Democrats,

It seems we’re very close to the end of a long, trying fight that has lasted nearly the entire course of Barack Obama’s young presidency and cost him most of his political capital. The House tonight, in spite of unanimous Republican opposition, passed the most comprehensive and historic social legislation since Medicare and Medicaid. This is a momentous occasion, and the credit is largely owed to Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend’s controversial “Tea Party” convention, boycotted by some fiscal conservative stalwarts such as Michelle Bachmann, may have been hindersome to the GOP’s populist momentum. With a recession-friendly price-tag of over 800 dollars (to see all of the convention speakers and the keynote), Tea Partiers were treated to Sarah Palin’s down-home rhetorical flashes (read straight from the palm of her hand) and the superstar power and charisma of other familiar faces from the far-right, such as Tom Tancredo, who decried President Obama as a “committed socialist ideologue” elected by “people who could not even spell the word vote or say it in English.” Read the rest of this entry »

With Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts last week, our party’s fears of hemorrhaging House and Senate seats in the 2010 cycle were drastically exacerbated.

President Obama, who attempted to salvage Coakley’s flagging candidacy with an eleventh hour visit on the weekend proceeding Tuesday’s election, has moved to centralize control over his party’s strategy for November, recruiting former campaign manager David Plouffe to oversee all House, Governor and Senate races, apparently a slap on the wrist for DNC head Tim Kaine, who so far hasn’t enjoyed a successful tenure (as Democrats are continuously outraised by Republicans on a month-by-month basis). This is a high stakes move for a President who often prefers compromise (though largely by necessity) to rolling the dice on more controversial, left of center measures (as he proved by quickly abandoning the public option). Read the rest of this entry »

Dems: Don’t freak out.

If you have read my posts on this blog with any regularity, I probably have begun to ring hopelessly optimistic. I like to think of myself as an optimistic realist, but really, who cares?

Anyway, we’ve just a tough election cycle coming up that won’t get any easier, especially with the departure of Senators Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan. Bill Ritter’s exit in Colorado has Democrats afraid that Ken Salazar’s caretaker, Sen. Michael Bennett may be facing a politically toxic environment on the western front. Read the rest of this entry »

While the U.N. conference in Copenhagen fell flat in yielding substantive commitments in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the Democrat’s Cap and Trade bill is dwindling on the floor of the U.S. Congress, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, likely headed for a landslide defeat in Britain’s June elections, has unveiled a two-pronged approach to employ “smart” power throughout the country. By placing smart energy meters in every British home by 2020 that read consumption levels and calculate costs in real time, along with a smart grid system that connects the entire country and estimates energy demand and production, affording U.K. consumers the ability to be energy and cost efficient. British Gas estimates that the company will create 2,600 jobs by 2012 by converting to smart meters. Read the rest of this entry »

Christmas Eve, early in the morning. The United States Senate came together to pass a comprehensive health care reform act in a historic and dramatic session. After a century of inspiration, months of hard negotiations, and twenty-five straight days in session (almost a new record), the Senate came up with a compromise that passed the sunrise session with a vote of 60-39 (retiring Republican Jim Bunning of Kentucky decided not to show). Thus, as with all legislation, the package moves to conference committee with the House of Representatives before final votes in Congress on whether to send the agreed compromise to the President for his more-than-willing signature. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a bitter pill to swallow. For us ideological Democrats who envisioned pushing America into the ranks of the other major industrialized nations by creating affordable, universal health care, the Senate bill is a brutal disappointment. Our President appears to have compromised his promises away. Republicans have defied reason by bending to the will of corporate insurance giants. Joseph Lieberman has proven to be motivated by pure spite. But it’s time for us Democrats to grow up and look at what we do have. For the first time since FDR’s New Deal, we have a serious (albeit less than ideal) proposal to expand the reach of affordable health care coverage to millions of Americans. Unlike Quentin Tarantino’s blockbuster film, this would certainly not be a time to kill the bill. Read the rest of this entry »

So it’s been a little over a week since we Democrats suffered sobering defeats at the polls in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere. Ever since, conservative spinmasters from Pat Buchanan to Charles Krauthammer to Glenn Beck have been mercilessly proliferating the airwaves, forecasting, as usual, Democratic political doom in 2010 and the death of Barack Obama’s purportedly “socialist agenda.”

