Moe Lane

While this is hardly an exhaustive list, the below represents my personal congratulations to last night’s winners in the election:

It was great fun to do these interviews, no matter how painfully obvious it was at the time that I was essentially learning how to do them on the fly; and I look forward to doing it again.

Starting next week.

Moe Lane

Via QC Examiner, I noticed this entertaining nugget from yet another He’s Just Not That Into You article about progressives and the POTUS:

[Darcy] Burner said [Progressive Congress Action Fund] and other progressives are focused on helping candidates such as Ann McLane Kuster in New Hampshire, Rep. John Hall in New York, Rep. Alan Grayson in Florida, and Rep. Phil Hare in Illinois.

It turns out that I remember the name: Darcy Burner was a three-time loser resume-padder best known for being unable to topple a vulnerable West Coast Republican in 2008.  This takes skill, because the 2006 and 2008 Congressional Democratic freshman classes do not precisely overwhelm with their civic greatness: but it’s nice to see her getting work.  Particularly when it’s apparently rebounding to my side’s benefit.

No, seriously.  Look at that list:

• Ann McLane Kuster NH-02 (GOP candidate Charlie Bass)
• Rep. John Hall NY-19 (GOP candidate Nan Hayworth)
• Rep. Alan Grayson FL-08 (GOP candidate Daniel Webster)
• Rep. Phil Hare IL-17 (GOP candidate Bobby Schilling)

Those people have two things in common: first, all of them are listed as Toss-Up seats.  Second, none of them were listed as such a year ago.  Hall and Hare in particular only slid off the beam quite recently.  If Burner and her PCAF are so inclined, I can give them a list of more Democrats to ‘help’…

Moe Lane

I knew that this was going to happen; I merely never thought that it’d be him leading the way. I’ll summarize the piece for you: Republicans Bad, Democrats Stupid, Republicans REALLY Bad, Democrats REALLY Stupid, and Democrats need to listen to Frank Rich and start branding Republicans as (as Rick Richman of Commentary himself summarized Frank Rich’s ‘argument’) ‘Worse than Bush.’  Don’t get me wrong: Rich still hates and fears Bush with the power of five hundred burning suns.  It’s just that now he hates and fears Congressional Republicans with the power of a thousand burning suns, and one must get one’s priorities in order.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, this is a standard Democratic tactic; use the Republican who is no longer in power as a club with which to attack the Republicans who are in power.  Except that the Republicans are, technically speaking, actually not in power.

Yet.

In precisely the way that a vulture circles a dying jackass in the badlands, yes.  Here Patrick Caddell is telling Fox News just how badly Obamacare is going to hurt the Democrats (hint: I picked the vulture/jackass/desert metaphor for a reason):

Admittedly, he’s been yelling about this since March, and admittedly he’s been privately called by a colleague of mine as sort of a Democratic David Frum (which is a vicious insult to Caddell’s effectiveness, reasoning abilities, and possibly his ability to breed) – still, that’s some tasty, tasty despair there. Accurate despair, seeing as Obamacare currently polls even worse than the President right now, but I guess that ‘tasty’ and ‘accurate’ are not actually mutually exclusive…

Moe Lane

PS: By all means, Democrats: count your cash-on-hand and dismiss Caddell completely.  Much obliged.

I wish that the universe would stop trying to provoke me into doing so early.  GOP by 11?  That’s perilously close to making me want to roll to disbelieve.

Again.

It’s not quite counting coup on my part – I had suggested that by about June the DCCC would be bragging about how they’ll keep us from getting enough votes for veto overrides – but I am pleased to see that the slow march by the Democrats towards objective reality is continuing.

Slowly.  Slowly is good.

…the last thing Dems need is a group of major donors convinced that another check will just be throwing good money after bad.

But the goal posts keep moving. At other times over the last 2 years, Dems have said their goal was to limit losses to fewer than 10 seats. Dems later said they would gladly take a 15-seat hit, assuming the environment might worsen further. By Feb., Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), who leads the DCCC’s incumbent retention program, said they party would lose fewer than 25 seats.

[snip]

On Tuesday, DNC chair Tim Kaine acknowledged the possibility of losing the House. But, he said, that’s not anything new, citing an average loss of 28 seats in midterm elections for an incumbent party — though he hinted that party losses might be much greater.

(more…)

Coming soon to a series of campaign commercials near you.

With the B-Cast’s latest data dump on Shabazz (who is pretty much the public, tattooed, hate-filled face of the New Black Panther party at this moment) it’s no longer really a question of if candidates are going to be bringing his case up as it is when candidates are going to be bringing his case up as a campaign issue.  Disclaimer: I have not been informed that any candidate is planning to use Shabazz and/or the NBPP as a campaign issue, and I have not privately advised any candidate to do so.  I am merely publicly advising it. (more…)

With less than four months to go before the fall elections, the greatest growth industry in the country right now is the tea importation business: everybody who has any interest in the November results is trying his or her hand at precognition.  Gallup is no exception:

This year’s low approval ratings for Congress are a potentially ominous sign for President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress. Gallup has found greater party seat change in Congress in midterm elections when Congress has had low approval ratings.

Specifically, in the five midterm elections in which Congress’ approval ratings at the time of the election were below 40%, there was an average net change in seats of 29 from the president’s party to the opposition. That includes the 1994 and 2006 elections, when the net change in seats was large enough to pass control of the U.S. House from one party to the other.

They currently track Congress’s approval rating at 20%. (more…)

While it’s pleasant to have the people that we’ve been trying to tell this finally get this:

Mr. Seidenberg, officially Verizon’s CEO, moonlights as chairman of the influential Business Roundtable, the “association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies.” That would be the same Business Roundtable that woke up this past month to discover the White House has been playing it for a patsy. It turns out that actively supporting a pro-tax, pro-regulation Democratic majority on issues like health care doesn’t really get you anything save more taxes and more regulation.

This has clearly come as a shock to the Business Roundtable, as Mr. Seidenberg made clear this week with his newsy and newfound criticism of the White House. The chairman revealed in a speech to the Economic Club of Washington that he’d become “somewhat troubled” by a “disconnect between Washington and the business community.” Here he and his fellow CEOs had “worked closely with policy makers”—they’d even pushed ObamaCare. And yet! “We see a host of laws, regulations and policies being enacted that impose a government prescription” on private actors. Truth was, Washington had created a downright “hostile environment” for job creation!

…there’s the problem that it’s not enough to come to your senses; you have to do something about it. I have a humble suggestion for Mr. Seidenberg and his colleagues. (more…)

Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics – an underrated blogger, possibly because RCP is such a good site generally that its bloggers get overshadowed – still holds his opinion from April that the House is going to flip big in November:

The bottom line is that Democrats are on pace for an ugly November. They’re increasingly running out of time to change the dynamic, and it looks about as likely that things will get worse as that they will get better. If the elections were held today, the balance of the evidence suggests they would lose 50-60 seats. If you think the political environment will improve for Democrats, you can adjust your expectations accordingly, but if you think they will get worse, you can do the same.

He’s basing that on a few things: the Gallup and Rasmussen generic ballot polls, and the NPR analysis.  (more…)

This made me laugh:

“Hey Jim, could you put together a list of House races where it’s either an open seat race or a vulnerable incumbent?” the editors ask, oh-so-innocently.

Do they have any idea how much work that entails?

…because even if the NR editors don’t. I do. It entails thirteen webpages’ worth of work, and it’s interesting to see all of that in one place. Well worth reading, the better to refresh your memory; and bear in mind that this isn’t the final list; we’re still six months out from the election.

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