To the editor:

In his column (Journal World, Nov. 6) Charles Krauthammer said that the November 2008 U.S. national election was “a one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated,” event. He was chortling over the results of the elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia won by Republicans.

I can just see him tingling at the keyboard as he typed that sentence and these words:

“One book proclaimed the ‘Death of Conservatism,’ while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

“This was all ridiculous from the beginning. The 2008 election was a historical anomaly.”

Maybe Mr. Krauthammer should talk to a failed congressional candidate from upstate New York. The candidate’s name is Doug “up from obscurity, back to obscurity” Hoffman.

The “return to the norm,” Mr. Krauthammer wrote about didn’t happen in New Jersey and Virginia. The “return to the norm,” happened in a much less publicized but much more significant “it’s been Republican for a hundred years” U.S. congressional district. In that election the Republican Right Wing got its own way, all the way, and (to use a gambling term) crapped out.