Not so fast.

The reality is, we lost a news cycle. Get over it. Isolated state races are hardly a referendum on national policymaking. Corzine was a poor chief executive who failed to contain rampant corruption in the Garden State. No amount of Wall Street money is going to change that (though it did significantly narrow Christie’s lead in the polls). Corzine was essentially brought into Trenton in 2005 as a technocrat: politically saavy, fiscally competent, and able to manage a state that falls out of control. He failed miserably.

No party wins an election without good, inspiring candidates. In these governor’s races, we failed miserably. Creigh Deeds’ inability to solidify the party base and bring minority voters in Virginia into the democratic fold, the key factors in Barack Obama’s seven-point victory over John McCain in the state nearly a year ago, were telling notions underlying our party’s defeat here.

Political gravity, as most party politicians find out, is a very difficult force to resist. Weariness with Democratic rule, in these isolated incidences, clearly played a role. Both offices had been occupied by Democrats for more than a term. If anything, the congressional races in New York’s 23^rd District and California’s 10^th District were referendums on Democratic rule, and our party once again passed with flying colors.

I am not arguing that resisting this force will not be a challenge in 2010 and beyond. It will be. But still, Democrats, I think we can look towards our political futures with some optimism. As the economy continues to recover, and job losses creep out of the red, Republicans will be forced to provide answers for what they’ve done to advance our collective fortunes, as a nation, since 2008. I wish them good luck. Certainly on the issues of Health Care Reform and Stimulus funds they were an entirely uncooperative bunch, and demonstrated a tendency to place short-term party political goals over long-term economic security for the American people.

It seems to me as if the Republicans have done little so far, in this congress, to reverse the shift in political gravity. The Bush legacy is evaporating, leaving party “leaders” such as Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Charlie Crist, and Sarah Palin to re-evaluate the schizophrenic chrysalis of the party in town hall meetings across the country.

At the end of the day, Americans vote on results. It seems as if Healthcare is bound to pass this year, and cap and trade may soon follow. What have the Republicans been up to, anyway?

Hello, everybody,

I’m Chris Z., a GW freshman. Starting tonight, I’ll be toiling in order to make at least one blog posting per week–my posts may all-in-all be multifarious in nature, with no specific interconnection amongst them.

So, tonight is of course election night. In just twenty-one minutes, the polls will be closing across the Potomac in the Commonwealth of Virginia, where voters all day have been casting their ballots in one of this year’s most influential and foreshadowing political races.

Let’s make some quick analyses based upon data and the factors that may serve as indications of tonight’s results:

Despite:

1. Explosive population growth in Northern Virginia that–with such an educated, affluent, and politically liberal to moderate populace–has favored Democratic candidates, particularly in Arlington, Alexandria, and Fairfax County’s inner suburbs;

2. President Obama’s public support of Deed’s gubernatorial candidacy in Virginia;

3. President Obama’s recent visits to Virginia’s Virginia Beach/Hampton Roads area, Virginia’s swing area in last year’s election;

4. Bob McDonnell’s contentious graduate school thesis paper that highlighted the incompatibility of working women and a productive world, which marginalized suburban Washingtonian women from his campaign,

and

5. Virginia’s trending towards the Democrats in all recent statewide elections, particularly because of the explosive growth of NOVA,

McDonnell has consistently (in fact, has always, in terms of the trendline) polled ahead of Deeds according to Pollster’s posted statistics.

According to Nate Silver at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/, McDonnell has a 98% chance of winning.

With only 21 1 (less than!) minute until Virginia’s poll stations close, I’m predicting that Deeds will lose and McDonnell will emerge as the race’s victor.