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.

For moderate conservatives, the Special Election in New York’s 23rd district has certainly been a harrowing experience. Dede Scozzafava, the decidedly moderate Republican candidate in the district, was pushed out of the race by the dominant arch-conservative wing of the party, led in this instance by the ex-Alaska Governor and politically “rogue” hockey mom who poisoned the 2008 Republican ticket, also known as Sarah Palin. They instead favored the “Conservative Party” candidate Doug Hoffman, who serves the more popular hard-line brand that has characterized the Republican Party, in which moderacy is no longer tolerated. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, we’ve seen what the right has wrought on what seems to be the Frankenstein health care bill coming out of the Senate. Its a concoction made from the blood sweat and tears of Finance Chairman Max Baucus with heavy influence of right wing states rights concerns. It seems the Republican party will go however far it takes to defend these things, even when it is clearly an issue that the Federal government can tackle successfully without trampling on the rights of states. Read the rest of this entry »

Down to its final days, the race for New Jersey Governor has become far more dynamic than almost anyone expected. With unpopular Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine facing off against Chris Christie, a law-and-order Republican claiming to have the guts to shake things up in Trenton, the outcome seemed a foregone conclusion as recently as August. After over a decade of marginalization, it seemed that this would finally be the year Republicans would take back the Governor’s mansion.

Many observers, myself included, warned our conservative brethren of overconfidence, reminding them that Republicans typically look competitive in summer polling only to suddenly lose their luster with New Jersey’s voters around Labor Day. Indeed, it seems that this prediction has yet again come to pass.

Christie’s collapse, though particularly breathtaking this year, is nothing new. Neither is Corzine’s stagnant support, a reflection of his profound unpopularity. What is new, especially by Garden State standards, is that yellow regression line traversing the low double digits. That, my friends, is Chris Daggett. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Steele recently said during a Univision interview that: “I don’t think we need a comprehensive overhaul of our healthcare system.”

When Bill Caudle lost his job at a plastics company this year, he also lost his health coverage. That means that he lost the ability to pay for his wife’s healthcare, as she has ovarian cancer. He was so committed to making sure his wife can get the treatment that she needs, so committed that she not become one of the 45,000 Americans who die from inadequate health coverage every year…that he joined the Army.

Thomas Jefferson noted that a volunteer-based large standing army required a permanent class of paupers. At the end of his presidency he bragged about largely eliminating America’s standing army, saying that: “Our men are so happy at home that they will not hire themselves to be shot at for a shilling a day. Hence we can have no standing armies for defence, because we have no paupers to furnish the materials.”

Bill Caudle’s story is emotionally moving but is also very important. It’s stories like these that should make us all take a step back from the politics and statistics and look at the human element of all of this. It is morally inexcusable that in the richest country in the world someone would have to join the Army to get healthcare for his wife. That’s what the national healthcare debate should be about.

The Dow has recently hit above 10,000 points, and 79 metropolitan areas in the US are officially out of recession. However the unemployment rate is still officially 9.8%, and is realistically more like 16% if you include those who have given up looking for work, or are “underemployed” (working a part time job that does not sustain their family). It seems that though the bailout was capable of re-inflating Wall Street and Goldman-Sachs, everyone in Washington seems to be scratching their heads on how we can lower the unemployment rate. I’d like to submit my own suggestion for putting Americans to work, lets bring back the WPA and the CCC.

Despite what you might hear from Michael Steele, government has a very good record of creating public works jobs. Not only can public works projects give unemployed Americans temporary work, it can create new investments for America that hold real value. Not Wall Street making money with money value, or McDonalds “would you like fries with that” value, I mean real economic value. To paraphrase Adam Smith: when a stick is on the ground it has no value, but when you carve it into an axe handle your labour has given it value. New bridges, better roads, power lines, and high-speed rail…these are the sorts of projects that give jobs to Americans and invest in the public commons. It seems that when government gives truckloads of money to banks, the executives who sold all of us out get the dividends. But when government invests in the commons, everyone receives the dividends.

So if we want to see a real recovery for Americans, not a jobless one, we need let our unemployed citizens get back to work. This is a way to make them breadwinners again while also investing in the future of our country.

I just got back from a talk by Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein sponsored by the GW Jewish Progressive Political Association. Klein’s main forte of late has been the health care debate, and he spoke both on that issue and its corollary — how cumbersome the U.S. Senate is.

I found Klein’s thoughts very insightful, especially as they related to what the final health bill will be sold as. There is a tremendous sense of frustration among liberal Democrats at the difficulty in putting through a bill to their liking, even with 60 Senate seats. What he warned against, though, was the urge among Democrats to demand a total victory the way Republicans seek the bill’s total defeat. This is Obama’s first major policy initiative, and if it was to fail it would be disastrous for him.

But failure isn’t certain. With Olympia Snowe’s backing, Democrats will probably be able to pass a deficit-neutral bill with Chuck Schumer’s creative “opt-out” compromise on the public option. And even though the new law wouldn’t guarantee insurance to everyone, it would probably hit in the range of 94%, according to recent estimates. Klein also pointed out that social welfare programs tend to grow overtime, not shrink; what might be an incomplete bill could be mended later.

Given the ridiculous number of structural obstacles to meaningful health care reform — “death panels,” town hall mobs, insurance industry lobbying, Republican filibuster threats, unions angry over excise taxes, liberal and conservative wings of the party fighting, five standing committees and two negotiating committees to get the bill through — we ought not to feel too badly about this fight.

Joe Biden has taken a stance on Afghanistan that directly opposes General McChrystal’s call for 40,000 more troops being sent to the country.  This position also pits him against our president, who supports General McChrystal’s endeavors in Afghanistan.  The VP has exerted so much effort toward defending his own theory that we should be redirecting our focus toward extricating the Al Quaeda base in Pakistan that he even authored a piece last spring called “Counterterrorism Plus.” Biden, in his firm stance and independent voice, may be revolutionizing the role of Vice President.  How is the country reacting to Biden’s detoxification of the idea that VP just stands and waves in support of the President?  Newsweek put him on the front cover of last week’s issue and commended his “ability to stir things up.”  Arianna Huffington, Editor-in-Chief of the controversial Huffington Post suggests that he “resign.”  Fred Kaplan, war expert and contributor to Slate Magazine predicted last May that the military would follow the advice of Biden as outlined in “CT-Plus.”  Biden, whose policy on Afghanistan was largely influenced by our involvement in Iraq, “sounded deeply pessimistic… but is no longer a lone voice,” according to The New York Times. What do you think about Vice President Biden’s policy on Afghanistan?

Canada’s very successful healthcare system was not started on the national level, but began in the great Province of Saskatchewan. There was no painful gridlock, no death panels, not even one teabagger. Instead, the successes of Saskatchewan were simply emulated by every other province until every Canadian citizen was covered. If your idea is good enough, someone will steal it. Canada seems to understand a cornerstone of American political tradition better than we do: states’ rights. Of course I’m not talking about the poll tax and Jim Crowe kind of “states’ rights,” what I mean is the idea of using our states as political “laboratories.” This is a long cherished American political tradition, allowing the states to try out new policies for themselves instead of on the national level, allowing the rest of the country to observe how successful a new policy could be. If this were done effectively, our Congress wouldn’t have to debate the hypothetical impacts of some new policy, but instead could say: “It worked for California, it could work for America.” Now of course just because something works in one state doesn’t mean it would necessarily work for all of the states, but why not allow those states to run more of their own policy if it works for them? Why not allow Californians to legalize marijuana if they want to, does someone from Tennessee really care? Read the rest of this entry »