Becoming Easier To See How 1930s Germany Happened

In the general comfort zone of my upbringing, I've always had a hard time comprehending how the public was naive enough at points in world history to allow their nations to be taken over by tyrants and maniacs, with Hitler's Third Reich as a prime example. Even in the darkest days of public adulation over Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, it wasn't the same as the kinds of extremists that history has produced. And while it still isn't, the likely ascendancy of today's Tea Party candidates into elected office is the closest I've come to being able to understand the sets of circumstances in which lunatics rise to power.

In the state of Alaska, a reasonable center-right Republican incumbent appears likely to lose her seat after what looks to be a narrow primary defeat to some wingnut Tea Party novice who questions the constitutionality of unemployment benefits at a time of 10% unemployment.

In Connecticut, a respected war hero and blue-district former Republican Congressman lost his primary to the wife of wrestling guru Vince McMahon.

In Colorado, the state's GOP gubernatorial candidate has publicly stated that the development of bike paths in Denver is part of a United Nations conspiracy for one-world government.

In Kentucky, a libertarian Republican Senate candidate questions the validity of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and more recently, even in the wake of the worst U.S. mining tragedy in generations, is calling for wholesale unraveling of all government regulation of Kentucky coal mining.

And of course, there's Nevada, where the Republican Senate candidate waxes poetic about the need for "Second Amendment remedies" to deal with her challenger, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

And that's just the most extreme stuff coming out of America's more-irresponsible-by-the-day opposition party. The fact that they're calling for Social Security and Medicare to be handed over to Goldman Sachs and AIG to set up private accounts/vouchers manages to sound less than insane only because in the previous statement they were calling for gunning down the Senate Majority Leader.

There are few things more dangerous in life than misguided anger, and the American public's apparent willingness to hand over the keys to the castle to these monsters in another couple of months is some of the most obvious proof of that that we've seen in years. For all the whining that Congressional Democrats may do about being saddled with President Obama's unpopularity, if they can't make the sale that their efforts to fix what's wrong with the country are better than the people who wanted to let all U.S. auto manufacturing die, substitute a "too expensive" $800 billion economic stimulus package with a "more affordable" $3 trillion tax cut for the rich, AND believe that bike paths are a U.N. conspiracy, then there was never a chance they had the political skills to persevere beyond the 2010 election no matter how good or bad the hand of cards they were dealt.

Democrats, you are running against an unreasonable and irrational cohort of some of the biggest lunatics American politics has ever produced. If you are incapable of beating these freaks, you have nobody to blame but yourselves and will have the blood on your hands for ushering in as close to a modern-day equivalent of 1930s Germany as this nation has seen.

Minnesota's Sad Sack Gubernatorial Race

Minnesota's state of financial affairs heading into 2011 make it a miniature California. The combination of the economic collapse, years of partisan gridlock between the Governor and the Legislature, and years of gimmicky deferrals of costs have left Minnesota with at least a $7 billion budget deficit going into 2011. Ironically, the man who left us this hole to dig out of, Governor Tim Pawlenty, now sees himself fit to be President of the United States.

The real tragedy is that there is no white knight on the horizon who seems capable of repairing the Minnesota's state of financial ruin in a credible way as both major party candidates are incredibly flawed. The Republican, Tom Emmer, is as extreme of a right-wing ideologue as you will ever find....basically Michele Bachmann with an Adam's apple. He's a loudmouth blowhard prone to idiotic statements who vows to stay Pawlenty's course of no tax hikes, pledging to fix the state's budget crisis with an across-the-board 30% spending cut, even after everything under the sun has already been cut to bone after eight years of Pawlenty.

On the Democratic side, a hotly contested primary among three flawed but well-meaning candidates left the party with former Senator Mark Dayton as the nominee. This is the same Mark Dayton rated the worst Senator in the country by Time magazine in 2006, who gave himself an "F" grade for his tenure in the Senate, and who has a history of clinical depression and alcoholism. Dayton is a good guy, but is not a natural politician. Furthermore, his policy platform of balancing the budget exclusively with huge tax increases on the rich is gonna be a cinch for the opposition to demagogue, particularly when they point out his proposal will make Minnesota the highest-taxed state in the nation. But to be fair, he does appear to be the only candidate making a serious proposal to solve the state's incredible financial mess, but it's one that will not go over well when the public dissects it.

