The U.S. Congress: Now under supervision by grown-ups

November 11, 2006

Guest Post by Morbo

I still remember feeling sick the day after the 1994 elections. I picked up my paper, and there was Newt Gingrich grinning at me, giving a thumbs-up and looking for all the world like a Chucky doll.

Thank god our national nightmare — or at least part of it — is over.

The Carpetbagger has done a thorough job commenting on the results. On Tuesday night, I was up until 12:30 monitoring the site with some of you. Then I got up at 3:30 just to check again and make sure Bush hadn’t declared martial law.

I don’t have a lot to add but did want to comment on a few specific races:

Pennsylvania: I am a native of western Pennsylvania. It can be a weird state. The population centers, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia (and to some extent Erie and the Lehigh Valley) run Democratic. In between is some of the most right-wing territory this side of Mississippi. But that’s no excuse for Rick Santorum.

I realize some people are not happy that Robert Casey is anti-choice. I disagree with Casey on choice, but he’s an important thing going for him: He’s not Rick Santorum. So I’m happy. Want to read a really good column about why Santorum lost? Try this one. I agree completely and can only hope that Santorum’s defeat means that people are finally getting tired of arrogant, my-way-or-the-highway politicians.

Maryland: Republicans in Maryland, my adopted home, chose Lt. Gov. Michael Steele to run for an open U.S. Senate seat. Steele and GOP cronies ran one of the nastiest, dirty tricks-laden campaigns in the nation — all while he posed as a nice, non-threatening guy. A right-wing African-American, Steele pulled out all of the stops: push polls, literature that implied he was a Democrat, endorsements from homophobic black ministers and endorsements from a few clueless black Democrats convinced that the party takes them for granted.

The day before the election, Steele and his partner in crime, Gov. Robert Ehrlich, brought in busloads of homeless people from Philadelphia to pass out fliers stating that local African-American politicians had endorsed Steele and Ehrlich when in fact most had not. Ehrlich later insisted he had nothing to do with effort — so why was his wife on hand to meet the buses?

The scheme failed utterly. Blacks went heavily for Democrat Ben Cardin. As an added bonus, Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley defeated Ehrlich. (Keep your eye on O’Malley. He’s young, telegenic and has a bright future.) I had been willing to cut Ehrlich some slack because he’s fairly moderate as Republicans go these days — but not after this cheap stunt. Good riddance to them both.

Florida: I’ve never believed that Katherine Harris engineered the GOP’s theft of the 2000 election. She’s too stupid for that. She was just a loyal soldier who did as she was told and was rewarded with a seat in the House of Representatives. She could have kept it for a long time. But she got greedy. She wanted to be a senator and then president.

Ah, hubris! Harris is like a Shakespearian figure — well, not really. Shakespearian figures are interesting because of their tragic flaws, while Harris is merely tiresome. She spent the last three months of the campaign shilling for votes from fundamentalist Christians, belittling the separation of church and state and then telling Jewish audiences she might like to join up with them. Everyone was confused. Even Harris’ best friend, God, declined to help her this time.

Ohio: The Religious Right formed a new organization, the Ohio Restoration Project, to elect religious fanatic Kenneth Blackwell to the governor’s office. For more than a year, Blackwell was dragged around to fundamentalist churches all over the state and stuck in pulpits, in clear violation of tax law. (And this guy was Ohio’s secretary of state.) He had his butt kicked by Rep. Ted Strickland (D), who knows a few things about faith himself. He’s an ordained Methodist minister.

Oklahoma: Rep. Ernest “Jim” Istook, best known for repeatedly introducing a constitutional amendment to eviscerate the separation of church and state — of course he called it a “religious freedom amendment” — gave up his seat to challenge Democratic incumbent Brad Henry for governor. Istook lost nearly 2-1. Istook has a degree in journalism and worked for a while in broadcasting. Can a Sunday afternoon show on the Fox News Channel be far off?

Indiana: I’ve had the misfortune to hear U.S. Rep. John Hostettler speak more than once to kook right groups. Pistol-packing Johnny reminds me of a more corpulent, grown-up Eddie Munster with a pompadour. He spent much of this year trying to take away the right of individuals to bring protect their religious freedom rights in federal courts. Now he is out of a job.

Missouri: The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a kind of less portly, less intelligent Jerry Falwell, departed Texas and traveled north to help James Talent keep his Senate seat and stop stem-cell research. He failed on both counts.

There is one other loser I would like to single out: the Mainstream Media. Good old MSM was so eager to help the GOP that it spent three whole days blowing an aberrant poll all out of proportion to make it appear that the Republicans were closing the gap. Thankfully the voters had other ideas.

Yeah, it sure was a fun night. But guess what, the Republicans are already at work thinking up new dirty tricks for 2008. Savor the win — but then it’s back to work.

“Savor the win — but then it’s back to work.” And spit in the face of anyone who so much as hints at the remote possibility of suggesting that we dump Howard Dean. God, Carville’s an ass, one whose day is done at last, I sincerely hope.

