It is amusing to see the chirping of Republicans, having saved the two party system on Election Day 2009.  In terms of politics as sports, it is pontificating on the success or failure of a third down pass for three yards for first down.  As well the “Sour Grapes”, in the true Aesopean meaning of the phrase as rationalizing negative news, in reaction to the NY House seat.  And I wonder what Gary Bauer has to say about these matters.:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Former Presidential Candidate Gary Bauer on the eve of mid-term elections Monday said that the electorate seems poised to make “change Conservatives can believe in.” Bauer is available for election analysis and commentary as one who played key roles in the races receiving significant attention.

Bauer, chairman of the Campaign for Working Families, was one of the first conservatives to endorse Doug Hoffman in his bid to take the New York house seat. Bauer’s Campaign for Working Families committed tens of thousands of dollars in contributions and independent expenditures in Virginia and New York to promote conservative candidates and mobilize conservative voters. The Campaign is one of the largest pro-family, pro-life political action committees in America.
Bauer said, “Whatever happens tomorrow, Virginia seems to be headed back to the Republican column, and Democratic state New Jersey has an incumbent Democratic governor who clearly will not get 50 percent of the vote even with Barack Obama’s help. And in New York‘s 23rd House Race, a grassroots rebellion threatens to put a Conservative Party candidate into the Congress. It’s definitely going to be must see TV tomorrow, and as one who has been very active in the races, I do believe that change is coming.”

Something I need to do: check to see what media appearances this press release netted for Mr. Bauer.

Probably the most disconcerting problem spot for Obama on “Eletion Day 2009” — into next year’s midterm elections and into his re-election bid — is the Virginia outcome.  New Jersey is fine: one unpopular Democratic incumbent ousted by an unpopular Republican challenger in a state where the Republican Party was due for a victory, and the only reason it was close at all was the presence of Obama.  Move along, nothing to see there.

But Virginia?  Virginia sort of resembles the outcome of Georgia’s Senate run-off election in 2008.  The Democratic candidate there had tacked to Obama’s relatively impressive state margins, forcing the Republican just below 50 percent and into a run-off.  And in that run-off, he was — quite predictably — trounced.  Obama’s electoral coalition collapsed completely sans Obama in something of an “Emerging Market”, and everyone knew it was about to happen — hence Obama stayed away from it.  Creigh Deeds knew the electorate would look different than 2008, and proceeded to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Indeed, in important ways McDonnell probably ran less against Obama than Deed did.

The irony of McDonnell’s smashing victory is that it follows two essentially successful Democratic gubernatorial terms.  Virginia’s one-term process offers a procession of quarterly “clean slate” choices where the election does not necessarily become a referendum on the last guy.  I guess it’s sort of set up for that purpose — that system has its small “d” democratic virtues.

The good news for Obama, running against his problems of unreliable base motivation, is that election outcomes in the blue parts of North Carolina — the Obama state with the lowest margin of victory and a ripe target for the Collapsed Electoral Coalition problem (I gather sort of most visible in the southern states) — trended ever more blue.  The other factoid moving forward to 2010: if the micro-level economy is not tangibly better, the Democrats need to brace themselves for losses with a capital “l”.  Never mind I saw in the supermarket check-out aisle a magazine commenerating his Nobel Prize — strange tidings.

Down Goes Hoffman!  Down Goes Hoffman!   Down Goes Hoffman!

Here’s where Drudge puts that election down, by the way:

Considering the elements coming together to push for Doug Hoffman, if NY-23 had gone the other way, would that have popped up first, instead of just a tidge ahead of Michelle taking his daughters to see Miley Cyrus?

I heard Roger Stone, Republican hack, at the start of the ballot counting just after the voting was done in NY23, sell the results for the district.  First of all, and I don’t understand the point in party hacks getting up to sell that “I think we’ll win this one” — not in the circumstances of 2009 where there aren’t major elections coming down the pike West-wise that might be tamped down in vote turn-out.  But Roger Stone saw the results: there obviously wasn’t anything to suggest the fait accompli of a victory, yet he spun that direction anyways.

Next, I saw Roger Stone sell the concept of the district as a Democratic vote-getter.  Obama narrowly won the district.  Fine, cool, great.  I gather the first Democratic presidential victor in the district?  (I know that FDR never won his home-turf in upstate New York, which I further gather is even less Democratic than these parts of New York.)  The other one was to point out the state-wide Democratic office-holders who won this district — Schumer in his last election, and Spitzer.  Those politicians won the state in a landslide — the district edged forward.

But you choose your facts to fit your storyline.  This, I think, is a more fitting fact storyline.  In the end, this race became a referendum on the strategies of the “Talk Radio” conservative and narrowly defined “Tea Party” audience.  They lost.  It’s not a political strategum employed by the two great Republican victors of the night who had broader electorates to appeal toward (and generally skirted the matter in the election of whether this was a referendum on national politics).  So, they can keep their Bachmans, as New York 23 would rather have someone tending to their parachiol matters.

So, how about that New York City mayorial race, huh?

At about 9 pm Eastern Time, the candidates and the media prepared to go through the ritual motions of lop-sided election races.  William Thompson reportedly was preparing to call Bloomberg.  Some media outlets automatically called the election.

Then the ballots were counted.  And the results showed.  Bloomberg up by a point.  Two points.  Holding steady at a point.  I imagine Thompson hurrying to write up a possible victory speech, a bit surprised by these circumstances.

I have no dog in this fight, but at this point I would admit I love a good upset, and bizarre scrambling electoral circumstances, and the biggest upset in American political history since Truman has a nice ring to it.   Thinking about it, the lesson would have been to pin-point when the diminishing returns of media saturation diminish to the point where it has negative value — complacency run amok.

There’s a couple ways of looking at the too-close result.  I am back to the cynical.  Bloomberg’s mega-bucks spend to make sure there’s no contest worked, weirdly and a bit deceptively sling-shotting a few points back in the process.  The question becomes whether money might have reallydone anything for Thompson.  And if an actual known name with historic electoral backing — Anthony Wiener — wouldn’t have had the effect of putting in different dynamics that would have resulted in the same effect.

Across the way, Chris Christie won election in New Jersey, reviving the old William Howard Taft wing of the Republican Party.  And you know what I mean.

Saw a bumpersticker.  I guess on an image of a ribbon the words “Vote Freedom”.  I’ll be sure to do that.  It occurs to me that this is a rather meaningless unspecified marker.  Everyone seems to be voting for freedom, with the belief that the other side is voting for Tyranny.

So I don’t know the bumper stickers’ politics.  There is another bumper sticker which suggests the car is owned by a cat owner.  Other than that, I have nothing.

I have, at this moment in scanning about the web, an irrational desire see election results of one kind or another.  I don’t even understand why.  I read, bemused, the comments of partisan charged commenter floating out there, against the easy conventional unconventional conventional wisdom that these elections add up to a few local races with local issues and people with an electorate that looks nothing like any electorate that will face Obama in 3 years.:

(bah.  Can’t find it. Website is slow to, I assume, election-result traffic — and in this case it has to be rather localized to the evening as opposed to larger election nights. It was a Typical spiel alleging that the liberal media would paint a Democratic night as significant, and a Republican night as hinging on the local.

Good luck to the residents of Virginia in upholding their pattern in electing Governors the following year of the other party than the president.
One thing that needs to be stated about these 70 Gubernatorial term slots.  Going back to the beginning of Virginia’s voting pattern, and the demise of the one party system at the end of the stuffy “Byrd Machine”.:  Here’s the first Republican Governor in Virginia since Reconstruction, and the Democrat he replaced who would then be the Republican that replaced him, a quick wikipedia sketch of the mechinitions of political realignment. 

Abner Linwood Holton, Jr. (born September 21, 1923) was the first Republican Governor of Virginia since Reconstruction. He was governor from 1970 to 1974. Holton was a member of the mountain-valley Republican Party (GOP) that fought the Byrd Organization and was not in favor of welcoming conservative Democrats into the Virginia Republican Party.  […]
In 1970, when forced busing was an issue in Virginia, Holton voluntarily placed his children (including future First Lady of Virginia Anne Holton) in the mostly African-American Richmond public schools garnering much publicity.
As governor he pushed hard to field Republican candidates in all statewide races instead of endorsing conservative alternatives. When segregationist Harry F. Byrd, Jr. broke ranks with the increasingly liberal Virginia Democratic party and ran as an independent for the U.S. Senate in 1970, Linwood insisted on running a Republican candidate rather than endorsing an independent. This eventually led to the nomination of Ray Garland.^[1] Byrd went on to win the three-way election with an absolute majority. Holton also encouraged a moderate Republican to run in the special election in 1971 to choose a successor for deceased Lieutenant Governor J. Sargeant Reynolds — another election which was won by an independent, this time populist Henry Howell.
The increasingly conservative Republican party turned their back on Holton and supported Mills E. Godwin, Jr. in 1973, the conservative former Democrat who had defeated Holton in the 1965 election. Godwin had turned Republican and supported “massive resistance” to desegregation.^[2][3] Holton was not eligible to run in 1973 anyway, as Virginia does not allow governors to serve consecutive terms. […]
After his retirement, Holton had supported moderate Republicans, including John Warner. As the Virginia Republican Party became more conservative, however, he found himself more in line with the state Democratic Party, ultimately endorsing several Democrats for statewide office, including his son-in-law, Governor Tim Kaine. Holton endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential contest.

