Success is not measured by what a man accomplishes, but by the opposition he has encountered and the courage with which he has maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.
Orrison Swett Marden
Election Watch
The RCP House lead for the GOP (lean/likely/safe) is now 222-179, as two shift from toss up to lean Dem and one goes the other direction. It's not clear exactly what factors are underlying status changes. For example, the only poll I've seen on IL-8 shows the GOP challenger Joe Walsh tied with Melissa Bean in a district long held by Republican Phil Crane (first elected in 1969 and narrowly defeated by Bean in 2004). I personally think that any Democrat in a purple or red district, particularly one held for less than 10 years, is in danger during the coming election; whereas Obama in 2008 did better than his overall margin elsewhere, I think that reflects more on Obama's favorite son status, and a more reliable indicator was Bush's bigger-than-elsewhere wins in 2000 and 2004.
It looks like Jerry Brown, third-time gubernatorial nominee in California, and Richard Blumenthal, US Senate candidate in Connecticut, are beginning to pull away from their former female CEO GOP competitors. I don't live in those states, so I only see occasional ads, but Brown and Blumenthal have been extraordinarily successful politicians and given they are running in states where Democrats have huge registration advantages, it's challenging to run against them. Jerry Brown also has an advantage in this being a change election year (after 2 terms of a Republican governor), and he wants to push any link from Whitman to unpopular Governor Schwarzenegger, particularly the fact that Schwarzenegger was a political novice just like Whitman. I think if she hasn't already, Whitman has point out the risk of one-party rule (in particular, the Dems' abysmal failure in Washington), she's got to link Brown with the unsustainable pension plans of public sector employees in California, and there's a difference between an actor playing a businessman or a professional politician living off the people's taxes and being a successful businesswoman.
Patty Murray and Barbara Boxer have almost consistently carried a small lead over their opponents, although Rossi and Fiorina have occasionally polled ahead. I'm not prepared to predict a victory for Rossi and Fiorina, but neither incumbent is polling ahead of 50%, and I think if you're an incumbent and you haven't sealed the deal by the last 2 days before an election, chances are the undecideds break in favor of the challenger.
On the Maryland front, it also looks like Martin O'Malley is beginning to pull away from Bob Ehrlich, although I have not studied the methodology of the poll (e.g., likely vs. regular voter samples). I actually like a lot of the spots Ehrlich is running. As an armchair analyst, I don't think Bob Ehrlich has anticipated and/or effectively responded the predictable flood of negative ads that O'Malley is running. This is the typical thing any unpopular incumbent will do (e.g., Rod Blagojevich and Gray Davis). I also don't think Ehrlich has really focused on the highly unpopular tax hikes that at the time dropped O'Malley's approval rate to the 30's (he's done it in general, not focused terms). O'Malley has been hammering Ehrlich on education cuts and has the audacity to attack "misleading" Ehrlich ads. I also think Ehrlich needs to tap into this year's taxpayer desire for getting spending under control and O'Malley's difficulty in cutting the budget because of his special interest supporters (i.e., union leadership). Ehrlich also should do a better job comparing and contrasting how he would have approached the last 4 years.
In Tribute of Barney "Roll the Dice on the GSE's" Frank
Man Up, Mr. President!
Sample direct/paraphrased definitions from Urban Dictionary:
- Be strong, take control of a (the) situation, be strong, rise to the moment
- Be a leader, step up to the plate when no one else will, give it your best shot
- Work through impediments and obstacles without whining, even if it is someone else's fault
- Don't cry and moan about something out of your control; knock it off
- Acknowledge and take responsibility for your own actions; don't blame others for your own mistakes, problems, or issues
PRES. OBAMA: The Republican leaders in Washington, they made a different calculation. They, they looked around at the mess that they had made, at the mess that they had left me, and they said, "Boy, this is a really big mess." And they said, "It's going to take a long time to fix, so maybe if we just sit on the sidelines, say no to everything, and then point our fingers at Obama and say he's to blame," they figure that maybe y'all would forget that they caused the mess in the first place, and they'd be able to ride anger all the way to election time.Obama, besides the absurdity of the straw man, you are rewriting history. "By their fruits shall ye know them." (Matthew 7:16) Marc Thiessen does a reality check in today's Washington Post:
The decline of the Obama presidency can be traced to a meeting at the White House just three days after the inauguration, when the new president gathered congressional leaders of both parties to discuss his proposed economic stimulus. House Republican Whip Eric Cantor gave President Obama a list of modest proposals for the bill. Obama said he would consider the GOP ideas, but told the assembled Republicans that "elections have consequences" and "I won."In fashioning and passing a convoluted, oversized stimulus package within a month of taking office, Obama refused to negotiate with the Republicans; instead, there was a deliberate, ultimately successful attempt to peel off the three most liberal Republicans (the Maine senators and Arlen Specter, before he jumped parties) to move past the filibuster, the only leverage the GOP had . Remember how he constantly promoted "shovel-ready projects", only to admit recently in a New York Times magazine interview that there is "no such thing as shovel-ready projects"? The stimulus package was also famously hyped to cap unemployment at 8% (which it promptly blew past on its way to 10%, now standing at 9.6%, some 16 months after economists declared the recession was over).
