The outstanding races, and the Senate fluxes
It looks like Virgil Goode has been defeated, the man who railed against Keith Ellison’s inauguration on his faith’s Holy Book — the Quaran, and who gave this rant. One pleasant defeat for what I guess can be called “Bachmann Caucus”. I suppose this means there will be one fewer source of amusement from out of Congress, but now that I come to think of it, this is never true: Dennis Kucinich does some goofy things sometimes.
On the negative side of dangling elections, Darcy Burner has been defeated.
The Omaha – based electoral vote has been called for Obama. This will compound every cartographer for the electoral map, who now need to dab a slab of blue onto the red Nebraska. Missouri remains in flux, though seems to be tilting toward McCain, and with no reason anyone cares will probably simply settle to McCain. Good news: a supposed “bell weather” which has never voted for the loser except for a “good wishes to Truman” in 1956 since time immemorial has falled by the way-side, joining Maine when it became similarly irrelevant back in 1936.
Turning to the Senate: MINUS ONE. The Joseph Lieberman question. Let us say you are Joseph Lieberman. The question is: where can Joseph Lieberman wield the most power? From a lesser committee, or sub-committee, as offered by Reid in the majority Democratic Party, or in the minority Republican Party Caucus? Mull this over and ponder its permetations for Joe in the media circuit. I think both spots fit him okay in placing him as a “critic of the Democratic Party” and “Uber-Independent fellow” on, say, the Sean Hannity program.
The Democrats basically have to hold to their stated position. This is a meta-narrative. There were theoretically good points to be made for leaving Lieberman around, but not after the deal / ultimatum was put on the table. See, the Democrats have a reputation for being easily pushed over. And to relent is to prove this right.
PLUS TWO: Jim Martin has a new ad up, as he catupults to the run-off election. He shows footage from Obama’s victory speech for half the commercial. It explicitly ties him to Obama’s coat-tails. This is a little weird, as he just came off of Obama’s coat-tails, and it got him to 46.8 percent of the vote, or roughly the exact same percentage of the vote that Barack Obama received. On one hand this seems to be Martin’s ceiling here; on the other hand this appears to be his floor. So, Saxby Chambliss has come out with an ad which shows scary footage of President Elect Barack Obama, and stating that Jim Martin and Barack Obama will raise your taxes. I guess the extra component ad in Martin’s campaign is that he, as a member of the majority party under the Majority Party President, sits closer to power than the member of the minority party, and this is supposed to pull away those extra couple of percentage points away from Chambliss. Either that or Obama’s approval rating has risen enough to carry Martin through in the post-election honeymoon?
And John McCain is coming down to campaign for Chambliss. Which is good, because McCain doesn’t have anything better to do.
Minnesota: I suspect Al Franken is going to end up winning this. Call it a hunch. First time voters scribble too much, and the scribblers edge toward Franken. A 300 vote deficit for Franken will thus be overcome.
What’s great here is that this will forever be thought in the minds of Republicans as having been a tainted election, stolen by Franken in the middle of several nights with new ballots being furnished out of thin air. Which is just as well, because Republicans didn’t consider Al Franken a legitimate Senate candidate in the first place. But, if it is any consolation to Franken, Lyndon Johnson was forever thought to have stolen the 1948 Senate seat in Texas against Coke Stevens — and he ended up becoming president. Of course, he did. But that was only because his 1944 attempt to steal a Senate seat was thwarted by the other side, who out-manuevered the Johnson team in the art of stuffing and removing ballots. The “other side” were Alcohol Interests who wanted to ship a “Dry” politician out of Texas and to Washington, so they fooled Johnson who thought they, as “Alcohol Interests”, would have been helping him.
ZERO SUM GAME. Alaska is really the Twilight Zone of politics, isn’t it? The results are fishy, but a little hard to get a hold of what happened, precisely. In the absense of anything but conjecture and conspiracy theory and crude off-handed jabs, we just have to shrug the whole game off and pretend that nothing looks weird. Ted Stevens looks like he’s on the road to re-election, or maybe not, (early votes skew toward the Democrats, but are evenly distributed through this hyper-Republican state, so who knows what to make of this?) — and then immediate expulsion. The question everyone has is: How does Sarah Palin thus become Senator? Well, she resigns her gubernatorial post, and has the new governor and current Lieutenant Governor appoint her for the next two years, at which point she’ll be up for a special election. And that is Palin’s clearest path toward continued national relevance.