Aftermath

It's quite late, but I felt I had to say something about the elections.

Russ Feingold is gone, and so is Patrick Murphy. Our awful drug policies remain in force in California, and, particularly odiously, Iowa threw out the state judges that legalized gay marriage. The Republicans swept and mopped the House and will likely maintain it for a very long time. Aqua Buddha may well prove a potent deity.

It wasn't all bad. The Democrats held on to the Senate. O'Donnell went down as expected, and kept us in stitches to the last. Harry Reid made quite the comeback and defeated Sharron Angle. And Lisa Murkowski looks like she will, improbably, pull off a rare write-in victory, neutralizing the last third of the Palinite triumvirate.

Still pretty wretched, though.

As for the near future, this cartoon only slightly exaggerates:

Got Hope?

Jonathan Cohn is nervous that Obama is retaining his characteristic zen in the face of electoral bloodbath:

If you believe, as I do, that the primary factor in determining election outcomes is the economy, then tomorrow’s results have been a foregone conclusion for some time now. The midterms were more or less out of Obama’s control the day he signed off on a stimulus too small to create robust job growth. But what’s true of this election will be true of the election two years from now. And with a Republican Congress blocking new economic initiatives, Obama won’t have much ability to create jobs--or even help those who can’t find any. If the economy continues to recover this slowly, the Republicans won’t merely solidify their hold on Congress in two years. They’ll also be in a position to win the White House.

He also goes on to mention this much-circulated image, from the nightmare days when Sarah Palin first arrived on the national scene, and wonders if its message still rings true:



Obama campaign manager David Plouffe would consider the President "lucky" to be able to run against Sarah Palin in 2012. Obama would do well to ask his good friend and colleague Harry Reid how it feels to be an encumbant running against a manifestly unqualified candidate in a rocky economy.

'Gold Irony

Dave Weigel's account of a Russ Feingold rally is a real downer:

Feingold has an advantage that some endangered Democrats are lacking: He's genuinely adored by his base. The idea that he could lose is not just shocking but also cosmically unfair. Eighteen years working on campaign finance reform and the Supreme Court unspools his legislation? A lifetime of public service that's kept him poor, and he's being out-man-of-the-peopled by a wealthy industrialist? It doesn't matter that Democrats are actually withstanding the "secret money" onslaught with money of their own—it just doesn't seem fair.

I would add that Feingold, the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act and a consistent critic of the Bush and Obama administrations on civil liberties and executive power, is being swept out by a movement that is not only pro-torture and war, but also has the temerity to assume a posture of outrage about government overreach.

It's got the ludicrous tragedy of a Tom Stoppard play.

Sore Wingers

Conservatives are freaking out about potential for voter fraud in next week's election:



For context, recall that Republicans are all but guaranteed to take the House and still have a fighting (if diminishing) chance of netting the Senate too. There are structural reasons for this--an unsustainably high Democratic majority, a weak economy in which the party in power tends to get blamed, historic trends of majority losses in midterm elections--and reasons particular to this election season. And yet listen to how hysterical Michelle Malkin is when she intones that "WE ARE ALL VOTER FRAUD POLICE NOW." (The manner in which she says this is uniquely suited to being transcribed in entirely capital letters without an exclamation mark.)

No pleasing some people.