Republican amendments have routinely been battered down by party-line votes, and Obama and Reid even lost the initially cooperative Maine senators as Reid kept a restrictive quota on GOP amendments. Then even after independents and moderates sent a strong warning message to the Democrats by electing Republicans in 3 high-profile blue/purple statewide elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama and the Democrats then passed the current unpopular health care law (in conjunction with an abuse of the budget reconciliation process to sidestep a potential Senate filibuster after Scott Brown ran as the 41st vote against Obamacare) without a single Republican vote, unprecedented on any major legislation.
Obama's nonstop Bush bashing, "failed policies of the last 8 years", intentionally misleading half-truths (e.g., that the GOP opposed small business tax cuts, when in fact they were opposed to the $30B of $42B which constituted a de facto corruptible community bank TARP, and in fact have repeatedly voted to extend ALL the Bush tax cuts, including the small business owners, most of whom report their business income through individual returns), and constant whining about Republicans as obstructionists and the "Party of No", instead of coming to grips with the fact that Republicans were presented with no real choice: voting for partisan Democratic legislative laws (versus bipartisan) or not, are not the stuff of bipartisanship, particularly by a leader whom ran on a materially misleading post-partisan platform.
And I guess you can't blame a guy for trying to sneak past such a manifestly absurd, totally unsupported claim that the GOP "caused the mess in the first place". The real estate bubble, like the Internet stock bubble, was well underway during the Clinton Administration; the Democrats resisted reforms at the government-subsidized GSE's, which raised the taxpayers' exposure to nearly half of the mortgage market, and the GSE's purchased a number of subprime mortgage notes, repackaged them and sold them to investors, here and abroad; the Bush Administration did not control the independently-run Federal Reserve, which has significant influence over money supply and interest rates, state bank regulators, credit raters or auditors; the Democrats specifically sponsored legislation politicizing home ownership to traditional high-risk/lower-income groups; the recession started several months after the Democrats had assumed control of both houses of Congress.
Let's put to rest this irrational conspiracy theory that the GOP decided to ride of wave of anger. First of all, Obama had huge majorities in both houses of Congress (unlike Bush whom not only inherited a sour economy after the stock market meltdown but faced uncooperative Democrats after a controversial Presidential election with an evenly-split Senate and then a Democratic-controlled Senate after Jim Jeffords defected.) Clinton strategist James Carville was promoting his book predicting "40 More Years" of Democratic control. After Specter's defection put the Senate at a filibuster-proof majority, the Democrats proceeded to pass a raft of progressive bills, and Obama's patently false partisan attacks that the Republicans had no constructive ideas and simply objected to Democratic bills for partisan reasons were telling; Gallup shows that GOP approval ratings were at their high point at 36% at the beginning of the Obama Presidency and the Dems have never trailed (through last month). There seem to be two major reasons for voter discontent: (1) the Congress seemed to lose focus on the struggling economy after passing the massive stimulus bill shortly after Obama's inauguration; (2) the Democrats miscalculated by forcing a highly unpopular health care bill in the face of Scott Brown's election and polls showing strong disapproval.
Does the likely GOP recapture of the House constitute an unequivocal acceptance of an ideological conservative agenda? No; I think independents and moderates are making the difference in this election. I think they bought into Obama's centrist, apolitical vision and did not foresee the progressive agenda that came forth, including a radical overhaul of their popular private sector health care insurance system, cap-and-trade, unprecedented deficits, etc. They assigned the primary blame for the recession on the back of the GOP, however unfair that might be; they gave the Democrats a chance to carry the ball. The Dems went into 2009 knowing there would be a voter evaluation after 2 years; the public simply doesn't want excuses or hear from Obama, after his giving 30 speeches they happen to disagree with, that they just don't get it. The reasons the Republicans will be given a second chance after 4 years in exile are: (1) to send Obama and the Dems a message about their priorities and ineffectiveness over the past 2 years; (2) to give the Republicans a chance to see what they can do with the ball; and (3) to restore checks and balances to Washington.
Let's Make It "Senator Demeritus Barbara Boxer"
Political Humor
"In Washington, President Obama's recent speech to a women’s conference was interrupted when his presidential seal on the podium fell off -- two years early." –Seth Meyers
[It was just another empirical validation of Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation. Other examples include Obama's falling job approval numbers and several bad apples falling out of the White House tree (e.g., Christina Romer, Larry Summers, David Orszag, Rahm Emanuel, Anita Dunn, Van Jones, etc.)]
"An amazing week for idiocy in America. Glenn Beck said that evolution is ridiculous because he's never seen a half-man, half-monkey. Christine O'Donnell did not know that the First Amendment was in the First Amendment. We are truly one nation indivisible on the short bus." –Bill Maher
[And Chris Coons and other Democrats don't get the Tenth Amendment is still in the Constitution and think non-transactions (not buying insurance) are covered by the commerce clause; go figure. And Bill Maher doesn't know the Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association isn't part of the First Amendment, enacted on December 15, 1791.]
Musical Interlude: The "British Invasion" of the 1960s Series. This is the last segment in this series (the choice was inspired by a 2003 British comedy that played on cable over the weekend, Love Actually). My next series will focus on hit instrumentals and other one-hit wonders.
The Troggs, "Love is All Around"