Virginians voted for and against Freedom between 1965 and 1973.

On that other round-up, I rolled about the am dial.  I heard a dash of two hosts.  Mark Levine was particularly interesting, alerting us to the one year anniversary of the election of a Marxist Radical to the White House, and the ensuring year long ground-swell that is reaching one key moment in the election of Doug Hoffman in Upstate New York.  Obama Never Knew what hit him!  A speech prevailed upon atop music from Patton.  It’s show business, I suppose.

It is, of course, worth noting the reported surreality from residents of New York District 23.  The Enthusiasm Gap between National Observers and National Movement Conservatives holding this out as one giant Stand (note the local spending versus national) and the residents in the district waiting for the media attention to go away, please.

Exit polls are coming out from all the contests.  According to the exit polls, 97 percent of voters believe they voted for Freedom.  What’s interesting is to see the Gender Gap: where 95 percent of men voted for Freedom, 98 percent of women voted for Freedom, showing a giant gap in terms of attitudes regarding this “Freedom Issue”.  Not enough data has come in to look at generational splits.

From an interview in the Nation with Mikhail Gorbachev.

By the way, in 1987, after my first visit to the United States, Vice President Bush accompanied me to the airport, and told me: “Reagan is a conservative. An extreme conservative. All the blockheads and dummies are for him, and when he says that something is necessary, they trust him. But if some Democrat had proposed what Reagan did, with you, they might not have trusted him.”

By telling you this, I simply want to give Reagan the credit he deserves. I found dealing with him very difficult. The first time we met, in 1985, after we had talked, my people asked me what I thought of him. “A real dinosaur,” I replied. And about me Reagan said, “Gorbachev is a diehard Bolshevik!”

Maybe I’ll add more to this post later, political musings that touch on American politics through the years, or maybe I’ll leave it at that.

This is a silly novel.  I plucked it out from a spot that had thrown out a bunch of old books, and I now shall deposit it at a public spot where some anonymous person might pluck it up for their silly reading enjoyment.  I picked it up with two other books — one bad, one lighter silly and enjoyable.  Maybe I’ll mention that one later.

There are a few things I wish to say about Stuart Archer Cohen’s Army of the Republic.  Firstly, I wonder how many real names appeared in his first draft which were then crossed out and replaced to fictional names — perhaps partly way through his first draft.  Secondly, I need to note a manner I read this book — I skipped just shy of the first hundred pages and read them last.  I have a theory that a lot of novels would be improved and better served if the editor just arbitrarily knocked off a large chunk of the beginning and threw it past some expository elements into some action which can’t help but allude to the exposition.  Of course, were a novelist to take this approach, s/he’d end up constantly knocking off hundred page installments until we end up with a single page or two — and that is no way in furthering explorations of the human experience.

The last thing I want to say about this book has to do with a cover blurb.  Check this out.  “One of the first works of art with the courage to live up to our historical moment.  The Army of the Republic is brilliant, terrifying, and much too close to comfort.”  — Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine, No Logo.  Okay.  Now, near the end of the book — and by “near the end of the book” I mean within the first 100 pages, on page 9 as the case is, the narration (at this point by the mid-20s guerrila fighter) describes a decoy apartment room.  The apartment itself has been purged of anything remotely political.  No Malcolm X posters, no heavy theory by trouble makers like Chomsky or Klein.  A few canned photos of ballet slippers and nature scenes hag on the mostly empty walls, and the bookcase is heavy with mindless historical romances we picked up from the Salvation Army for a nickel each. Hey!  He just name-dropped one of his blurbers!  Funny that.

I point to this bit of Political Pandering on the part of House Minority Leader John Boehner, an easy picking I gather, but ultimately a weirdly meaningless “Get Tough” messaging for cheap, easy points.

………………………………..

KING: We’re back with the House Republican leader, John Boehner. I want to spend some time on politics, but a couple quick questions first. The administration announced Friday night that it is going to make the H1N1 vaccine available to detainees at the Guantanamo Bay terror detention facility. There are shortages here in the United States for families who are trying to get them. I wonder if you think that’s a good idea.

BOEHNER: I don’t think it’s a good idea. The administration probably didn’t think it would be very popular either, that’s why they announced it on Friday night. We have prisoners in my own home county who are going to get H1N1 shots while there are vulnerable populations who want the shots who can’t get them. I just think that’s wrong.

………………………………….

Bleh.

A spokesman for Physicians For Human Rights, an international medical group, said there are “certain basic obligations the U.S. has to its prisoners,” and that vaccinations for influenza fall into that category.

“The fact that many prisoners within the U.S. don’t get timely access to basic health care doesn’t change the obligation of the U.S. to prisoners at Guantanamo,” Dr. Scott A. Allen of the rights group said in an e-mail from Rhode Island. “We should work towards securing H1N1 vaccine for all at-risk populations, and not towards lowering a public health standard for certain unpopular groups.”

