I find it very appropriate that the California Democrat counties are coded as "green".
Posted on 11/06/2002 8:19:14 AM PST by Pokey78
THE ERA WHEN THE PARTY that doesn't hold the White House automatically gains seats in the House and sometimes seats in the Senate as well--is over. Democrats bucked that century-old habit in 1998, winning 5 House seats while Bill Clinton was president. And Republicans, led by President Bush, did it even more decisively in yesterday's congressional election. For the first time ever, the presidential party captured control of the Senate in a midterm election.
There's one particular reason for the death of the off-year trend: House incumbents have safer seats than ever now. When new districts are drawn every 10 years, they're done, first and foremost, with incumbent protection in mind. If an incumbent isn't popular, his new district will be gerrymandered to be especially safe. Should the other party think about reapportioning an incumbent out of a seat, he will join in a back room deal that protects incumbents of both his party and the opposition's. As for senators, they've only occasionally been subject to the midterm election rule. They certainly weren't this year.
So much for history. Let's get to the winners and losers in the 2002 midterm election. The top winner, of course, was President Bush, whose furious campaigning for Senate and House Republicans was a gamble that paid off handsomely. No president has spent so much time stumping for so many candidates of his party in so short a time. Bush emerged as the dominant figure in the campaign, creating a GOP tilt that affected races all over the country. Democrats who won, like Jennifer Granholm in the Michigan governor's race, did so by smaller margins than expected. And vulnerable Republicans such as Rep. Clay Shaw of Florida won by surprisingly large margins.
Another winner: Bush's White House adviser Karl Rove. He guided the president in handpicking Senate candidates in Minnesota and South Dakota and in clearing the field in Texas for John Cornyn to be the Republican Senate candidate. Rove also figured correctly that the best way to keep the House in GOP hands was to forge state-by-state agreements with Democrats to protect their incumbents along with Republican incumbents. He advised Republican leaders accordingly and, since Rove is the president's political guru, they obeyed. It worked.
Winner: Ralph Reed, the Republican chairman of Georgia. He promised not to be outdone by Democrats in turning out his party's voters--and he wasn't outdone. Georgia produced two huge upsets against popular Democratic incumbents, ousting Sen. Max Cleland and Gov. Roy Barnes. You may remember Reed from his former life as the brains behind the Christian Coalition when it was important political group, which it no longer is.
Winner: Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, who chairs the Senate GOP campaign committee. He's a hands-on chairman who took a few risks. One risky decision was to pump money into Louisiana to back Suze Terrell and attack Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu. The goal was to hold Landrieu below 50 percent and force a runoff. It was achieved. Terrell will now face Landrieu in a runoff on December 7. Frist decided where every dime of GOP money would go and even reviewed the scripts of all TV ads.
Winner: Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, Frist's counterpart in the House. Davis is a political junkie who knows more about every House seat than anyone on the planet. And it showed. He recruited an impressive group of Republican candidates, intervening in internal GOP fights when necessary. He also got the president to make appearances for Republican candidates in competitive districts. That's mere House candidates, not Senate. Davis did so well that Republicans won two House seats in Georgia that have been carved out for Democrats.
Loser: The biggest one is Tom Daschle, who loses his post as Senate Majority Leader. Daschle approved the strategy of having Democratic candidates avoid fights with Bush, stay fuzzy on controversial issues, and emphasize attacks on their Republican opponents. The best example of a Democratic candidate who followed this advice was Gov. Jean Shaheen of New Hampshire, seen by columnist Bob Novak as having run a perfect campaign. She lost anyway in her Senate contest against Republican representative John Sununu.
Loser: Bill Clinton. He engineered the nomination of Democrat Carl McCall for governor of New York. McCall ran a disastrous campaign and lost ignominiously to GOP governor George Pataki. Clinton campaigned in Florida for Democrat Bill McBride, but his appearance probably hurt more than it helped. And his mission in Arkansas to put Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jimmie Lou Fisher over the top failed miserably.
Loser: Steve Largent. He was a Republican golden boy, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame who was expected to win the governorship of Oklahoma easily after resigning his House seat. And after that, national office beckoned. No more. His campaign fizzled in the home stretch and he lost to Brad Henry, an obscure Democratic state senator.
