down the series of tubes
doesn't that look just say it all?
and with that, another miserable old fraud goes down, and a filibuster-proof senate majority becomes a legitimate possibility.
standard disclaimer about complacency and premature celebration, etc., but with obama’s prospects looking the way they do at the moment, is the presidential race is becoming just a little bit… boring? anybody else finding themselves more interested in the senate all of a sudden?
with stevens on ice, these seem to be the hot contests:
- Franken/Coleman in MN
- Lunsford/McConnell in KY
- Udall (my old congressman)/Schaffer in CO
- Merkley/Smith in OR
- Shaheen/Sununu in NH
- Hagan/Dole in NC
these are all tight contests, and most narrowly favor the democrat. assuming a sweep of all of the above, and one or two longshot flips like Martin in GA or maybe Musgrove in MS, a supermajority could happen.
my guess is that november 4th will go down one of two ways:
obama will win, but by a relatively narrow margin — say, 5% or less in the popular vote — that will startle us with the realization of how much closer it was than everybody thought; in this case, we’ll be doing well to reach 56 in the senate, and president obama will have to contend with the semi-plausible impression of a divided electorate and the attendant, too-predictable gridlock and bipartisan half-assedness. (nevermind that bush got away with claiming a mandate on the strength of barely 51% — that was different.)
or, it will be seismic. obama wins with 300+ electoral votes, including some states like indiana that nobody thought would flip in a million years. in this scenario, we win all the close senate races and at least one or two surprise states. in which case, let’s just say that joe lieberman is going to find out what his colleagues really think of him.
if i had to guess, i’d say scenario A is more likely. but either way, it feels sooo gooood to see a corrupt motherfucker like ted stevens get some comeuppance. i’m pretty sure it makes me a bad person, but knowing that old crook is probably going to die in prison just makes me smile.
11 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Loading ...
I’d add Shambles/Martin GA – Senate race too…
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_senate_elections/georgia/election_2008_georgia_senate
I’m particularly excited to see Franken retake Wellstone’s old seat from the scabrous Norm Coleman.
I think your options A and B aren’t mutually exclusive: I think we’ll see an Obama popular vote victory of 5% or so, AND 300+ electoral votes. If 538 is as right as so many people believe, the question isn’t whether or not Obama will pull in 300 EVs; it’s whether or not he’ll break 400.
That said, I’m also bored with the race for POTUS. My attention and dollars are now focused solely on the effort to defeat Prop 8 here in California (y’know, the ballot proposition that would amend the state’s constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage). It’s funded almost entirely by wingnuts from Arizona and Mormons from Utah, and I can’t wait for the whole state (or, at least, a slim majority of it) to give a big, fat middle finger to those assholes.
I second that emotion, Gray!
Right now, GLBT couples in Cali are scrambling to get married before election day.
You know, you’d think Mormons, of all people, would be a little more open-minded about the parameters of marriage.
I think Bush may pardon Stevens in the now-commonplace outgoing Presidential forgiveness fest. But I sure delighted in the jury’s verdicts.
This may come as a shock, but if I lived in Minnesota right now, I’d vote for Dean Barkley over Franken in a heartbeat. I’ve met Al, and he seemed like a self-important ass who excelled at critique and complaint, not leadership. My friends and family — even those who support Franken — tell me his campaign has been almost entirely negative. Makes it hard for me to be excited about the idea of Senator Franken.
In all honesty, I’d kind of prefer the Dems not reach 60 in Senate. Here’s the thing: I’m on the far left of the political spectrum and definitely don’t consider myself a Democrat, and I think the Dems are just as vulnerable to corruption and power-grabs as the GOP. Granted, the favors they grant are to different folks than the favors the GOP grants, but still… I’m wary of a blank check. If nothing else, not having a filibuster-proof majority would give the Dems some political cover and plausible deniability should things sour.
While leverage over Rep. Senators who fask re-election in 2010 seems plausible, the quality of a lot of the dems that would push towards 60 is higher than many of those in office. If things sour, it’s not going to be an anti-Dem backlash, it’s more of the anti-current govt. sentiment that is helping Obama
swoopscoop up the middle. I feel “A bad Dem is better than a moderate Rep.” is very true with the Dems looking at a true majority. Heck, the likelyhood of things that we don’t know about yet, those unknown unknowns that aren’t going to come out of the woodwork until Jan/Feb are just as likely to screw us, as a nation.ben — i love ya, buddy. this site would be totally boring without your occasional outbursts of intentionally provocative bomb-chucking.
okay, i’ll take the bait.
barkley? for real? so you’d actually back an economic libertarian and former tobacco lobbyist over an honest-to-god liberal because the latter strikes you as kind of a dick. maybe barkley’s the kind of guy you’d rather have a beer with?
if you don’t mind my asking, what is it about dean barkley that appeals to your “far left” sensibilities? is it his support for school vouchers, health savings accounts, and unrestricted gun rights? his kneejerk anti-tax ideology and his desire for a mccain-style, across-the-board spending freeze? maybe it’s his ideas from the ’90s about mandatory sentencing rules for drug crimes, or capital punishment for drug traffickers. no, no, i get it — that stuff is all balanced by his nominal social progressivism, lipservice to anti-corporate populism and campaign finance reform, and opposition to the war; that is, the stuff that puts good anti-establishment lefties at ease but which is either totally uncontroversial in minnesota in 2008, or on which he has neither the means nor the political will to act meaningfully, in the supremely unlikely event that he’s elected. i’m sure if paul wellstone were still with us, he’d be out stumping for barkley, just to stick it to that pompous jerk franken.
