Posted by
Bill Crawford on Saturday, November 27, 2010 4:24:01 PM
I took a little vacation from this monstrosity in part because I was catching up on more important things, but also so I could get a gander on the reaction to Election Day.
It could be an occasion to gloat about my predictions, but that wouldn't be appropriate. This was an even easier year to predict things than 2004, as many of the various x-factors (turnout, candidates adjusting strategy, etc.) were negligible. Both sides gave it all they had. The side that understood what the Tea Party was about won. More on that in another entry.
Personally, it was a good year right down to grass roots. My county here in North Carolina elected a grand total of one Commisoner (out of five) for one term sine Reconstruction. This year, they swept a team of three onto the Board, creating a new pro-growth majority.
Also, the State House and Senate went Republican for the first time in over a century. Alas, the Governor's office here is limited to Democrats already serving sentence, and Democrats who will be serving in the future. I guess it keeps Illinois from feeling ostrasized.
The House posed no surprises. The GOP pickup is now at 63, with only the CD on the east end of Long Island, NY still in dispute. With the loss of many independents in the transitory Obama coalition, many parts of the center of the country reverted back to how they voted ten years ago. This election was not a Republican groundswell as much as it was a reversion to the Republican majorities post-1994. P.J. O'Rourke called it in late October, he said the election was going to be a "restraining order on the Democrats".
The Northeast, the Washington-Boston corridor and the West coast all maintained themselves as Democrat strongholds. There, the Tea Party polled almost as well as everywhere else, but didn't translate it into voting against their own Congressman. California and New York will only prolong their own fiscal suffering with all that.
The Senate was the true battleground, and the West coast phenomenon made the re-elections of Boxer and Murray academic. The two real shocks were Alaska and Nevada. Murkowski proved more resilient than predicted, and Miller could not close the deal. Angle spent her last weeks using her heaps of cash to buy air time, while Harry Reid called out his sizable ground advantage, notably the whipped up and powerful SEIU troops.
My first observation of the end of gunfire was the Republican establishment types who were using the fact that they did not gain a Senate majority as the responsibility of Sarah Palin. Many will be doing their level best to trivialize her that way. The Bush loyalists will be charter members of this effort. Sarah still marches to her own drummer, and my only advice to her would be to stop responding. Learn the value of "no comment".
When the Republicans took over the world in '94, the White House went into hiding for a few weeks. They even invited self-help guru Tony Robbins to pep them all up, sometime that December. This year, there will be none of that. The Keynesians who are running the Democrat party will not change a thing, they all think this was a communications problem. The people will ill informed of all their accomplishments, or they were not thinking with "science and facts", as Obama intoned. Never leave behind a chance to announce that you think that disagreement with you is borne of stupidity. This is sure to win back all the independents who turned on them this month.
The Democrats will probably play the same ju jitsu game with the budget as Clinton did in '95. Obama will punt the budget to Boehner next year, wait for them to pose the tough questions and then carp at them from the peanut gallery.
Meanwhile, the internecine struggle keeps on in the Republican Party. The Tea Party people will keep pushing, and if they meet resistance from the K-Street establishment, they will continue to throw them overboard until they are acknowledged as a majority. This will all likely happen before 2012. The only chance for the establishment to win would be for the '12 candidate to be a Tea Party sympathizer and then lose the election by a landslide of LBJ proportions.
Absent that, the two players to watch are Palin and Senator DeMint from South Carolina- Mr. Inside and Ms. Outside. They will be the twin lighting rods for next year. Obama will get some image rehab from not being in the spotlight as much.