I too can name that tune in five notes.
Ahhhh… the Old Standby, “there are 435 individual elections, each decided on a case-by-case basis” claim. I remember offering that weak hope myself in 2006, right before we got walloped as so many of those individual elections turned the same damn way. Gee, it was almost as if there was some unifying force that strongly influenced each election and turned the majority of swing voters in the same direction.
The problem here for the Democrats is that they assumed that the President’s sky-high approval ratings of January 2009 – or even April of 2009 – would not have dropped this far by now. “You’ve got me,” and all that. Nobody really expected things to be any different, in fact: back in 2009, whenever I noted how badly the administration was polling I would note that ‘well, yes, of course the polls will go back up again, but…’ before I got on with the kicking. And I’ve always been the rampaging optimist about this sort of thing.
So it’s a bit of a pickle for the Other Side, what-what? Well, I’m sure that they’ll think of something. Eventually. Almost certainly. Hey, they could blame Bush! It won’t work, but warm fuzzies from nostalgia are not something to be spurned.
Moe Lane