New Direction or Wishful Thinking? [UPDATED]
Blog types are pretty excited over EJ Dionne's column in the Post. There he exclaims the good news that America is changing.

It wasn't all that long ago that Democrats and liberals were said to be out of touch with "the real America," which was defined as encompassing the states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including the entire South. Democrats seemed to accept this definition of reality, and they struggled -- often looking ridiculous in the process -- to become fluent in NASCAR talk and to discuss religion with the inflections of a white Southern evangelicalism foreign to so many of them.

Now the conventional wisdom sees Republicans in danger of becoming merely a Southern regional party. Isn't it amazing how quickly the supposedly "real America" was transformed into a besieged conservative enclave out of touch with the rest of the country? Now religious moderates and liberals are speaking in their own tongues, and the free-thinking, down-to-earth citizens in the Rocky Mountain states are, in large numbers, fed up with right-wing ideology.

Only a few months ago, it was widely thought that accusing opponents of wanting to "cut and run" in Iraq would be enough to cast political enemies into an unpatriotic netherworld of wimps and "defeatocrats."

Now the burden of proof is on those who claim that fighting in Iraq was a good idea and that the situation can be turned around.

I seem to remember that part he describes, where Democrats looked "ridiculous", you know, with the religion and the NASCAR, was just a few months ago. Have things really changed? Or did people just finally get fed up with clearly the worst federal government we've seen since Nixon (at least) and decide to vote them out? He's got some good points, especially about the young vote (Jon Stewart is the new Rush Limbaugh?!), but I'm not ready to claim a sea change just yet.

[UPDATE: Then again, if what's happening in Kansas is any indication, maybe Republicans really have screwed the pooch.]