Republicans seem to be taking victory laps concerning a perceived landslide election victory in November, anticipating their not only gaining a majority in the House of Representatives, but also taking over the U. S. Senate.
Just one thing they seem oblivious about: Polling over the past week show the Democrats catching up and the race currently in a virtual dead heat.
Meanwhile the local Democrats seem to be spending their time licking their anticipated wounds rather than rallying support at such obvious locations as the Central Market on weekends. If you want a sign for your front lawn, you have to visit a basement on Duke Street during office hours.
From this guy’s lips to God’s ear, but I can say anecdotally that as I call around the country, I am finding in the past week that Democrats seem a lot more energized on the issues, and – unprompted – a lot more willing to realize we have to save what we have if there’s going to be a future of progressive change, than they were a month ago. I am having a lot of donors to other causes tell me they cannot do that now because they are giving everything to the election. Is it enough? We’ll know at midnight on November 2nd.
What I am seeing is pretty close to reading tea leaves, and damn close to whistling past the graveyard, but I well remember my great-grand-uncle, Jim McKelvey, who was a political staffer for Harry Truman, telling me back in the 1960s how the 1948 election began to turn around in late September, and how the Republicans didn’t notice it, and the more celebratory of victory they became, the faster the turnaround happened. They may have peaked too early, as they did back then.
And if they lose, and don’t take the House, the far right base is going to explode. A lot of those people will become so frustrated at the loss that they may turn off completely – or at least enough that the true crazies stay involved and they nominate a serious whackjob in 2012, which finishes them. We might even see some of these idiots turn to their “Second Amendment remedies,” and then when they do, they will turn the country against them. A few trials of radical whackjobs in the next two years would go a long way to discrediting them.