HALF-FULL REPORT 09/03/10

It takes longer for the economy to get better than it does for the economy to get sick.  This is the fundamental fact that drives today’s political environment.
 
It’s now too late for the economy to improve enough to provide relief for Democrats on Nov. 2.  But there is still plenty of time for it to get worse.  Democrats who understand little about economics understand this, which is why they are so grumpy.
 
The political environment right now is scary good for our side.  A Gallup poll this week showed Republicans with a 10 point lead in the generic ballot, the largest lead the Republicans have held since Gallup began asking the question.
 
What makes the lead scarier for Democrats is that Republicans typically perform 2 or 3 points better on election day than the generic poll indicates.  This is because people tend to like individual Republican candidates better than they do the party as a whole.
 
The three things that matter most in politics are issues, voter intensity and money.  Republicans have the first two this year, in spades.  Another Gallup poll this week showed voters prefer Republicans to Democrats on all major issues save the environment.
 
Democrats lead in money, so they can buy more ads.  But what will they say in those ads?
 
Democrats can’t talk about their “accomplishments,” because they are toxic to voters.  And they can’t talk about their plans for the future, because these sound suspiciously like their “accomplishments.”
 
So what’s left?  They can talk about Bush, but a Democratic pollster said that only 25 percent of Americans think a Republican Congress would revert to his policies. 

That “Miss Me Yet?” T shirts are selling six times better than Obama shirts in the Democratic playground of Martha’s Vineyard suggests the bashing Bush strategy has just about run out of steam.
 
Democrats are thinking about having a debate after Congress comes back in September about whether to extend all the Bush tax cuts, or just all the Bush tax cuts except for the wealthy.  It won’t help the “it’s all Bush’s fault” narrative to have a debate about whether Democrats were mostly wrong about the Bush tax cuts, or entirely wrong.
 
Democrats were trying to revive the old “Republicans want to destroy Social Security” chestnut when Zero stepped all over their plans when he waded into the Ground Zero mosque controversy.  It probably wouldn’t have worked so well this year because Social Security is running in the red, and it’s Democrats who gutted Medicare.  Granny is mad enough at them this year that the old scare tactics won’t produce the old fright.
 
Essentially all that’s left is pretending to be a Republican.  My Congressman, Jason Altmire, is doing a swell job of this.  He’s got an ad out where he has constituents praising him for standing up to Obama and Pelosi, voting against Obamacare and Wall Street bailouts, and supporting a border fence:

 
This can work for Jason, because he did vote against Obamacare and Wall Street bailouts.  It won’t work so well for Democrats who voted for the stimulus, Obamacare, and cap and trade.
 
There are now 13 Democrat senate seats in play.  My choice for a surprise election night is in Connecticut, because the Democrat candidate, state attorney general Richard Blumenthal, has a glass jaw.  He can’t stop lying.
 
In an editorial Aug. 20 in the Manchester Journal Enquirer, Editorial Page Editor Keith Burris detailed his shortcomings, and declared that “unless Blumenthal gets a guts transplant, this race is gone; this candidate is hopeless, doomed, toast.”
 
The 13th seat, in West Virginia, is a surprise.  Gov. Joe Manchin is very popular, and West Virginia is a Democrat state, though very definitely not a liberal one.  But a Rasmussen poll this week showed Manchin leading Republican John Raese by just six points, 48 to 42.  Don Surber, the excellent columnist for the Charleston Daily Mail, say that if the election is about Manchin, he’ll win.  But if it’s about Obama, Raese will win.
 
Raese, a very wealthy businessman, has the money to make it about Obama.  Manchin’s popularity as governor could even be turned against him.  West Virginia elects its governors in presidential election years.  If Manchin loses the senate race, he’ll still be governor.  The only way West Virginians can lose Manchin in the job they like him in is if he wins the senate race.
 
Another possible fly in the ointment for Democrats is a possible FBI investigation of Manchin.
 
I think that unless the economy turns down sharply in the next 60 days, the Dems will hold the senate seats in Connecticut and West Virginia.  But they’ll have to spend a lot of money to hold them.
 
