Posted on 12/07/2008 2:51:46 AM PST by flattorney
I am not so shocked, guess I don’t shock easy. I was ‘surprised’ when I saw the polling giving Cao a lead but that prepared me for the possibly. Winning the special (or breaking 40%) for the Emmanuel/Blago/Flanagan/Rosti seat, THAT would shock me.
It’s gonna be very tough to reelect him. He’d be the GOPer in most rat seat since at least RINO liberal Connie Morella. Hopefully the NRCC will have enough cash to fund him and at least allow for the possibility. Surviving ‘10 would be one thing. Surviving black turnout in ‘12 would be another thing. But since the seat must get bigger as the state is dropping a district (this is the one that lost people) it can take on more GOP territory.
Of course should he lose we can play the race card against the democrats.
“first Vietnamese-american Congressman”
And a hell of any unlikely one. From NOLA in 2008?
“Gary Studds “
Ick. And the thing is that seat is and as far as I can tell has been for the past 50 years at least, the most Republican area of Massachusetts in POTUS voting (despite it also housing some ultra liberal gays). Studds first won it in ‘72 as Tricky Dick was almost certainly carrying it. He beat Hastings Keith (R) at the time the only halfway conservative member of the Mass. delegation since Joe Martin. That same year Kerry lost a house race in MA.
“The local papers have been rubbing it our face with nonstop “commerative” issues of Dear Leader since Nov. 5, 2008.”
See the “own of piece of history” Sun Times (or Trib?) reprint commercials? Barf.
Also there are commemorative plates that they started to make so fast they list the electoral votes of Missou and NC as “undecided”. Mind bogglingly revolting.
I don’t get why Dems cried foul about the attacks on Jefferson. What was wrong with telling the truth? Nothing. You would think they wouldn’t want to be associated with him.
Bobby Jindal for 2012 VP
Chet Edwards did the same crap here in Waco.
I don’t know.
Coming in late on discussion. If this has been stated prior to my post disregard. How low and corrupt must you become to cry foul when people tell the truth about William Jefferson?
bttt
Studds challenged Keith in 1970 and nearly won. Keith retired in '72 (because the Dem legislature removed some GOP precincts and moved them into the adjacent district) and Studds faced and beat Republican William Weeks by just 1,200 votes. Weeks was a wealthy State Senator and the son of Ike's Cabinet Secretary Sinclair Weeks.
I’m no expert on this subject, but I’ll share what I observed as a teenager working on my dad’s real estate maintenance crew in Roxbury MA during the 60’s. During that time a large influx of blacks moving up from the southern states rapidly changed Roxbury from a mixed catholic/jewish/black neighborhood of Boston to the almost exclusively black enclave that it remains to this day.
Anyways .....
Black families moving up from the south arrived essentially penniless and without the necessary education to obtain decent paying jobs. Many or most consequently ended up on welfare.
These people may have lacked somewhat in the way of education, but it rapidly became clear to them that they could obtain a higher rate of benefits if the parents were “separated” in the eyes of the bureaucrats and filing separately for benefits. This required that the parents no longer inhabit the same residence, so the husband would leave and rent his own apartment. The social workers would actually prowl around checking to make sure that husband and wife were not “cohabiting”.
IMO, this is the point where the Law of Unintended Consequences took over. The institution of marriage and the two parent family became slowly discredited as a result of badly crafted federal welfare regulations making it financially disadvantageous to maintain. I’m sure that this is not the only factor in play, but I do believe that it does bear a full share of responsibility for the breakdown of the family among the poorest sectors our our populations.
If you want to know why the Democratic Party has had a lock on the MA congressional seats for decades, just look at the way the voting districts have been so grotesquely gerrymandered.
Elbridge Gerry was from Massholechusetts, so should we be surprised that there is so much gerrymandering going on?
Quite so, but we’d be hard-pressed to gerrymander a single Congressional district in MA to elect a Republican. The party doesn’t really exist there anymore, except on paper. RINOs slowly killed it and Slick Willard delivered the final death blow.
I’ve always said we’d be better off turning the party up there over to high schoolers and college students, since with an aggressive attitude and walking the precincts, we couldn’t possibly slip any further down than where we are now (with a 90% Dem legislature — I see we dropped from 19 to 16 seats in the House with this election, and barely held the 5 out of 40 in the Senate. It is very conceivable the state could become the first outside the South in the modern era to have a completely Dem legislative body within a decade).
Studds is descended from him him.
“Studds challenged Keith in 1970 and nearly won. Keith retired in ‘72”
My bad. What a wuss.
It’s sick that seat elected and reelected that ultraleft queer whist voting GOP for President until the 90’s I think.
Bush/McCain cracked 40% in the seat but no GOP candidate. :/
The last close race in MA besides the special we almost won was ‘96 in the first district. Hard to imagine THAT seat ever returning to the fold now.
On school choice, or NRST?
I like "Holy Cao!"
Cao is also a Catholic and pro-lifer.
If he pulls it out in 2010, unless (or even if) there is some extreme re-districting in time for 2012, perhaps the GOP should prep him to face Landrieu.
Actually, Keith was largely forced out. Weeks challenged him aggressively in the ‘70 primary and came close to beating him (losing just 55-45%, which is a poor showing for an incumbent). Weeks was also freely spending all the while Studds, who was fairly skilled at GOTV, was aggressively going around the district, especially courting Portuguese Americans. Keith seemed to be caught unprepared for both and only won by 2,000 votes in ‘70. If Keith had run again, he might’ve been defeated in the primary (and Weeks still would’ve lost to Studds) or had he prevailed, he may have been crippled enough and had his resources depleted that he might’ve lost by a wider margin than Weeks did. So, I wouldn’t call Keith a wuss, he was in a difficult spot and chose to graciously get out of the way, probably surmising that Weeks’s money and aggressiveness would keep the seat in our hands. Sadly, it didn’t.
First, let me say that I did not mean my last post to suggest that you were unfamiliar with the gerrymandering shenanigans of the democratic party in MA. My remark was aimed toward non-residents of our glorious Commonwealth.
Secondly, I fully agree with you argument that a change needs to be made. The Republican Party has been in a state of complete ineffectuality on Beacon Hill for several decades. Its only achievement has been to elect a string of powerless governors whose chief function has been to act as the official scapegoat whenever the latest hare-brained Democratic scheme blows up in the legislature’s faces. The money spent on those gubernatorial adventures would, IMO, be far better spent on developing a grass roots political guerilla movement in the local cities and towns. When you really get down to it, much of the reason for the democrats’ dominance of the legislature is that so many seats simply go uncontested each election.
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