as for the blank-check panic, i wouldn’t be very convincing trying to make some prima facie argument for the democrats and their innate moral superiority. as soon as president obama is sworn in, i’m going back to being an independent, and if the new crop of dems turns out to be as spineless and philosophically malleable as the post-1994 DLC clintonistas, i’ll be lining up right throw away my vote all over again. but aren’t you just a little bit curious to see what they can do with a supermajority, and the presidential pen in barack obama’s hand? at this moment in history, you’d really “kind of prefer” that the republicans indefinitely retain the ability to block anything and everything they don’t like?
look. you and i, in our lifetime, have never seen a democratic party armed with an unambiguous reform mandate and the political muscle to impose its agenda, whatever that may turn out to be. the last time it happened, we got the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, the NEA and NEH, public broadcasting, Head Start, and nearly every meaningful piece of environmental legislation this country has ever passed. that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll do it again, but we’ve seen the alternative and it fucking sucks.
i’ll grant you that democrats are as susceptible to corruption as anybody else, but there are many kinds of corruption — like the corruption of ideals that sets in after forty years of running for re-election in an environment characterized by the other guy’s political orthodoxy, the spiritual corruption of governing like a loser because you don’t think you can win elections and make good policy at the same time. rejecting the change that’s on the verge of happening this year amounts to embracing another generation or more of that kind of rot and decay. we don’t have time for that. the economy’s broken, the military is weak, we have no diplomatic standing, and we may already have passed the tipping point on global warming — either the shit gets done now, or the shit don’t get done, and all the political cover in the world will mean nothing if it doesn’t. i’ll be watching the democratic majority for abuses of power, but the only thing i’m really “wary” of is six more years of ass-covering complacency masquerading as bipartisanship. seriously, how could it get any worse?
you can be contrarian about franken’s candidacy for your own symbolic reasons, or choose to get hung up on negative campaigning — as if norm coleman really deserves better — but don’t claim the high ground of the “far left” unless by “far” you mean “willfully disengaged and purposefully irrelevant.” that’s not politically radical, it’s radically apolitical.
Franken slips in Ras poll
Ah, I love it when I touch a nerve. My plan worked perfectly!
To address some of your points: To be clear, I never said I wanted Dean Barkley in the Senate; I simply said I’d vote for him. I should have been more clear: I’d vote for him only on the condition I knew he wouldn’t win. Yes, I realize Minnesotans tried the whole “vote for the third-party guy to express displeasure with the entrenched party candidates” before and (inadvertantly, perhaps) wound up electing a former wrestler. There’s certainly some hazard here…. if there’s a Green candidate on the MN Senate ballot I haven’t heard of, I’d vote for him/her before Barkley. My point was that both “legitimate” options in that race are poor, and if I were in MN I’d me more inclined to try and send the “these candidates suck” message than to vote for someone underwhelming simply to shoot for 60 senate seats.
As for the “as if Norm Coleman deserves better” bit — it has nothing to do with what Coleman does or does not deserve. It has to do with the failure to forcefully articulate one’s own values, positions and plans. Negative campaigning is designed not to win votes, but to suppress votes for your opposition. It may often be an effective political strategy, but without some positive ads mixed in, it speaks to a lack of substance. As McCain’s campaign aptly demonstrates.
As for the Senate: Am I just a little bit curious to see what a Democratic supermajority looks like? Yes — hell, I’m a lot curious. But I’m not sure I’m excited. It’s hard for me to be enthusiastic about a Pelosi-Reid juggernaut… I believe them wholly capable of fanning the flames of partisan ill-will just as well as Tom Delay and Co. did during their power binge. IMHO, the need to occasionally pick off a few moderate Republicans will help foster the sort of detoxifying “change” that Obama intends to bring inside the Beltway more than a supermajority would.
Is legislation passed by a supermajority more likely to agree with me politically than legislation crafted to appeal to a few members of the GOP? Of course it is, corrupt, pork-filled or otherwise. But I can’t shake this feeling — and it’s just a feeling — that the Democratic majority in both chambers will actually persist longer if there isn’t a supermajority. And I’d rather see things stay more than half blue for quite a while than witness a supermajority for just 2 years and then a backlash. It’s just a hunch that I can’t explain.
I realize there’s a case to be made that Congress will get much more done with a supermajority, and that the tangible, positive results of such legislation may actually prolong the Dems’ stay atop the hill. Here’s hoping. But in my gut I think the supermajority will just give conservatives more to rail against, thus bolstering their efforts in 2010. I’d rather see a sustainable majority than an unsustainable supermajority rapidly decay into a minority.
I would like to backtrack on one of my comments, however. On many issues, I’m actually not far left (happy to articulate these in detail if you really want). I just have very high standards and ideals for people in office.
Gotta run, Barack’s on.
Longest Comment thread on SB, in a long, long time! I think it’s Barack staring down from the masthead that inspires it all. Can you feel that change? It’s palpable, like vacation about to happen, or the present unopened, it’s the future. While expectations fail to meet with reality quite regularly, let us savor the promise and hope that feeling lasts a good long damn time: