Mark My Words!

The Real Kingmakers of Election 2012

2012-01-22T19:14:00.000-08:00

In the next 10 months we'll be hearing about all kinds of groups and individuals who will be credited for determining which team wins or loses November's election. And there will be some plausible suspects thrown out there about who the real heavy is. Among them will be Angela Merkel and the European Union, Wall Street crony capitalists, Middle Eastern saber rattlers, and SuperPACs bankrolling individual candidates' campaigns with eight-figure cash infusions to render the opposition paralyzed. Any one of these could prove to be the puppetmaster responsible for determining who controls the White House and the Congress in 2013. But my money is on a different player altogether, a group that has been responsible for nearly a decade's worth of misery for Joe Sixpack already and is only getting started.....and that group is oil speculators.

For all the talk of how the economy is gonna determine the election, that's only half true. No matter what's going on with the economy, if Americans are paying an average price of $5 for a gallon of gas, or anywhere over $4.50 for that matter, the incumbent party will take it in the shorts this November because there is no more tangible metric of misery index for the average voter than spending another $40 a week on gas. And now that Obama has passed on the Keystone XL pipeline, he has given Republicans a perfect excuse to blame him for even a penny's worth of gas price increase between now and November, no matter how demagogic that connect-the-dots may be in the real world.

Making matters worse, oil prices have never been this high in January before, meaning that if one domino falls to drive down oil supply (or lead speculators to believe oil supply could hypothetically decline), the typical annual increase in oil prices as summer driving season approaches will be all the more painful. The deeply unsettled situation in the Middle East, including but not limited to Iran, makes it unlikely we'll be able to keep a lid on oil market uncertainty. It's possible the oil markets can be contained to a politically manageable level for Obama, but my money is on gas prices soaring above $4.50 nationally by summer.

About the only thing that could save surging oil prices is another bad scenario....a collapse of Europe's economy and a recession in China driving down demand. The double-edged sword of that is obviously a new set of serious problems emerge for America if the global economy loses its footing.

As cartoonishly bad at politics as both leading contenders for the Republican nomination may be, there are still plenty of icebergs for Obama's reelection campaign to steer around, and few things could hamstring his efforts for a second term more than $5 a gallon gas.

Which One of These Asshats is Gonna Be the Nominee?

2012-01-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

Every four years, we hear moans and groans from the media and disengaged voters how terrible the lineup of candidates running for President are. This year it's really true. The eight top candidates from the beginning of last month have declined to seven now that the CEO of a second-rate regional pizza chain had to bow out of the race early after multiple charges of sexual harassment that were starting to appear as though they had merit torpedoed his frontrunner status. Seriously! Graveyards full of founding fathers are spinning like tops in their graves.

Meanwhile, the two most interesting and well-credentialed candidates have been almost completely shut out of the debates and get zero press coverage. Former New Mexico Governor and mainstream libertarian Gary Johnson has just dropped out of the race and may run on the Libertarian ticket. Even more impressive is former Louisiana Governor, Congressman, and small-time banker Buddy Roemer who has brought more to the table in terms of policy points in a few interviews on MSNBC than the other seven lightweights have in more than a dozen televised debates pandering to the basest right-wing urges of Republican primary and caucus voters. The average IQ on the GOP stage would triple if either Johnson or Roemer were allowed to debate.

Instead, we're stuck with seven candidates who are deeply flawed superficially and an even bigger disaster substantively. This country deserves a reasonable choice between two mature emissaries of a responsible political persuasion. None of the major candidates of the more-radicalized-by-the-day Republican Party qualify. Jon Huntsman only seems reasonable within the context of a slate of candidates that openly question science. His tax policy and economic platform is further to the right than any mainstream Presidential candidate in three-quarters of a century up until 2012, but still passes for the genial moderate in this crowd peddling a policy agenda that would have made the John Birch Society blush five decades ago.

Mitt Romney, considered the most cartoonishly right-wing major candidate in 2008 is running to the right of where he ran four years ago, but even positioning himself as a man who wants to "let the housing bubble bottom out" and "let Detroit go bankrupt", taking the American economy out as collateral damage and its devastated people as cannon fodder, still gets to be the guy deemed too "centrist" to be accepted by the tip of the right-wing that has hijacked America's opposition party.

Ron Paul has all kinds of nutty ideas, but it's not his nutty ideas that are keeping enough Republican voters from embracing him to win the nomination. It's the fact that he doesn't want to start even more wars in the Middle East and has called for taking American troops out of South Korea and Germany.

The rest of the malcontents running are not even worthy of mention based on the seriousness of their candidacies, but that doesn't mean they don't still have at least a modest chance of getting the nomination. Rick Santorum may well win the Iowa caucus on Tuesday with his last-minute surge, despite the centerpiece of his campaign being an issue as unserious as "protecting the sanctity of marriage" from those rascally gays. But his campaign makes 2008 Iowa caucus winner Mike Huckabee seem well organized by comparison. Hard to see how he doesn't wither away after Iowa, win or lose.

And while Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have been stumbling in the polls, both have the financial resources to press on even after defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire, and given that 75% of Republican voters refuse to accept Mitt Romney, it's too early to count them out. The field will eventually shrink and a prime Romney rival will arise, and whoever that is will have a giant glob of votes available to them simply for being the not-Willard.

Things are playing out now similarly to 2008, however, when John McCain prevailed in a perfect storm of opposition incompetence to overcome the fact that most of his party's base hated him and won the nomination. If Romney wins or comes in a strong second on Tuesday, he's gonna be tough to beat for the same reason McCain was tough to beat after New Hampshire in 2008. Then again, amongst an Republican
electorate that threw away winning Senate candidates in favor of Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, Linda McMahon, and Ken Buck, I'm not sure there's any point in the primary cycle where Romney could rest easy until he has passed the necessary delegate count to secure the nomination.

So it's gonna be Romney...unless it isn't...pretty much exactly where this race has been throughout 2011 except for those few weeks where Gingrich and Perry had their respective surges that were briefly taken seriously. The good news for Obama is that Romney is a terrible politician and under any traditional scenario would lose decisively. The bad news for Obama is that there's at least a 50-50 situation that 11 months from now will be anything but a "traditional scenario", and there's almost no chance of Obama facing an ideal political situation.

Even though I still think Obama is more likely than not to be re-elected, primarily because of his good fortune to run against politically tone-deaf idiots who respond to the sorrowful cries of the disappearing middle-class by proudly vowing to take a lead pipe to their knees, 2012 is an incredibly scary year to go into with the possibility existing of having nothing but human wrecking balls unleashed onto our country unbridled next November, destroying everything in sight and puffing their chests out with pride while doing so.

The War in Iraq Finally Ends

2011-12-16T22:17:00.000-08:00

I wasn't alive yet in 1975 when the last American helicopters left Vietnam, but I've always been under the impression it was a fairly anticlimactic final moment to a war that killed 56,000 American soldiers. Nonetheless, hard to imagine it was as anticlimactic as the closing chapter of our misguided nine-year $4 trillion quagmire in Iraq is shaping up to be. On Thursday, President Obama spoke to the troops on the eve of our withdrawal...and it was the third story on the evening news....following a head story about some student who died in a hazing ritual at Michigan State University, or something along those comparatively inconsequential lines.

As for the second story deemed more important than the President's speech to troops about their withdrawal from a war in which approximately 4,500 American soldiers died in the name of finding phantom weapons of mass destruction, it was the horse race among Republican candidates seeking to replace Obama. This is important because, with the exception of Ron Paul, the consensus among these Republican candidates is that the mistake was not invading Iraq in the first place, but "leaving too soon"! Only 17% of Americans believe we should remain in Iraq, but 86% of Republican Presidential candidates do. And the fact that the Iraq government doesn't want to stay and refuses to offer immunity to American troops if they do stay matters not at all to them.

And not only do these Republican candidates for President want us to stay in both Iraq and Afghanistan still longer, they also want us to pick up a fight with a third Middle Eastern country Iran. They've managed to turn the latest drama over that crashed drone into an epic foreign policy failure on Obama's part, and suggest that if they were President we would have gone in with guns blazing to retrieve it.

What's really scary is that they're not kidding...and even though American voters would overwhelming oppose starting even more wars in the Middle East, very few will base their vote on it next November. There was never a point where the war in Iraq was genuinely real to most Americans, even in the early years of heavy combat, but today it's just an afterthought, as evidenced by the fact that the war's end doesn't even make the headlines on the evening news. So I'm not sure Americans have war fatigue as much as they have war detachment. At least since the quasi-successful surge of 2007, hardly a word has been spoken about the war in any conversation I've been engaged in, meaning we've been in a state of war for four years and it has gone under the radar of just about everybody not directly involved with the military.

So when a bunch of idiot Republican chickenhawks start pounding the drums for yet another war to court favor with the bloodthirsty warmongers in their base and the defense contractors bankrolling their campaigns, voters are nominally opposed but collectively shrug while voicing their opposition. Only five years have gone by since the ugliest scenes of the Iraq war were played out on the evening news every night, yet it could just as well have been 50 years for as much as voters seem to care about it. Whether we invade Iran and spend trillions more or not, voters don't seem to feel strongly either way. At least they must not...or else none of these Republican chuckleheads insisting that not enough American blood has been spilled in the Middle East would be registering above single digits in the polls let alone well-positioned to win.

Newt-ron Bomb

2011-12-13T07:55:00.000-08:00

Who could have ever imagined back in June that Newt Gingrich would be the frontrunner for the Republican nomination three weeks ahead of the Iowa caucuses? Amazing now to think back to 2000 when the Presidential nomination process was more or less a formality....a coronation of the establishment choices with only minor speed bumps (i.e. John McCain in New Hampshire) along the way. In the internet and cable news era we live in today, political partisans are far too engaged in Presidential politics to allow a 2000-style process to play out again in the foreseeable future, meaning the volatility of the last three primary cycles is probably the new normal. But even with that said, Newt Gingrich??? Has it really come to this, Republicans?

