There’s a man named Keith Goodenough running for one of the two Senate seats in Wyoming.  I have no guage on the situation to determine if he is the favorite or likely Democrat nominee against the incumbant of one year, John Barasso.  The other incumbent, Mike Enzi, famces no opposition, and so Barasso’s is the closer to the “Open Race” to place a token challenger’s weight.

Goodenough presents an interesting question.  The name strikes me as both an opportunity and a challenge.  He is “Good enough”, the ad copy writes itself, skeptics of the other guy can shrug and vote for him.  But the opposition can posit that he is merely “good enough”, and Why not the Best?

The oddest image of this Democratic nominating battle was seeing the two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, addressing an audience of Wyoming’s Democratic faithful.  Something just looked out of sync:  Wyoming, Democrats, national politics.  It didn’t much make sense.

Looking back to 2006, I posted this little survey of a mass of races in what I guess I’ll call the “Inland Northwest”, a mostly deep-red Republican area stretching from Eastern Washington and Oregon sliding through Idaho and landing to Wyoming and Montana.  A number of competitive races which flickered signs of life for a dormant Democratic Party.  And, naturally, they all lost.  Except Tester, but even that was instructive in what I termed a sure thing sort of headed to the thinnest of margins of victory.  So we skidaddle over to 2008 and it is worth surveying this landscape to see… another crack at Sali.  Another crack at Wyoming’s At Large House seat.  And… that’s about it.  Unless you count the sort of half rotten fish certain re-election of Max Baucus.  A lot of Democratic bloggers trumpet the Idaho Senate race, and I guess that is what partisan bloggers do, but I am not about to hold my breath for a rematch of a previous election lost by double digits.

Maybe it is not quite as wide-eyed a prospect for the Democrats in this small corner of the country, but then again, if these two elections fall the right way, the result would be better… right?  Taking a gander at Republican responses to some Democratic boosterism, I see the response to the unveiling of the “red to Blue” races from the DCCC goes along the lines of “A lot of re-match races you lost last time out.”  Which is spin of a sort, the position the Democrats are in is that they are trying to pluck some seats that they just barely couldn’t last time out, better than the Republican position which is… trying to hold down the fort for the same seats they just barely won last time out.

Meanwhile, over the DSCC, the response for Chuck Schumer’s gloating of recruitments running for the Senate, where the horrible map the Republican faces is made manifest, is an admission on Senator Ensign’s spot that the party is playing defense and, well, Maine and Oregon are favored for the Republicans, and after that… North Carolina and Kentucky and Nebraska have second tier recruits from the Democrats, and after that… Kansas is still Kansas.

Which, Kansas.  Jim Slattery.  A “hm”, along with a strata of states that should be rolling to a Republican landslide, which is that the Democrats have a few candidates who do nothing but slow down the Republican incumbent enough to force them to glance over and acknowledge their existence.  After they do that, provided they don’t shout out “Macaca!”, they should all be on their way to a double digit victory.  But this strata of races comes after over ten somewhat or much more credible races.

Maybe I’ll entertain myself by going through all 35 Senate races and glancing at them specifically, just… for my amusement.  One suggestion to Georgians:  vote for Martin and keep your pride.  The other guy, Vernon Jones, voted for Bush in 2004, which is an act that should be a non-starter for any Democrat running for president for at least the next two decades.

And the Democrats are as screwed as the Republicans are right now visa vie the map in the year 2012, so… fans of the letter “D” can only gloat so much, because fans of the letter “R” will have their day.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 11:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.