Strange how Republican senate candidates don't talk about that. I think they don't know how to explain it or something.
IF they had listened to Rush Limbaugh...we would not have lost our shirts last night...
Dole failed us in Florida by failing to recruit a decent candidate. She needs some blame. Our whole campaign was poorly run. We never came up with a theme to stick to. We had no unified message.
So, Frist is good in Tennessee. Wonderful.
Lindsey Graham and Chuck Hagel should be nominated for the Hall of Shame.
Frist helping Corker is worth very little in the grand scheme of things. Frist has been a very weak majority leader from the very beginning.
Love him or hate him, McCain represents his constituents in Arizona. The Senate should not be set up in such a way that one senator is expected to rein in another.
Maybe it is time to go for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on congress critters.
Term limits have worked well in California where politicians are forced to move on from safe positions to fight for other ones. The same should be true at the national level.
If senators and congressmen were term limited then there might not be so much graft, corruption, and isolation from reality.
If Republican candidates knew they actually had to go back into the real world to get a job they might not start acting like Democrats who expect a government handout for their entire life.
I can tell you though that Mitch McConnell will not make these mistakes in 2008.
Look at what McConnell achieved last night. After Kentucky's GOP governor got mired in a hiring scandal and his approval ratings fell to the floor, Democrats thought they could exploit it and pick up as many as three House seats. They only got one, barely, in a district that was already Democrat-majority. McConnell helped keep Anne Northup in the House for four terms, much longer than anyone expected. She apparently also ignored McConnell's advice and went positive at the end of her campaign, which may have killed her. Democrats brought the popular Ken Lucas out of retirement in the 4th District, but Geoff Davis trounced him. Ron Lewis also kicked ass in the 2d. Kentucky remains a GOP stronghold, while Democrats made gains in every surrounding state. This should give Republicans some comfort as McConnell takes the reins in the Senate.
Honestly, I would have been a lot happier this morning if the NRSC would have done two things:
1) not gone back and recruited Bouchard in MI to run against Butler in the primary.
2) used the money they dumped into MI and used it on another race where the numbers were better for the R's.
I know that I would have been disappointed that the national party bailed on MI, but we needed to win in other areas and we didn't. Now I'm extremely P.O.'d at the Party for trying to pick up when they couldn't defend what they had very well.
Allen was 10 point ahead after the primary.
He lost most of those points over Makaca.
It doesn't matter that he did not know what it could mean.
In politics - preception is thruth
It is easy to see now that the Republicans should have been running on substantive issues. The economy, national security, border control, judges... all these issues work for us. But most Senate candidates chose to ignore all that, and concentrate on quick scores, with Allen being the worst offender.
To be an effective candidate, a Republican must first educate the electorate to understand what these issues are and why they are important. This is a long, drawn out process, and takes time. It cannot be done in a five-second sound bite in between attack ads on your opponent and rah-rah rallies.
I thought Steele ran an excellent campaign in Maryland. That is the race that disappoints me most.
I don't know why Allen didn't mention judges. The Gay Marriage Ban won here 58-42%, so obviously a lot of people who care about social issues voted for Webb.
Allen also didn't mention how losing the Senate would cost us in Navy contracts, which means jobs will be lost (because John Warner won't be the chair of the committee anymore, unless Burns or Allen pulls out a miracle).
...."outgoing Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist"....
I thought the votes were still being counted in Montana and Virginia?
I think you're right that they don't know how to explain it. Conservatives MUST now begin an offensive on the judges issue, explaining that activist judges BREAK the law by unlawfully inventing law. They circumvent the legislative process. Activism is unconstitutional, illegal and unpatriotic. Until we do this, the Dems will continue to block our nominees while we will have no leverage in attempts to block nominees of their Presidents.
New term for those of us who are disappointed with the election results ; Fristration. We've had our party co-opted by someone who has only his own selfish aspirations in mind. First is a non-starter for President in 2008.
All this Monday Morning Quarterbacking is making me sick! It was a horrible night for the GOP and for conservatives. However, it fits perfectly within the historical context of how elections go for a president six years out, especially a president conducting a war.
Just remember the same thing happened to Reagan in 1986. The American electorate is a fickle lot, and the pendulum will again swing in our direction. Few of the losses were severe, percentage-wise, we still have two out that are 'too close to call' but which we will probably lose, seating Leahy as Chair of Judiciary.
No single person or candidate is to blame in this... tho I do wish Tony Snow had gotten to the White House a year earlier (I know he couldn't have, with his surgery) but the WH lost a lot of ground not properly expressing its positions, its successes, and in dealing with the WH press corps.
Another thing they didn't run on was pointing out how strong the economy is and claiming some credit for it with respect to the tax cuts the Dems all opposed. What's with these people?
These results show one simple thing. The Republicans have done nothing of any lasting substance with the majority they gained in 1994, and the hold on Presidency, House, and Senate since 2000.
Permanent tax cuts? No.
Spending reductions? No.
Elimination of useless and unconstitutional agencies? No.
Reduction in regulation? No.
A cleaner more ethical government? No.
A government not run by moral misfits? No.
Social Security reform? No.
Bigger government? Yes.
More useless unconstitutional programs? Yes.
Spending run amok? Yes.
Corruption/morals scandal of the week? Yes.
Maybe, having cleaned out the dross of the party, we can now recpature our ideals.
No, don't measure the noose for Bill Frist. The failure of failures was Dennis Hastert. When Hastert decided in 2006 that he had to defend William ("Freezer Full") Jefferson because the Congressional brotherhood of graft trumped principle (if he has any) or even party, he threw the House away.
In the Senate, the crummy performance was perennial lightweight Libby Dole. Under her "leadership," the committee got involved in primaries, a situation where the House committee followed suit, to support marginal candidates over stronger challengers -- because they were so "electable," don't ya know. Ask Senator Chaffee (he still is, briefly) how that's working out for Republicans in RI.
Bush deserves a share of the blame, but not for what the conventional wisdom says, the war. Instead it is for making no distinction between the parties in six years, and for making his only legislative priority the deeply unpopular amnesty for criminal aliens. That may have suppressed Republican vote a little, but it's equally unpopular with Reagan Democrats and independent voters who have traditionally provided R's with our margin of victory.
There were some bright spots. Mike Steele in Maryland ran a great campaign, and in a year where Republican incumbents were playing politics rather than stuffing their politics, he might have won. We will see his face again.
Another bright spot is the outing of Mark Foley by the gay Democrat lobbyists at the Human Rights Campaign. It shows that they, too, understand that gay men cannot be trusted around teen boys. This "admission against interest," as a judge would call it, should have impact that reaches far beyond the two-year splash these elections make.
Both parties will probably quietly vet future candidates to keep future Foleys out of the halls of Congress, which is only a good thing for the 99% of society that isn't gay and doesn't need an endless supply of confused teens to perpetuate itself. (Remember that Foley himself came to his gay identity by being raped as a teenager... a pattern he then perpetuated, and what passes for "normal" in the gay underworld).
Finally, here is one lesson we need to take to heart: corruption hurts us. Whether it's the small-scale sexual misconduct of a gay Congressman who likes to bugger pages, or larger-scale corruption or tolerance of corruption like Weldon or Hastert, it hurts. Throwing Foley out when his gay Dem buddies out him was too little, too late. He needed to go when he was first exposed as a page pursuer. The mind-boggling spectacle of Hastert standing up for corruption -- for a corrupt Democrat, no less -- was demoralizing. Likewise, many Senators were tainted by taking money from those who exploit illegal-immigrant slave labor, in order to keep the flow of slaves coming.
Why must we run a tighter ship than the other guys? Why must we abjure and eject corruption, perversion, and criminality while the other guys welcome in their leadership folks who have broken all ten Commandments and God alone knows how many laws? Two reasons. 1. We are supposed to stand for something other than raw power. (As Spider-Man, but not Hastert, says: "With great power comes great responsibility.") And 2. The media retain some (albeit dwindling) influence, and they are absolutely in the tank for the other guys. Anyone from the Massachusetts Congressional delegation could rape a child on his Capitol desk with three cameras running (several of them probably already have) and the story will never be written, or will land upon the editors' spike. Let a Republican park more than a foot from the kerb and the same journalists will howl for his head.
However, we are looking at a day of celebration in the dens of America's vilest enemies -- in South Waziristan, and on 43rd Street in NYC. Their guys won. And their guys won not because, in most cases, they were strong; but because our guys failed.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F