A lot of Democrats are giddy about the prospect of facing off against the erratic and undisciplined Gingrich, knowing he's likely to melt down countless towns over the next 11 months. They're probably right, but it's worth noting that politicians with a reputation for being erratic are all too often given tremendous latitude by voters for doing so. Joe Biden is a classic example for Democrats, and the fact that Herman Cain was able to keep his soldiers in line for several weeks even after an endless drumbeat of amateur hour gaffes suggests Gingrich will really have to step in it for voters to respond. That is a huge advantage up against either Romney or Obama, both of whom are expected to be perfect and for whom any minor misstep is exaggerated over several news cycles.

Whatever current poll numbers show, my feeling is that both Romney and Gingrich are poor general election candidates who will lose decisively in a political climate similar to the one we have now. Romney's profile as a smart and steady-handed Rockefeller Republican only holds up when nobody is scrutinizing him personally or politically. His policy agenda is boilerplate Tea Partyism and would have been seen as way out of the mainstream in any previous election cycle, but he passes as a faux "moderate" amongst this stage full of jesters. Once voters in suburban Philadelphia; Lakewood, Colorado; and Canton, Ohio, are made aware of this, Romney's would-be general election viability declines. And if he pivots to Rockefeller Republicanism in the general election, he risks losing his wingnut base who already dislikes him. As for his alleged personal inflappability, it's a myth that has been disproven three in the last two months, twice at the hands of the lightweight Texas Governor in the debates and again in an interview by Bret Baier of Fox News. Rattle Willard in the least and he becomes as brittle as an icicle in 32-degree weather.

Combine all of that with his baggage as a jobs assassin for Bain Capital and his overall robotic demeanor and this guy doesn't scare me....and I'm not entirely sure Gingrich brings more negatives to a general election than does Romney. The wild card is if Gingrich's erratic tendencies can be successfully sold as a form of mental illness. If the media and the Obama campaign make that narrative stick, Gingrich will become "Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket" and we could be looking at a 1988-style Electoral College landslide. Anything's possible with Gingrich, and he could well aid and abet that perception, but I don't think Democrats should count on that. Romney brings complete predictability to the table in a general election, and the Obama campaign will have the advantage of knowing every move he makes in advance. With Gingrich, they're gonna get a daily onslaught of curveballs (and spitballs), and while it's certainly possible these curveballs and spitballs will make Newt look bad, if Obama is caught flat-footed by any of them, it becomes Obama's problem.

And therein lies the gamble of cheering on a Gingrich candidacy for the blue team. While I think the current political environment favors Obama's re-election, the political environment could change. If Europe crashes, as I still think is a serious possibility, it takes America down with them. A Dow Jones average of $8,000 and an unemployment rate of 13% next November is not a climate Obama can get re-elected in....against anybody. So then the question becomes, do Democrats want somebody who is sane or somebody who is insane as the President? Most seem willing to take the gamble and are crossing their fingers that Professor Gingrich to remain popular with wingnut GOP primary voters. I'm still undecided.

And one last thing worth mentioning that scares me most is that a lot of National Review-type pseudo-intellectual conservatives are so spooked by their terrible choices that they're starting to suggest Jon Huntsman might be acceptable. This is Obama's worst-case scenario as, unlike Romney, Huntsman can probably get away with faking he's a Rockefeller Republican through next November. It still seems unlikely that there's enough time for Huntsman to catch on, but it was about this time in 2007 that John McCain first started getting some momentum in New Hampshire, and we know how that ended.

Early Look At 2012 Senate Races

2011-12-03T09:13:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it's pointless to get too far in the weeds on the 2012 Congressional races 11 months before the election, particularly when the field isn't even set in most states, but my modus operandi is nothing if not pointless so I'm giving it a whirl anyway. Just as is the case with the Presidential election, the Democratic Party's success or failure in the Senate races has more to do with what Angela Merkel does in Germany than what Barack Obama or John Boehner do in America, as if Europe falls next week and America has a 13% unemployment rate next November as a result, voters will unjustly spank the Democratic Party next fall. But if Europe holds off from self-destructing until either after our election or before it does any serious damage to us, the Democrats stand poised to get a strong majority of the overall votes in this year's Senate races.

That's the good news for Democrats. But the fact that they hold 23 of the 33 Senate races up this year means they get a 57% popular vote in the Senate races this year but still lose the four seats they need to hold to hang onto the Senate, particularly when three of their most vulnerable seats are in bright red states where Obama will be a drag at the top of the ticket.

Arizona--Theoretically, the Democrats got a great recruit in former Surgeon General Richard Carmona to face off against likely Republican nominee Jeff Flake to fill the open seat left behind by retiring Republican Jon Kyl, but Carmona has been an indecisive and reluctant candidate who stammered about his decision to run for months leading up to his ultimate decision last month. That doesn't bode particularly well for the kind of campaign he plans to run, and given that he has no experience as a politician, it's far from clear whether he's gonna be able to go toe to toe with the well-spoken Flake, or even if he'll impress enough to secure the nomination from fellow Democrat Don Bivens. This is the kind of race that's too soon to get a comfortable feel for, but given what we know today, I have to give the edge to Flake. Prediction: Republican hold.

California--Democrat Diane Feinstein will not only win big next year, she'll get more votes than any other Democratic Senate candidate in any state in the country ever. All indications are the 78-year-old Feinstein plans to run for a fourth full term, and given that the more controversial Barbara Boxer won by nine points against a strong challenger in the toxic political year of 2010, it's hard to imagine anybody in the Republican field giving Feinstein a serious challenge. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Connecticut--If Republican voters were smart enough to nominate former Congressman Chris Shays, they'd have a very good chance at picking up Joe Lieberman's open seat....just like if they had the brains to nominate Rob Simmons in 2010, they'd probably have one more Senate seat right now. But the smart money is that Connecticut Republicans will once again forfeit a seat to Democrats by nominating wrestling baroness Linda McMahon, the same terrible candidate who got her clock cleaned last year. Congressman Chris Murphy is the most likely Democratic nominee and unless he's a rotten candidate, should be able to take advantage of McMahon's weakness. Otherwise, only a huge Republican wave brought upon by a bruising double-dip recession could make McMahon competitive here. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Delaware--Two-term Democratic incumbent Tom Carper should effortlessly get a third term. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Florida--Another race where it's way too soon to call definitively. Two-term Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson has always been the kind of guy who generates few strong feelings either way, and there's little doubt that had he been up in 2010 he would have been defeated. But 2012 may be a different story. There are a flurry of Republican candidates but the smart money now is on Connie Mack, current Congressman and the son of the former Senator. The Mack name is gold in Florida Republican circles and promises to make this a competitive race, particularly if the economy sours again. But in a neutral environment, I have to give a little bit of an edge to Nelson because he seems like a harmless enough Democrat for Florida voters to keep around to give a little bit of balance in their increasingly right-leaning politics. Just a gut feeling for now, but whatever the case Mack is unlikely to be as much of a pushover for Nelson as Katherine Harris was in 2006. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Hawaii--Yet another race that seems likely to be competitive in the most unlikely of states. Retiring Democratic Senator Daniel Akaka leaves an open seat that will be current Democratic Congresswoman Mazie Hirono's to lose (barring an unlikely nomination of Ed Case in the primary), particularly with favorite son Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. But Republicans aren't going down without a fight and have nominated former Governor Linda Lingle. Lingle stands to benefit from the deep unpopularity of her Democratic successor in the Hawaii statehouse. Still, the partisan tide in Hawaii coupled with Obama's presence on the ticket make it hard to imagine Lingle will prevail without some glaring missteps by Hirono (or Case). Prediction: Democratic hold.

Indiana--If this was 2010, long-time incumbent Richard Lugar would probably be felled in the primary by conservative Richard Mourdock. But in 2012, I think Lugar will prevail in the primary, and then dominate in the general election. It's a shame that Democrats are poised to squander a second great statewide Senate candidate this year with Congressman Joe Donnelly, but that's almost certain if his opponent is Lugar. If Mourdock prevails, the race is a toss-up, but I'm inclined to think the GOP would still have a slight advantage unless Obama decides to strongly contest Indiana again, which doesn't seem likely. Prediction: Republican hold.

Maine--Looking more and more like Republican incumbent Olympia Snowe is gonna dodge a bullet here. She has nothing but clowns running up against her in the Republican primary. That may have been enough to take her down in 2010, but I don't think it's a gamble Maine Republicans will be willing to take in 2012. Anything is possible still....one of the Some Dudes in the primary could catch on among conservatives, but it seems odds-against now, and if the popular moderate Snowe prevails in the primary, she's a cinch to win the general election. Prediction: Republican hold.

Maryland--I can't envision a scenario where a Republican can win a statewide race in more-Democratic-by-the-day Maryland in the foreseeable future. That's good news for Democratic incumbent Ben Cardin who should have a slam-dunk re-election. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Massachusetts--Six months ago, I thought Scott Brown owned this seat the way Olympia Snowe owns her seat in Maine, but it's become clear he hasn't established himself yet with Massachusetts voters based on his very vulnerable poll numbers. Factor in the Democrats' top-tier recruit with Elizabeth Warren and all signs point to a very precarious re-election fight for Brown. Brown is by no means out of the race, but if the political conversation continues to be dominated by inequality and the sins of Wall Street, Warren will prevail in deep-blue Massachusetts. Prediction: Democratic pickup. Dems +1

Michigan--Some candidates seem to be getting very lucky this election cycle, and one of them is Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow, who is theoretically vulnerable and would most likely have been felled if she ran in 2010. But she lacks a strong Republican challenger and I ultimately think Obama's role in saving the Michigan auto industry, amidst passionate Republican cries to let automobile manufacturing in America come to an end, will work to the Democrats' advantage next year. Stabenow is not yet out of the woods, but things are leaning her direction for now. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Minnesota--Things would really have to go badly for Democrats for incumbent Senator Amy Klobuchar to become vulnerable. Her Republican challengers are either third-tier or fourth-tier and every potentially competitive challenger has taken a pass on the race. The only word of warning I can offer for Democrats is that this is Minnesota....where the last time an incumbent Senator looked as secure as Klobuchar does today was Rudy Boschwitz in 1990, and we all know how that ended. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Mississippi--Republican Roger Wicker has been about as anonymous of a GOP backbencher as anyone else in the country over the last four years but being a Republican wallflower is all one needs to score a comfortable win in Mississippi, particularly with the radioactive Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. Prediction: Republican hold.

Missouri--My prognosis of this race hasn't changed since earlier this year. I can't imagine a scenario where Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill can win with Obama on the ballot. Missouri's hard-right turn seems poised to have staying power particularly with less minority growth than the rest of the country to offset the wholesale shift of the state's working-class whites to the furthest-right reaches of the GOP. I'm not sure whether Sarah Steelman or Todd Akin will get the Republican nomination, but I feel secure in predicting that whichever of them does get the nomination will be Missouri's next Senator. Prediction: Republican pickup

Montana--The fact that Republican Congressman Denny Rehberg already holds small leads in every available poll does not bode well for incumbent Democrat Jon Tester. And I don't believe Tester is doing himself any favors by suddenly becoming a reliable vote AGAINST his party even on popular issues. There are certain districts and states where it makes some sense for a Democrat to think his best bet is to always be on the other side of most issues as Obama and his party's leadership, but I don't think Montana is one of those states. Montana has a substantial left-of-center Democratic base that Tester is gonna need next year. He's far more likely to keep those voters sufficiently motivated by being a good-faith Democrat than he is by trying to win over the conservative rancher from Miles City who currently leans Rehberg. Either way though, a second term for Tester is a longshot. Prediction: Republican pickup. GOP +1

Nebraska--If Ben Nelson hadn't embarrassed himself and his state with the Cornhusker Kickback deal in the health care bill, he'd probably win re-election. But since he did, I don't think that genie can be put back into the bottle. There's absolutely zero margin for error for a Democrat in Nebraska, and Ben Nelson misread his constituents and made a huge error. However much Democrats try to ease their minds by the fact that Nelson isn't trailing his hypothetical GOP challengers now by as much as he was a few months ago, he's toast. Once the ads about the Cornhusker Kickback start playing by his challenger, Nelson will decline again. The current competitive poll numbers are probably only good for convincing Nelson to run again rather than retire. I'm normally lenient towards red-state Democrats who challenge party orthodoxy but in Nelson's case, I couldn't care less if he wins or loses....he sucks that much. Prediction: Republican pickup. GOP +2

Nevada--This one looks to be one of the marquee Senate races in the country....and one of the most difficult to call. What I can say is that Nevada has a recent history of Democrats overperforming in polls, with a strong union machine that cranks out Hispanic votes in Las Vegas in defiance of polls. With that in mind, Democratic Congresswoman Shelley Berkeley would seem to have an advantage over interim Republican Senator Dean Heller. But with one of the worst economies in the country, Nevada is not likely to be as favorable of terrain for Obama as it was in 2008, and softness at the top of the ticket--whether Obama loses or narrowly wins--is bad for Berkeley. But for me the deciding factor in making this call right now was the Republican blowout in the recent special election to fill Heller's old House seat, in which the Republican overperformed traditional Republican margins even against a well above-average Democratic recruit. This tells me Republicans are more engaged than Democrats in Nevada, and if that continues Heller has an undeniable advantage. Prediction: Republican hold.

New Jersey--If the Republicans have come up with a challenger to face off against Democratic incumbent Bob Menendez, I don't know of him yet. Barring a stronger-than-expected Republican candidacy or a double-dip recession, Menendez should prevail for a second full term without breaking a sweat. Prediction: Democratic hold.

New Mexico--Here's a race I haven't seen any polling on. The likelihood is that the open seat vacated by long-time Democratic incumbent Jeff Bingaman will be a face-off between a current and a former Albuquerque-area Congressperson, Democrat Martin Heinrich and Republican Heather Wilson. The trajectory of the Latino vote and its growing pull in New Mexico would suggest Heinrich has the advantage here, but this is the kind of contest that could easily swing Republican if political conditions change for the worse for Democrats. Prediction: Democratic hold.

New York--Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand prevailed handily in the Republican year of 2010, far better than I expected she would. Unless Rudy Giuliani declares his candidacy next week, I suspect Gillibrand will coast into her first full term. Prediction: Democratic hold.

North Dakota--Democrats are understandably giddy that their recent top-tier recruit, former Attorney General Heidi Heitkamp, to fill the seat of retiring Democrat Kent Conrad has a small lead in the early polls against her likely Republican challenger, Congressman Rick Berg, but it smells to me like a post-announcement bump for Heitkamp. To be sure, this is winnable, as Democrats still win elections in North Dakota unlike most of the other Plains states, and Berg is hardly Mr. Popularity based on the available polling data. However, North Dakota is a GOP-leaning state that is in the middle of flush times with the state's ongoing oil boom. My experience is that conservative voters who suddenly become rich don't vote for Democrats in open-seat Senate races. Prediction: Republican pickup. GOP +3

Ohio--For the second straight cycle, Democrat Sherrod Brown has been blessed with good timing. He rode the "culture of corruption" wave into office with a landslide in 2006 and now stands poised to benefit from being a populist voice most loudly decrying the plutocratic overreach of unpopular GOP Governor John Kasich. Brown would have no chance of re-election in 2010, but right now he's looking pretty good for 2012. With that said, it's too early to dismiss youthful Republican challenger Josh Mandel, widely accepted as an up-and-comer in the Ohio GOP. But I don't think 2012 is gonna be his year. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Pennsylvania--Considering the mediocre campaign of Joe Sestak came within a hair's breadth of victory in the toxic Democratic year of 2010, it's hard to imagine that Democratic incumbent Bob Casey, who has pretty widespread appeal even amongst southwest Pennsylvania conservaDems, will be defeated next year. The lack of top-tier GOP opposition to rise to challenge him suggests that's the consensus opinion among Republicans too. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Rhode Island--It's worth mentioning that the state of Rhode Island, along with many of its cities, is financially about where Italy is right now. Given it's long-standing status as a Democratic stronghold, there could be some backlash next year against the party. With that said, incumbent Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse looks pretty secure for re-election next year even in Rhode Islanders are in a particularly cantankerous anti-incumbent mood. It's easy to imagine a scenario where he underperforms, but hard to imagine a scenario where he loses. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Tennessee--Democrats had the perfect political storm in Tennessee in 2006 and still came up three points short of victory. Since then, the state has moved much further to the right and Republican incumbent Bob Corker is in no way controversial or outside the mainstream of his party. That should translate to a landslide re-election for Corker next year. Prediction: Republican hold.

Texas--Long-time Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is retiring, leaving an open seat. The most likely Republican nominee is current Lieutenant Governor David Dewherst while the field is undefined and wide open for Democrats. Theoretically, the recruitment of former Democratic Congressman Chet Edwards would put Democrats in the game here, but even with Edwards this one still leans decidedly Republican. Without Edwards, the GOP nominee should be a cinch. Prediction: Republican hold.

Utah--Given their rigid nominating process, it's still possible that long-time Republican incumbent Orrin Hatch will fail to secure his party's nomination in favor of a Some Dude Tea Party clown. If this was 2010, Hatch would be a goner, but I think he's odds-on to survive in 2012 as the nominee, a scenario in which he'd cruise to a 3-1 re-election. But even if Hatch fails to get the nomination and it's a dream scenario for Democrats pitting right-wing Tea Partyer Jason Chaffetz versus Democrat Jim Matheson, this is Utah...and whoever has the (R) next to his name wins. Prediction: Republican hold.

Vermont--Independent socialist Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats, is about as sure of bet as anyone to win another term next year. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Virginia--The marquee race of the country and the most hard to predict of all. The retirement of Democratic Senator Jim Webb is pitting former Republican Senator George Allen against former Democratic Governor Tim Kaine. Numerous polls have already come out and every one of them is deadlocked, a scenario that is likely to play out for the majority of the cycle. Obama's strength in Virginia next year combined with the strength of the national economy will be the tiebreaker in this election. While it can't be ruled out that Allen will implode like he did in 2006, Kaine's close association with the national Democratic Party isn't doing him any favors. Even if we assume a perfectly neutral national political environment in 2012, Virginia is still slightly to the right of the rest of country, meaning I regrettably have to give a narrow edge to Allen here, with the caveat that just about anything can and most likely will change and potentially put Kaine in the driver's seat. Prediction: Republican pickup. GOP +4

Washington--Two-term Democratic incumbent Maria Cantwell has quietly won over her constituents and has a pretty solid approval rating to show for it. Hard to see how any Republican topples her next year. Prediction: Democratic hold.

West Virginia--I expected Democrat Joe Manchin to be some combination of Ben Nelson and Zell Miller after he won last year's special election, knowing he'd have to come in front of West Virginia voters only two years later with Barack Obama at the top of the ballot. To my surprise, he's been less horrible than I expected, and while still an imperfect soldier prone to some dumb statements, I sense that his heart is with the Democratic platform and if re-elected next year he'll get better. But will he be re-elected? His standing is better than I anticipated and thus far potentially troublesome challengers have opted out of the race, but if Republicans manage to time their "random WV Democrat is the same as Obama" attack right, the third time could be the charm in toppling them as they almost did with Governor Earl Ray Tomblin in October. While I still give Manchin the benefit of the doubt in avoiding this, one mistake in the next 11 months will be the end of him. Prediction: Democratic hold.

Wisconsin--Democrat Herb Kohl is retiring, and I really wish Russ Feingold would have chosen to reclaim a Senate seat next year, because my gut says Wisconsin Democrats are pissing away a seat by consolidating around Madison Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin. Perhaps I'm not giving Wisconsin voters enough credit, but I suspect Baldwin being openly gay will cost her two or three points...and thus the election. Add to that Baldwin's anti-gun record and she's a terribly flawed candidate running in the wrong state. And frankly I think the Democrats are squandering their momentum after Governor Walker's overreach with their permanent recall campaigns, which have gotta be exhausting Wisconsin voters. I doubt former Republican Governor Tommy Thompson will prevail in the GOP primary after giving the thumbs-up to Obama's health care bill, but if he does, he'll be the next Senator. But assuming either Mark Neumann or Jeff Fitzgerald prevails in the primary, I still think they have a leg up on Baldwin in the general election. Prediction: Republican pick-up. GOP +5

Wyoming--Republican John Barrasso will cakewalk into his first full term. Prediction: Republican hold.

