In 2002, I watched the Senate results — clicking back and forth between MSNBC’s Hardball and CNN’s Crossfire gang — with pen in hand and a small piece of paper with two lists: the five Republican seats that the Democrats hope to pick up and the five Democrat seats that the Republicans hope to pick up.

In order, roughly, of how likely the pick-up was for the other side.

Arkansas voted for the Democrat. The Republican candidate was involved in a sex scandal, and the hypocrisy of his holier-than thou stance toward Clinton during Impeachment proved to be his undoing. The last of victim of “Clinton’s Revenge” — which destroyed Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingstone’s career. Anyway, he was at the top of the list of possible Democratic pick-ups, and … as it turned out… he was the only Democratic pick-up.

Other than that case… the Republican seats stayed put.

Once the second entry on that list stayed put, and the bottom one on the Democratic side was won by the Republican, early in the evening… I had a good sense that this was a Republican night.

Tim Johnson narrowly edged his way to a victory in South Dakota, by a margin of something like 300 votes… the Indian Reservations came out huge for him (prompting the National Review to do a cover story about the dangers of Tribal Socialism, and prompting the National Review to do another cover story about how Terry McAuliffe stole the South Dakota election… a story that seems to boil down to a suggestion that the Native American votes were not on the level.)

Louisiana boiled down to December. On that winter day, the unremarkable DLC candidate Mary Landrieu saw that she was in trouble, the poll results streaming into campaign strategy did not look good. Bill Clinton came down to save the day with a mass-calling of African American voters, leading to a dramatic late-day Democratic surge.

The other three Democrat seats were lost. The other four Republican seats were won. Today, you can wonder if things would’ve been different had Paul Wellstone not died in an airplane crash… Wellstone very easily would have chugged Ms. Carnahan to victory in Missouri, meaning the net effect of the 2002 election would have been one Republican pickup and one Democratic pickup, which would have cut the storyline of the “Poweful Bush Coat-tail Effect” down to size before it could even gain hold… the only change being in Georgia — the smearing of Max Cleland and the sudden gust of the state to Republican control and the raging state flag controversy meaning the only message coming out of the 2002 election would have been all politics is local. But, that didn’t happen.

Anyway, on the sidebar you have this year’s list. At the start of the year, the conventional wisdom was the Democrats had an uphill fight. The southerners were retiring. But, things levelled out quickly. The Illinois Republican party imploded specacularly. The candidate that jumped into the race to take over John Edwards’s seat — Erskine Bowles got on a roll (when he ran for the Senate in 2002, his campaign ad featured Erskine Bowles… BOWLING. Good thing his name’s not “Erskine Crapshispants”.). The Colorado Democratic Party seems to have gotten its mojo back. And strong candidates entered the fray in Oklahoma and Alaska — while Oklahoma’s Republicans nominated a candidate a bit too extreme — whom the National Republican Party is a little weary of overtly connecting themselves to. Alaska’s Republicans nominated the candidate who received her job through nepotism. Also, in the “truth will set you free”, all pretenses that the Democrats held a seat in Georgia went out the window: so any suggestion that Majette might be closing in that race is a bonus, not a “must”.

In case the balance swayed a bit too much toward the Democrats, things evened out again: the Republican Party Hierarchy staved off the right-wing challenge to “centrist” incumbent Arlen Specter — which pretty well closed shut a prime opportunity for a Democratic pick-up. And the South Carolina Republican candidate picked up a lead, and the Republicans managed to convince their strongest potential candidate — John Thune — to take a stab against Tom Daschle.

Altogether, we can probably boil the Senate races down to six, three on each side, that could swing either way without too huge a political gust of wind… six races where it would not be a shocker if either candidate wins. Another couple of races on each side of the ledger bear a bit of watching in case political winds shift dramatically. At the moment, proving that “All Politics are local” — even as the presidential candidate flouders a bit and even as the red states get a bit redder, the Democratic candidate appears to have the slight edge in five *, and the sixth — Florida — is the mother of all toss-ups, in the mother of all swing states. (* although, Louisiana’s election is quirky as hell, adding some unpredictability… the effect being that what happens on November 2 will change the dynamics of that race.)

In that sense, the Democrats have a better chance than you would think they would have, races being in so many Republican strong-holds, of winning back the Senate. The party had a good blink of good luck.

I almost hope that Tom Daschle loses, and the other five Democratic candidates win. There’s something a bit pathetic about the persona of Tom Daschle, which shows us the true ways of the Democratic Party, and a loss would require the Democratic Party to find a new Senate leader… without being spurred on by being the “Loser Party.”

“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” — Condelleza Rice, September 8, 2002.

Interesting. Do forest fires create mushroom clouds?

Who knows? Perhaps everyone in the world is just on edge a bit these days, and indeed, our pals — the leaders of North Korea — just went through with a planned demolition for a hydro-electric project.

Does demolishing a hydro-elctric facility create a mushroom cloud?

I wonder if Saddam Hussein could’ve said that…

To the degree that the current Democratic Party has a message, to be submitted to the public at large, it’s Bob Shrum’s message.

Hard to tell if it’s a “winning message”. A hefty percentage of Democratic Senators and Governors owe their toughest victories to Bob Shrum.

On the other hand, a heck of a lot of unelected and nonelected Democrats lost with Bob Shrum.

Most famously, the list of Democratic hopefuls for the presidency that he’s “helped”: George McGovern in 1972. Edward Kennedy in 1980. Richard Gephardt in 1988. Bob Kerrey in 1992. Al Gore in 2000.

And, he quit after ten days with Jimmy Carter in 1976, due to a conflict in his conscience. I don’t know who he picked himself up to for 1976 after that (perhaps Edward Kennedy?), and I’m not sure who he fought for in 1984 (perhaps Mondale) — or if he didn’t get on board with either one and ended up on the Dukakis team –, but altogether, he is 0 for 7 in presidential campaigns.

You can’t win them all… can you?

Listening to John Kerry’s acceptance speech, I listened for the key Bob Shrum buzz-words. “Fighting for you” (or a variation of that theme) came out, by my count, twice. A relatively disappointingly meager amount: a panoply of phrases sprinked through the entire speech would have been far more entertaining in the “Drinking Game” schematic, or in the case of just watching the speech — a giggle knowingly match.

During the run up to the Democratic primary campaign, back before Al Gore bowed out of the race, we heard much hemming and hawing — most classically from Joseph Lieberman — that Al Gore lost when he abondoned the “DLC ethos” and took on the Bob Shrum – infused rhetoric that comes with the phrase “The People Versus the Powerful.”

Without parsing out the veracity of that particular phrase (Al Gore has been the vice president for the past eight years, and is of the “powerful”, ain’t he? Is he serious? How can someone who just picked Joe Lieberman as running mate be serious?)… it was the correct message politically.

Al Gore’s campaign would have sputtered before even getting off the ground without it. His campagin was completely and utterly dead before that particular campaign acceptance speech — started the summer of 1999 being fifteen or so points behind in a theoretical matchup with the publically unknown, but cash-infused, George W Bush.

There’s a marked depression I get staring at the electoral map. George W. has more red state electoral votes solidly sewn up than Al Gore — and now John Kerry — has blue state electoral votes sewn up. Al Gore had to win a majority fo the swing states up for grabs… pretty much, he had to nearly run the table. John Kerry has a similar task.

Al Gore just about accomplished that coup, and if that’s not enough, the Democrats in 2000 managed to run the table on close Senate races up for grabs.

It’s for this reason (as well as the fact that Gore was consistently shown slightly behind Bush in the national polls) that the talk throughout the 2000 campaign was “You know, Al Gore just might win the electoral vote and lose the popular vote.” It turned out the other way around (Florida being fishy), and that’s sort of not too surprising either (two Senators in every state.) That talk has resurfaced in the 2004 campaign. (I hear that there’s a news article from the summer or fall of 2000, available in the archives of some news site, about how Bush was preparing himself to fight a post-election battle in case that happened.)

But a few chads punched through in Florida, and the Al Gore campaign would’ve been hailed as a work of genius! Sputtering at the start, found its voice in the summer, and withstood some varieties of difficulty from there on out.

The generic populist message was necessary to define a difference with the other guy, and his vaguely defined “Compassionate Conservatism.” I’m not defending the “liberal” position over the “centrist” position here: Bill Clinton’s strategy was, obviously, the best one for his two campaigns… but in 2000? You have to somehow build on that and suggest a slightly different direction (Bush was suggesting only a moderately more conservative version of the same direction, bottom line: tax cuts and no scary Newt-cuts.) It’s not much about the message so much as it is about a message.

Without Bob Shrum, or some force like Bob Shrum, Al Gore would have been dead.

Now, how do I explain the other seven campaigns (including the current lackadasical Kerry campaign?) Well…

Kerry says that he knows Bob Shrum’s strengths, and that he knows Bob Shrum’s weaknesses.

In the course of Donald’s travels, we are given portraits of three societies and cannot help but draw comparisons. The first world is our own: modern day Duckberg, bustling with experts and petty bureaucrats. There are scientists, poring over dusty museum relics. There are eggheads of another sort, barons of the poultry industry who would process the world into one giant egg, as the globe in their conference room suggests. And there are the doltish but equally greedy farmers, seeking to package nature for profit by breeding squae fryers with round corners. Each group is after the same object in the same devouring way because it represents money: the square egg.

In such a society, position and salary are everything. Hierarchies form, and the object of life becomes climbing the ladder so you can step on the guy below. When we first see Donald, he is a lowly Fourth Assistant Janitor, struggling to move up to Third. The cadre of archaeologists aboard ship is just as stratified: each assistant can pass orders and omelets only to the next level. Even ptomaine posioning must move in an orderly fashion along the chain of authority.

We might expect better of the Andean natives, who dress in traditional costume and appear to make a simple living gathering reeds. But toruist trade has reached into the mountains, and the locals are out for every centavo they can snatch. Learning that Donald wants square eggs, they mass-produce replicas using the modern convenience of a Ward and Roebuck cement mixer. Donald, who charges into the village waving a fistful of dollars, is not much better and deserves to be swindled. The natives are simply playing the money game back at him.

Only the valley of the square people is untouched by greed. Sheltered from the rest of the world by mountains and mists, it seems to be Utopia. Everyone is friendly, southern hospitality is the order of the day, and the Ducks are hailed as dignataries, in marked contrast to the treatment they received as assistant janitors. Indeed, the valley’s name seems oddly out of joint with its happy disposition. But utopias, as Barks was fond of showing us, have a way of becoming Plain Awful.

The only other visitor ever to have penetrated the mists was another American, Professor Rhutt Betlah of the Birmingham School of English. By an ironic twist, this explorer was himself the relic of a lost civilization; and like many colonizers before him, he left the stamp of his culture on the land. Carrying southern customs and dialect even further south, he established, in insular and agrarian Plain Awful, an outpost of insular and agrarian Dixie. The natives, being square, were ripe for the transformation.

It is remarkable how much Plain Awful resembles the ante-bellum South. The folk may not work cotton plantations, but they live close to the soil — so close that they fuse human and topographic features, taking on a rocky look. President and Congress constitute a traditionally idle aristocracy, ruling by ceremony rather than action. In some ways this is good: it means that rank is purely nominal. Donald and the boys are welcomed as equals, given meaningless titles, and treated with honor. But nothing seems to get done in Plain Awful. Someone must quarry the great stone blocks that make up the local architecture, but we never see laborers. Ceremony and egg gathering, these are the daily rounds. Toil and sweat in the quarries fall outisde this pattern and are reserved as a punishment for outcasts.

This lurking threat makes us realize how awful the square world really is. Like the Old South, it is built on a rigid social system that ignores the variety of life. If the natives look sculptured, it is because they have been forced into identical shapes by their daily round and their hard stone beds. There is only one law in Plain Awful, but it is a statue so proscriptive that no others are needed: Everything Must Be Square. The cube has replaced the dollar as almighty totem. — Geoffrey Blum “Gracious Living in Plain Awful”

(The book of Marxist ideology by the same title as the title of this post, which has nothing to do with this post: available in most university libraries..)