Tuesday is Election Day 2009, and we’ll find out any number of things.  How much does Washington State like its gays and how much does Maine love its gays?  Actually polls show Domestic Partnership should pass through Washington fairly easily, with marraige in Maine a qubble that we shall see.

Other questions: what will be the dollar per vote amount for Michael Bloomberg’s third term mayorship in the city of New York?  Actually, this one is pretty easy to figure out right now — the two variables of the hundred million spent and the rought vote count are roughly set in stone.  As is the hypocrisy of arguing against the third term claim attempt as the “Necessary Man” by his predecessor, Rudy, against his third term claim as the “Necessary Man”.

What will the Virginia Republican Gubernatorial candidate’s victory signify, considering this will be the ninth straight time the opposition party took this seat following the presidential election?  Was Creigh Deed unlucky in having been tossed a false golden nugget in the form of the McDonnell college writings — another metaphor — the silver bullet that wasn’t diverting him from necessary campaigning steps?  Actually, Deeds made the honest mistake of not wanting to rely on the Obama electoral coalition, viewing it as full of too many unreliable voters, and trying with no success to cobble together something different.  The Democrat in Virginia might be unwittingly setting a pattern for some vulnerable Democrats in 2010 — assuming the voting pool will be terminally altered away from the Obama victory they rode the coat-tails on, and then making that a self-fulfilling prophecy by alienating Obama’s marginal voters.

Can a one time promising Republican candidate in New Jersey finally finally finally win a state election?  It’ll happen eventually.  It just didn’t happen in 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, or 2007.  Actually the New Jersey Governor Corzine took the electoral strategy his Virginia brethern rejected: hide behind Obama, and call his opponent fat.  Well, that last one wouldn’t have worked for Virginia’s Deeds — the best Deeds had was to call his opponent a crazy fundamentalist.  That misfired.  It may be that Virginia is full of crazy fundamentalists in a way that New Jersey is not full of fat people, which is why calling his opponent fat worked out well.

And then there’s the one everyone’s watching, though the main fireworks have already gone off.  New York Special Election District 23.  It’s a good one.  The Republican — Dede Scozzafava — has jumped out in the fasce of Conservative Party (that’s the state party started about in the 50s or 60s by the Buckleys)’s embrace by the teaparty and Club for Growth and Sarah Palins and Dick Armeys and Glenn Becks and others.  If at first blush, the Democratic candidate’s chgance lay in riding to a division of the two Republicans, in its final weekend it becomes a contest to stake a claim to the “moderate” Republican voters — and really, both candidates kind of have an equal claim.  Proceed with caution, Democrats, for the possible new “Moderate” Democratic Congress-critter.  It is worth exploring the manner Democrats might end up painting themselves into a corner in bids of Respectability.  A longer campaign against Hoffman should exploit Conservative Party Hoffman’s very real weaknesses — what, Dick Armey is parading around with the carpet-bagging candidate proclaiming the local issues anc concerns “Parachoial” — but, unfortunately, things are so very truncated.

The post-moretems will be full of Republicans and conservatives puffing about the resurgence of the Republican Party and Conservative Movement, and liberals and Democrats calling this as a sign of party fracturing and moving out of victory-range for 2012.  Weirdly enough, I tend to think both and neither assessment look accurate.  I will suggest that the Democratic Party in Florida should proceed with the assumption that Marc Rubio will beat Charlie Crist in the Republican nomination fight.  This is interesting, in that Crist is unbeatable in a general election and Rubio — well, he might be unbeatable if we assume a somewhat peculiar midterm election voting pool skewed by Florida’s skewerence toward the aged, and might also not be.

There has to be other elections worth paying attention to.  Hill Valley, California has Goldie Wilson III up for an election to replace his father.  “Progress is His Middle Name.”

None of this adds up to a hill of beans.  Gay marriage will either edge forward slightly or edge forward slightly less slightly.  The House composition will be composed of either one more Democrat of a type you don’t necessarily like all that much or it will have one more Republican that’ll align with the right-wing fringe of the congressional coalition.  I’d call a rematch for a year from now.  Virginia will continue its truly counter-cyclical trending, and conveniently Republicans are claiming this as the one true national message election.  But this all leaves New Jersey as the one election that will determine a national message for the 2009 elections of one type or other.  A message to be taken with grains of salts.  The pressure’s on New Jersey to provide a verdict.  In fact, the verdict for the entire Obama Administration.  And, no I don’t beleive that last statement.

And then it’s off to this phony little election in Afghanistan.  Amusing to see Hillary Clinton claim “candidates drop out of elections in America all the time for all sorts of reasons.”