So I expect Democrats to have reasonably comfortable victories in most of the large-state Senate races and hang onto the majority of the remaining races as well....yet still lose the Senate. Republicans will likely hold a 52-48 edge in the next Senate, and poised to make substantial additional gains in 2014, particularly if Obama wins re-election. Democrats are better positioned to make some gains in the House next year and they better hope they do because it won't be until 2016 until the Democrats can expect good news out of the Senate.

2012 Election: The Outlook A Year in Advance

2011-11-06T11:35:00.000-08:00

Perhaps never before in my lifetime has an election been this tough to handicap a year in advance, with so many conflicting factors in play. Things tend to change a lot in a year, as was certainly the case in 1991 when George H.W. Bush looked like a lock for re-election, in 1995 when Bill Clinton looked vulnerable, and in 2003 when George W. Bush seemed poised for a comfortable victory. In November 2011, we're looking at a scenario where the economic environment for the incumbent is very unlikely to get measurably better and could in fact get much worse, while the political environment for the incumbent isn't as bad as it should be and could in fact get much better.

Starting with the economy, incredibly slow recoveries are the new normal in postglobalization America. Interestingly, the demographic most aware of this structural transformation is the white working class, the very group who rewards those vowing to slow down economic recoveries even further with ill-advised austerity measures and the withdrawal of trillions of dollars of demand from would-be consumers to be redistributed to nonexistent "job creators" already flush with cash. Aside from the white working class, everybody else seems surprised that the economy hasn't returned to a 1999 level of growth with unemployment rates of 3% even in the wake of a financial crisis with effects still percolating through the system in the form of escalating foreclosure rates resulting from bad loans made in the years before the crisis.

With all these forces working against economic growth, I'm surprised it's doing as well as it is, but it won't take much to derail us again and there's a flurry of rocky waves that could do just that in the next 12 months. At the top of that list is the crisis in Europe, which has already hit crisis mode in Greece and could very easily hit Italy soon. Europe seems to be now where America was in the spring of 2008, realizing they have a major problem on their hands and knowing that it won't be going away, yet maintaining a stiff upper lip about the magnitude of the problem until it reaches its inevitable boiling point with their equivalent to the Lehman Brothers collapse. Honestly, the tipping point could come about at any time, and I'd be surprised if Europe limped along for another full year without the law of gravity catching up to them. And when that point comes, America instantly plunges into another recession. There's not a damn thing Obama can do about this, but if it happens, he will almost certainly lose the election next year.

Yet with an economic situation with no tangible upsides and seemingly endless downsides for Obama, I would rate his chances of being re-elected at no worse than 50-50 because the political environment is not terminally toxic. That is the case because the opposition party is peddling a political tonic that is about as popular as diarrhea, with a cohort of unimaginably awful candidates as their chief emissaries. Voters got their opportunity to express their outrage at Obama in 2010, and the result has been the elevation of a fringe group of extremists to what could charitably be called 50% control of the American government, and the result has been complete political paralysis in a time of economic crisis. American voters convinced themselves that divided control of government was a good thing, and a strong case can be made that in the past public policy worked better with conflicting forces meeting in the middle. But with the current political polarization and the Republican Party gone off an ideological cliff, the public is seeing that past precedent no longer applies and divided government now has the potential to destroy the country based purely on GOP obstinence.

And most of the Republican Presidential candidates not only personify everything the public doesn't like about Congress, they also happen to seem woefully incompetent. The public certainly believes the country is moving in the wrong direction, but the Republicans want to double down on the things the public is most sour about. And with the national conversation moving towards income inequality courtesy of Occupy Wall Street, the Republicans have found themselves fiercely on the wrong side of public opinion with their tin-eared calls for still more tax cuts for upper-income Americans, and are creating an opportunity for a damaged Obama to resurrect himself.

Anecdotal evidence shows the only reason that Republicans are still in the game for 2012 is Obama and the liabilities he has from being an incumbent in a period of domestic decline. A Suffolk University poll showed a hypothetical contest between Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney producing a crushing 55-38 victory for Hillary, and Hillary mopping the floor up with Perry by an even larger 58-32 margin. Since Hillary isn't running, this doesn't tell us much, but below the surface the poll numbers speak volumes. Against a non-Obama Democrat, the two leading lights for the Republican Party are scoring less than 40% of the vote. Insofar as one can glean this is a "generic" Democrat versus the current Republican frontrunners, that speaks very badly for the long-term prospects of these Republicans and the radioactive political message they're peddling.

And Obama has proven himself successful in the past at winning over skeptical voters, as he did in the final weeks of the 2008 campaign, meaning that against such wimpy opposition, one should not sell short his ability to do the same next year peddling a message far more in line with what the public wants to hear. To be sure, Obama will have to thread a needle in more ways than one, but I can easily envision a scenario where he not only wins, but wins with a comfortable majority and more than 300 electoral votes. And if the next year produces an economic environment vaguely similar to the current one, with a nominally lower unemployment rate and growth rates in the 2.5% range, that's the outcome that seems most plausible.