Flick past righwing talk radio, and I hear a caller say something to the effect of, “This marks a moment in time. We would have gotten the word out if it were not for the bloggers, instead everyone would’ve taken the so-called expert at CBS News.”

He’s referring to the sudden influx of experts on Vietnam-era Kerning. It so happens that what people know about Vietnam era kerning directly relates to whether they’re voting for Kerry or Bush, but… (And if you wish to know which side I’m going to tend toward: the side that is all about the warped Kerns all swear to the validity of The Swift Boat Veterans for Obfuscation.)

You know, I know about some obscure topics as well! Hopefully, one of these days, a political debate will rage (in a manner that can only happen on the Internet) that will require knowledge of the history of the bread-clip to sort out who’s telling the truth and who’s blowing smoke.

In the meantime…

# of posts on usenet that use the word “Kerning” posted between September 8 and September 11, 2004: 420.

# of posts on usenet that use the word “kerning” posted between August 1 and August 31, 2004: 291.

I’d venture to guess that you can count the number of the posts in August that discuss what the kerning looked like on Vietnam – era documents you can count on one hand… assuming the number doesn’t form a fist.

Here’s the wikki on Kerning. Just so you know: It is commonly confused with tracking, but these are two separate concepts. So make sure that you don’t mix those two terms up!

…

(As a aside, and as a rule, I find it difficult to care about Bush’s Vietnam – era controversy… don’t expect much from me on that topic.)

The two of them gave me an idea, and, well, hear me out for a minute. It’s crazy, but it’s so crazy it just might work. Let’s forcibly convert the world to Quakerism. Quakers don’t start wars, or take hostages, or play their stereos real loud when you’re trying to sleep. The Left can get behind this because the Friends are one of the most liberal of denominations, and the Right’s already on board because I said “forcible conversion.” Problem solved.

(from here, comment for here.)

More from Bellatrys:

Doghouse Riley, that’s so crazy it just might work. Granted, William Penn is not the first person you think of when you think “Muscular Christianity,” but the world might just be ready for Militant Quakerism these days. (Plus we can just remind the Paleocons that Saint Nixon was a Quaker, and leave out the fact that he was a very bad Quaker.)

Assuming our programming that was shown for the past two July 4ths and the last two September 11ths are reshown again, I recommend clicking through the Portland Oregon Public Access television stations (and probably many, if not most, public access stations throughout the nation) to find a program that jumbles various 9/11 related television footage together.

Here are the things you’ll see: BBC broadcast news, showing how the “most religious of nations” is grieving. Footage from a Gore Vidal interview from the Summer of 2000, with Gore Vidal saying that the USA has been living in a security state (close to a military dictatorship) since World War II ended. Some bits from a Vietnam War documentary called “Hearts and Minds”. A press conference with deputy undersecretary of defense William G. Boykin. Bush saying that we would dig out the enemy. (It’s not terribly subtle a juxtaposition.) And, perhaps the most fascinating item I have ever seen from Fox News, an item that future generations are going to be studying to explain the psyche of the moment in history:

The host of the Fox News show says, “And now we leave with footage of an “America United”, which follows with a country artist singing “God Bless America” (though it could be a different song), and a panoply of smaltzy images that seems like it comes straight from “Hands Across America” (and seems like it was filmed before 9/11). The only image that sticks out to me is the proud Native America, twinkle in his eyes.

AND pay close attention to the “news bytes” streaming across the bottom of the screen, and how asinine just about every single item is… “news” items meant to reassure the viewer, meant to tell you how we are about to “kick ass”. (This is footage that Jello Biafro has in mind when he says, and this should probably be airing on KBOO sometime this weekend, “and naturally the worst was Fox News!”)

I trust it’ll be shown again. If anyone sees it, let me know your reaction to the Fox News footage, and help me out with the messages that stream past on the bottom of the screen.