JOHN PODHORETZ TRIES TO COME TO GRIPS WITH THE TERRIFYING POSSIBILITY THAT MAYBE LIBERALISM ISN'T A BIZARRE GENETIC MUTATION FOUND ONLY ON THE UPPER WEST SIDE AND IN HOLLYWOOD

In today's New York Post, Podhoretz theorizes that people might be voting for Democrats because they actually agree with Democrats and disagree with what Republicans. Gee, you think?

...likely voters say they trust Republicans more than Democrats on only four issues out of 13 -- taxes, terrorism, moral values and illegal immigration. In each of these cases, the Republican edge isn't very substantial. And on nine other issues -- ranging from health care to Iraq - Democrats outdistance Republicans by huge margins.

Everybody has a quick answer for this state of affairs: Iraq, or more precisely, the failure to secure a victory there....

But what if what we're seeing is something larger --something more interesting and more threatening to conservative ideas of governance and GOP ideas of holding onto power?

What if, in fact, we're seeing a restoration of a secular national trend toward liberalism -- a preference among voters and the American populace more generally toward liberal solutions to national problems and to the Democratic Party as the repository for those solutions?

This would be the trend that was in evidence on Election Night 2000. If you add up the votes of the two left-liberal presidential candidates that year -- Al Gore and Ralph Nader -- you come up with 54 million. That's 3 million more than George W. Bush and Pat Buchanan combined....

Wow. I think this really is unprecedented. Pundits have told us for years that Ross Perot deprived Poppy Bush and Bob Dole of their rightful victories and that Al Gore didn't lose on a technicality, he flat-out lost. I can't remember the last time I encountered an opinion piece in a big daily newspaper that said voters actually wanted a liberal to win any national election, even when the numbers showed precisely that.

Could Podhoretz's column be the start of a trend? Could more pundits possibly now come to the realization that Americans actually like Democratic ideas, and even, God help us, Democratic candidates?

...Nahhhhh. Never happen.