On to Minnesota's gadfly Independence Party. Much as instinctively detest the party for helping so many Republicans win over the years, they have nominated some solid candidates in the past, and if ever there was a year I would consider them with the opposition being "dumb and dumber", this would be the year. Unfortunately, the IP's nominee this year is center-right Tom Horner, who pledges a "more balanced approach" to the budget with a mix of tax increases and budget cuts. Sounds sensible for the most part, until you read the crux of his budget fix involves the single most disqualifying position a politician can take for me.....yet another cigarette tax. A cigarette tax is gimmicky, predatory, cynical, cowardly, regressive, hypocritical, dishonest, and perhaps worst of all, budgetary malpractice of the highest order. Any politician calling for a cigarette tax will not get my vote from here on out because it proves they're a snake oil peddler and a coward. Horner is among them.

So now what? Actually, given how awful the major parties are, if Horner can present himself the least bit articulately in televised debates, he could easily win this thing Jesse Ventura style. I'm leaning towards a victory by him currently. The current conventional wisdom is that Emmer has made such an ass of himself that he can't win, but I actually feel that's more true of Dayton. In a year such as this, running on a policy platform such as Dayton is, his current poll lead will melt faster than ice cream in a microwave. Emmer, on the other hand, merely needs to slink along for a mistake-free three months and he has a very good chance of taking advantage of the pseudo-conservative flavor of the month among the electorate. His inability to avoid gaffes thus far makes that objective seem like a stretch, but Bachmann largely pulled it off in the much less Republican year of 2006, and was rewarded with an eight-point victory against a well-funded challenger.

So I guess my prediction is that if the current Tom Emmer sticks around for the next three months, Tom Horner will be Governor. But if a more disciplined Tom Emmer shows up in the weeks ahead, he wins. Either way, God have mercy on Minnesotans' souls heading into 2011.

Could Harry Reid Be The 2010 Version of Chuck Robb?

It's been said that Harry Reid has more lives than a cat in Nevada, but pretty much everybody thought his lives had run out six months ago when he was behind no-name challengers by double-digits in nearly every poll. Then a funny thing happened. All of his opponents began to implode, and by the time Republican voters had a chance to consolidate around a challenger, they chose the wingnuttiest of them all, a fruitcake named Sharron Angle promoting "second amendment remedies" to the incumbent and who has already managed to make Reid look good by comparison to Nevada voters. Reid holds small leads in every poll taken in the last couple of weeks.

But before breaking out the champagne, Reid is still well under 50% and if the election were held today in a one-on-one race, Reid would still almost assuredly lose to Angle given his ceiling of support is about 44-45%. However, in one more fluke of luck, Reid won't have to deal with a one-on-one race with Angle. A Tea Party candidate named John Ashjian is running in the race and cuts into Angle's base. Between that and Nevada's unique "none of the above" option on its ballot and it becomes possible to envision a scenario where a divided opposition allows Harry Reid to win another term in the Senate.

And there's precedent for such a scenario, going back to the last Democratic slaughter in 1994. Perhaps the weakest Senate incumbent going into 1994 was one-term Virginia Democrat Chuck Robb, plagued by a sex scandal and low approval ratings in the red state which he represented. Few would have imagined in the spring of 1994 that the Democrats could lose nine seats that November but Chuck Robb would be one of the survivors, but that's exactly what happened. The key to Robb's success: controversial opposition. Right wing felon Oliver North, the face of the Iran Contra scandal, was the Republican candidate and scared away independents in droves. Meanwhile, independent candidate Marshall Coleman got more than 11% of the vote. The result was that Chuck Robb eked out a two-point victory over Oliver North and got a second term for himself.

Robb took advantage of a perfect political storm, and there's a very good chance Harry Reid could as well, but it's too early to say with any level of certainty that Reid's troubles are behind him. If Angle is able to soften her edges and score some good points in TV ads and in televised debates, she could recapture some of those independents. And it won't take much given Reid's absolute ceiling of 45% support.

I continue to believe Democrats will lose more than 80 House seats in three short months and will come within one seat of losing the Senate, but the possible survival of left-for-dead Harry Reid is nonetheless a development worth mentioning. I'd still give his odds as 40% at best, but that's about 35% higher than I'd have given his odds in May.