LANCE SELFA notes that there has been a dramatic shift in U.S. politics over the past months and, for the first time in many years, rising expectations

U.S. POLITICS continue to shift leftward and away from its conservative groove at a pace that has defied predictions. By its sheer incompetence, cronyism, and devotion to policies that appeal to an increasingly narrow band of Americans, the Bush administration has managed to crystallize public doubts about the conservative orthodoxy that has set the pace for U.S. politics for a generation. Bush strategist Karl Rove came into the White House in 2001 with a plan of fashioning a long-term conservative Republican majority. Instead, in five years, the Bush administration has damaged the conservative brand to such an extent that none of the leading Republican presidential hopefuls has bona fide conservative credentials. And the early favorite, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has actually lost support by attempting to position himself as a successor to Bush and cheerleader for the Iraq War.

In the corridors of Washington, the administration appears set to spend its last twenty months in office fighting off subpoenas and corruption investigations from the Justice Department to the Department of Defense.

Even the normally timid Democrats in Congress are projecting a more confident posture, challenging the administration on a number of fronts. This certainly did not appear to be in the cards even after the November 2006 election. But the gathering list of administration failures and the sense among growing sections of the opinion-making classes that the administration is a lame duck has added to the Democrats' confidence. While the news that Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) nearly matched Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) in first-quarter 2007 presidential campaign fundraising hit the headlines, the broader back story was the fact that Democrats far out-raised Republicans in preparation for 2008. This means that many people with money are preparing to usher a Democratic president into the White House in 2009.

More importantly, this shift in fortunes between the political parties reflects a longer-term shift in public attitudes away from conservatism, according to a recent Pew Center for People and the Press survey. The Center reported that:

Increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies have improved the political landscape for the Democrats as the 2008 presidential campaign gets underway.

At the same time, many of the key trends that nurtured the Republican resurgence in the mid-1990s have moderated, according to Pew's longitudinal measures of the public's basic political, social and economic values. The proportion of Americans who support traditional social values has edged downward since 1994, while the proportion of Americans expressing strong personal religious commitment also has declined modestly.

In the great scheme of things, April's firing by two major networks of radio/television shock jock Don Imus for an on-air racist and sexist comment was no major political milestone. But the protests Imus stirred with his denigration of the Rutgers women's basketball team as “nappy headed 'hos”-and the response of CBS and MSNBC-was another indication of how the political climate has changed since post-2004 election pundits declared the U.S. “Bush country.” For years, characters like Imus and others of his ilk, from Ann Coulter to Rush Limbaugh, have flourished in a media atmosphere that catered to a dominant right-wing ideology supportive of the Washington establishment's attacks on working people and its program of war and empire.

Time will tell whether Imus's demise will lead to further cleansing of the airwaves of other right-wing shills. But something has changed in the political culture, making conservative ideas seem increasingly irrelevant and just mean-spirited to larger numbers. After almost three decades of Washington-led attacks on the social safety net, erosion of civil rights, an employer's offensive against workers' living standards, and ever-increasing spending on the military, the majority of people in the U.S. are poorer, less economically secure, and worried about their futures. That reality has affected millions of Americans' attitudes more than the faux outrages that Limbaugh and Coulter regularly whip up.

Rutgers coach Vivian Stringer, in her comments to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, put the Imus issue in this broader context.

[T]oo often politicians, leaders, and whatever, religious leaders…speak for us, and we sit back and don't realize the power in numbers, and when to say enough is enough... I hope that it doesn't stop with Mr. Imus, because he's not the only culprit…. [W]e haven't stepped up, you know, [to the fact] that the corporate executives have dealt with the color of all of this being green…. We see these things over time, you know-a kid that steals something with a plastic cap pistol, to spend 10 years in jail, and yet you see, you know, the white-collar workers, you know, thieves that steal millions of dollars. I think that we've just got to come back, we've got to come back to some level of human decency. And I do think that if people stood up, and politicians wouldn't wait for a poll, but are strong enough to make a decision and stand.… I would gladly exchange winning a national championship if we, as young ladies, would stand and allow the country to somehow be empowered and that we take back our country, and we start talking about moral decency.