Which brings up another problem for Democrats.  I said at the top they have more money than Republicans.  But they’re having to spend it in a lot of places they didn’t expect to have to.  In the recent past, Democrats have farmed California for money for candidates elsewhere.  But this time, because gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown and Sen. Barbara Boxer are in beeg trouble, most of that money is going to have to stay there.  The Republican candidates in Connecticut and West Virginia can self finance.  Blumenthal and Manchin need help.
 
 As more House seats come into play, Democrats have a triage problem.  Do they pour resources into the races of their most endangered incumbents…and risk losing the next several dozen seats that could have been saved if the money had been spent on them instead?  Or do they give up on the most endangered, and focus their resources on the next tier of endangered candidates?  There isn’t enough money for both.  And if there is a tsunami, there may not be enough money to save any who are at risk.
 
So the outlook looks good for November.  Scary good.  But what can a Republican victory – even a very big Republican victory – accomplish?  We need to be realistic in our expectations.
 
From easiest to hardest, here’s what I think we can accomplish.
 
First, we can prevent any more really bad legislation from passing.  If we don’t do this, we’re really screwed.  But all that this takes is a majority in the House, or a gain of 6-7 seats in the Senate, which would be enough to RINO proof any filibuster of bad legislation to come out of the House (if we don’t win a majority there).  The odds of both are better than 50-50, so this is pretty much a done deal.
 
Second, we can investigate shady doings by the Obama administration.  This is important, first, because the prospect of exposure will diminish these activities, and second, because a lot of Americans will be really mad when they find out what the Obamunists have been up to.
 
To accomplish this goal, we need control of at least one House of Congress, to obtain subpoena power.  As noted above, the odds are better than even that this will happen.
 
Third, we need to mitigate the damage the Obamunists have already done.  This will be hard.  It is, essentially, impossible to do through legislation, because even in the still unlikely event we take the Senate, there will still be enough Democrats to sustain a filibuster.  And if, for some reason, they wouldn’t filibuster say, a repeal of Obamacare, Zero would veto it, and we’d be nowhere near having enough votes in either the House or Senate to override a veto.
 
There is, as we have discussed before, a defund strategy.  The House of Representatives is under no obligation to fund the Obamacare bureaucracy, or anything else it doesn’t like.  As a practical matter, we’d need at least a 10 vote majority (50 seat gain), and more likely a 15 seat majority (55 seat gain) to pull this off.  It is very important for the GOP to gain at least 55 seats in the House.  Right now, that’s a little less than a 50-50 bet.
 
It isn’t so important to take the Senate.  Since it takes 60 votes to do anything big, 49 votes are about as useful as 51.  In some ways more useful.  It would be fun to watch Harry Reid (if he survives) or Dick Durbin or Chuckie Schumer try to run unpopular legislation through a 51-49 Senate, in which at least half a dozen Democrats would be sweating gallons about the 2012 election.  It would be a series of Maalox moments for whatever lucky fellow is the Democrat leader.  And with Democrats controlling the White House and (nominally) the Senate, it will be hard for the Demonrats to blame whatever goes wrong in the next two years on the GOP.  (Though they are certain to try.)

As I noted in one of my columns this week, Zero treated George Bush shabbily in his Iraq speech.  Others have noticed.  Here’s Tom Mahnken writing in Foreign Policy magazine.
 
Obama’s speech begged comparison to his predecessor — indeed, his words invited such a comparison. And it is by comparison that he comes up short. Whereas Bush exhibited great courage in going against his own military to support the Iraqi surge and sell it to his own party and the American people, Obama has yet to put comparable effort into selling his own Afghan surge. The Oval Office speech was a missed opportunity to do just that.
 
If there were any doubt about who is the real man, these photos should settle it.
 

 

 
The shabbiest thing the Obamunists did this week was to cite Arizona’s immigration law in its mea culpa of American human rights violations to the United Nations (which is reknowned these days mostly for having its peacekeepers rape local women), and for suing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for enforcing immigration law.
Dem Reps. Ann Kirkpatrick, Harry Mitchell and Gabrielle Giffords – the first two trailing, the third tied with their GOP challengers – must be thrilled.
 
Let’s close with this photo of Zero trying to figure out how to get an umbrella through a gate:
 
 

 
The ship of state is in good hands.  Not.