Loser: The Democratic party. It will now face a period of bitter internecine struggle, liberals versus moderates. Liberals were critical of the strategy of going soft on Bush in the campaign. They preferred to fight on taxes and war with Iraq. Since the strategy of not fighting Bush failed, liberals will now demand the party veer to the left, and moderates will try to block that trend. Meanwhile, Republicans are likely to be even more united behind Bush.
Many other winners could be cited: new senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia; Mitt Romney, the victorious Republican in the Massachusetts governor's race; Mike Murphy, the GOP media consultant whose winning clients included Romney and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida; and the man who beat the Kennedy clan, new governor Bob Ehrlich of Maryland. Other losers? Let's not overlook Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe, who was responsible for producing a strong turnout, particularly by minorities. He didn't deliver and now will surely lose his job.
I find it very appropriate that the California Democrat counties are coded as "green".
Losers
Zogby
Dick Morris
CNN
Chris Matthews
Eleanor Rodham Clift
Babs Streisand
Woody Harelson
Susan Sarandon
NBC,CBS,ABC,PBS News orgs
Winners
Fox News
Rush limbaugh
Free Republic!
...and keep R.C. Slocum!
A Republican Congress - what a beautiful thing!
Leftists straining for left ever more
Fighting a White House locked in a War,
Won't come out winners in twenty-oh-four.
We will see if the Admins over there can figure out who this FReeper in sheeps clothing is.
I had a tough ti...err...I know that this FReeper had a tough time keeping up the level of vicious vitriol that he/she has but he/she feels that many, many moderates lurk on DU and anything that can give the impression that the radical core is demoralized will transfer...
...each one...reach one...impeach one.
Beware of the Green machine because once they receive Federal campaign maching funds these funds cannot ever be recinded. Once that line has been crossed, the Green party will grow like a cancer on our Nation and eventually become worse than the Democrats.
For example: In the late 1980s the German Green party had absolutely no political power but by last summer's election, they became the 2nd largest political party in the German Parliment. It can happen here.
jriemer
JUMPIN' JIM JEFFORDS - who now has the smallest office on the Hill and NO committee assignments.
LINCOLN CHAFEE - who floated the treasonous trial balloon of following Jumpin' Jim's treacherous ways. That trial balloon has blown up like the Hindenburg now that a Republican cushion exist in the Senate and a jump would do no more than put him in the minority.
I've been wondering, what with the revival of Lautenburg and Mondale and (not so much) the occasional yammering of Jimmuh, is there a sense of nostalgia and a yearning for the past circulating through the democratic party? There are no true liberals today in the sense of HHH or Stevenson, only pretentious unprincipled power usurpers interested solely in advancing their own personal agendas, and fooling as much of the American Public as they can.
I believe their constituency is made up of two distinct groups of people: For simplicity's sake, you can call them the Have's and the Have-not's. The Have-not's are made up of the Understandably Ignorant: The under-educated low-achievers that want without giving, and are easily manipulated through promoting envy and instilling fear. The Have's are made up of the Inexcuseably Ignorant: They are apparently well-educated and professionally successful, but are paradoxically naive and largely misinformed. Chalk it up to thinking with the heart rather than with the mind, which of course we all know is a terrible thing to waste. They hear what they want to hear and believe what they want to believe, and espouse it all ad nauseum as if it were all perfectly clear and logical.
The reason the dems are such good fighters when they're out of power is that the Have's are able to energize the Have-not's with the same swill they themselves swallowed and then in turn so effectively embellish on their fiction and fantasies and flowdown to the Have-not's wrapped in imagined threats and takeaways. The reason they are so ineffective when they're in power is their inability to maintain the charade without actually producing anything, and subsequently lose just enough previously-fooled Have-not's to tilt the balance of power back to the Good Guys.
Simple, ain't it??
Ed Asner
Alec Baldwin
Eric Roberts
Bill Maher
George Carlin (used to be funny)
LOL!
Yes...a very important distinction.
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