  • On Pennsylvania – Santorm’s loss should be the message that Republicans should really take to heart. Santorm may have had that all/nothing attitude in excess, but the GOP as a whole suffer from that affliction. Sure some (only some) of this election was less that Democrats won but that Republicans lost. However, why Republicans lost is something that Republicans need to pay heed to – but they won’t. And the writer was right, no matter the party, politicians that can work with the opposition enstead of vilifying them, do appeal to voters.

    As for Ohio, glad to see that they didn’t elect Blackwell. Someone who screws up the electoral process in the state, doesn’t deserve to be reward for that huge clustef**k. Of course Jean Schmidt got re-elected (though not by much).

  • Dirty tricks have been part of the electoral process since just about forever, yet they undermine the most basic concept behind representative democracy. How is it that we have not, in all these years, found a legal way to make abuses a rarity rather than commonplace occurrences?

  • I agree completely and can only hope that Santorum’s defeat means that people are finally getting tired of arrogant, my-way-or-the-highway politicians.

    I would like to think this is true, but I’m not very optimistic that it will hold. Wingnuts like Santorum have been demonizing the left for years – with great success and an equal amount of glee. That it backfired this year is an unintended consequence of Bush’s Iraq adventure. They successfully tarred us as anti-security, anti-American, and Lord knows what anti-else, a mere 2 years ago over Iraq. The difference this year is that it had became all too obvious to most people that we had been right all along. The hysterical smears couldn’t stick and revealed the ugly truth about those used them. Will this perspective hold in the future on other issues?

    Here in the western end of the state, Santorum’s school tax problem was a local issue that hurt him badly. His success was always based in part on his local connections in SW PA offsetting his politics, which are not a traditional fit with this region. Once it was clear he was no longer from this area, he lost his claim to it. That alone put his reelection at risk. Add in the Shiavo disgrace and he was toast. Flying off in a Wal*Mart jet, to use some poor soul’s deathbed as a fundraising event is universally revolting. I suspect that stunt is what cost him in the T.

    Time will tell whether the voters are tired of flame thrower rhetoric, or that it simply doesn’t work when the flame thrower has proven himself to be a world class asshole. I wish it was the former, but I suspect the latter.

  • ***Robert Casey is anti-choice***

    All in all, CB, this might not be such a bad thing. Santorum and his fellow Reichsters were all in favor of shutting down abortion—but they could offer no clear alternative to pregnancy other than the dualistic coersions of abstinence and patriarch-centric marriage. Bob Casey, on the other hand, seems the type of guy to say, “Wait a minute. Abstinence is not an option for a woman who’s already pregnant—and marriage doesn’t guarantee a safe, nurturing environment for a child.” So—maybe Bob’ll start talking about a “Plan C”—providing the right kind of social support system. Single payer healthcare across-the-board; beefed up to include safe childcare so “Mom” can work if she has to; opportunities for post-secondary educational advancement; better living conditions, and whatever else might be out there, waiting to get done.

    America certainly couldn’t depend on the Sanitorium Squad to get those things done….

  • Looks like the NY Times has woken up to the dichotomy in the new Democratic class, and that it’s not just “conservative Dems.”

    Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who recruited many of these candidates as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, described the group as “moderate in temperament and reformers in spirit.” Conservatives tend to highlight the conservatism in the new class as a sign that Democrats are essentially ceding ground to the right on issues like gun control and abortion.

    But many of these freshmen Democrats are hard to pigeonhole ideologically. Even among the most socially conservative, there is a strong streak of economic populism that is a unifying force.

    Heath Shuler, for example, the former professional football player and newly elected Democrat from North Carolina, is anti-abortion and pro-gun, but sounds like an old-style Democrat on economic issues.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/us/politics/12class.html?hp&ex=1163307600&en=c28b82096a3935d5&ei=5094&partner=homepage

  • “There is one other loser I would like to single out: the Mainstream Media” – Morbo

    While the MSM were shown to be on the wrong side of history, they should take the repudiation of this group of Repubs to be a repudiation of their right-slanted reporting as well. Just as Santorum, Steele, Blackwell and the other losers were shown the door because the public was sick of their antics and attitudes, so is the public sick of MSM right-wing hack reporting. The MSM needs to do some house cleaning after this election. Do we really need to be bothered by the Adam Nagourneys, David Broders, David Brooks’, Britt Humes and other knuckleheads who consider to insist how right they are after the American public proved that they are not?

  • so is the public sick of MSM right-wing hack reporting. The MSM needs to do some house cleaning after this election — petorado, @ 8

    Yeah, but I don’t see them self-correcting any more than the Big Oil is likely to self-inflict environmental protection measures. As for the public being sick of them… I think you read blogs too much… DH — an intelligent Dem — watches the news on TV and reads papers and he’s *totally unaware* of their skew. To be perfectly honest, so was I, until my son sicked me onto CB (and I discovered some other places by myself). People of my (or his; there’s a significant age difference between us) generation “bought into” the idea that the best press is non-partisan and we never noticed the slow change. I had it pointed out to me; he hasn’t. And he’s more like the general public than I am.

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