One caveat I will add that goes undiscussed by political analysts is that the primary metric by which Obama's re-election will be determined is not the unemployment rate, but gas prices. With that in mind, modest economic growth is a best-case scenario for Obama given that a sudden and unforeseen surge in economic activity will send oil prices soaring, and since Joe Sixpack still won't be getting a raise he will judge Obama more harshly with 5% growth and $5.50 gas prices than he would with 2% growth and $3.00 gas prices.

As hard as it is to handicap the Presidential race, it's even harder to handicap Congressional races next year with so much up in the air regarding redistricting court challenges and historic incumbent dissatisfaction. I don't believe there will be a general "throw the bums out" sentiment that will hurt both parties equally as such a climate almost always hurts one party far more than the other. It's hard to imagine any scenario where the arithmetic works out for the Democrats to win the Senate. It's possible, but does anybody really see a scenario where Ben Nelson, Claire McCaskill, and Jon Tester survive? With the House, a favorable situation at the top of the ticket that is yet to be determined will determine whether the Republicans gain seats or lose seats, but given how they consolidated power in the now unreachable McCain districts in 2010, it's very hard to see how the Democrats have a prayer of winning the House back since those seats will mostly stick with their Republican freshmen. What is a safe bet is that whichever party wins the White House in 2012 will have a bloody midterm in 2014.

Another prediction I will make is that the 2012 election will have a lower voter turnout since any Presidential election since 2000 and possibly since 1996. Few of Obama's first-time voters will be sufficiently motivated to reward him for his bleak first term next year, while the independents that will determine the election outcome don't seem like they'll be chomping at the bit to replace him with a shmuck like Romney or Perry. Even for myself, the excitement surrounding elections is now more than ever based exclusively on the horse race aspect. Holding any expectation for good governance is a relic of my youth that was discarded after 2006 when the new Democratic Congress governed from a pathetically weak posture. Whoever wins the 2012 election, America will not be better off in four years, and politics becomes far less interesting when it becomes a contest in who will destroy the country less rapidly.

The Real Legacy of Solyndra

2011-09-28T15:26:00.000-07:00

The scandal du jour in Washington designed to allow cynical politicians to do everything but worry their pretty little heads about losing an entire generation to permanent joblessness revolves around the Obama administration's loan to the now-defunct solar panel maker Solyndra. I haven't dug too deep into the weeds of the Solyndra collapse, but anecdotal evidence suggests this was a high-risk venture with plenty of early warning signs that it was doomed. Obama's coziness and fund-raising history with the CEO's make for bad optics, but it seems unlikely anything criminal was occurring.....it just seems like a bad investment taken on by an administration that oversold itself and the country on a "green energy revolution".

Now I'm skeptical about solar panels having any more of a long-term presence in our energy future than they had back in the 1970s during Phase I of the alternative energy fad, but the neglected topic in the discussion about Solyndra is that the entire American solar industry is on its heels because it can't compete with China. In just the last few years, China has consolidated 54% of global solar panel production due to lower production costs. So the real lesson would appear to be than any good-faith attempt to reignite a production-based economy here in America is doomed to the race-to-the-bottom abyss of globalization.

For decades now, politicians from both parties have assured us America's economic future involved endless expansion of the financial industry and binge consumption of low-cost goods manufactured in the Third World by middle-class American consumers, and they scoffed at those of us who raised red flags about forfeiting our industrial base to the globe's lowest bidders. After the entire house of cards collapsed with the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles in 2008, even "new economy" politicians started to see the light, scratching their chins and assessing that just maybe it would be good if America actually started making things again.

But this green energy revolution was our first experiment in testing whether America is capable of being a competitive manufacturing economy again, and the collapse of Solyndra and Chinese consolidation of solar panel production suggests we're not. Yet politicians across the spectrum continue to tell us we need to think "outside the box" for creative ways to more broadly reinvigorate manufacturing in America. How exactly do they propose to do this?

Solyndra's unique solar panels were a classic case study on this front, and it was not only a failure, but a failure that has led to speculation of pernicious motives on the part of Obama administration. Since this outfit donated to Obama's campaign and was later given a government-supported loan to start up with stimulus money, then it must be a payola, is the implication. With this allegation in mind, who's gonna be the next politician to sign up for financially supporting American manufacturing knowing that there's a large likelihood it will fail, and you will be accused of criminal conspiracy if it does?

Nobody. Which means our renewed commitment to reviving America's production economy has come too late. Which means the American economy will continue to be a paper tiger offering an employment base to its citizens that consists of financial industry marionettes aiding and abetting Wall Street's next round of wreckage, writing out recision letters for the insurance cartel, and wiping old people's asses. Economic superpower indeed.

Is The Dow's Permanent Baseline $6,000?

2011-08-16T20:58:00.000-07:00

I am not an investor in the stock market, and I'm not sure I ever will be having tracked its ultimately lateral movement over my adult life and coming to appreciate that it just might be a zero-sum game. We all hear the market analysts remind us endlessly in the face of a bear market that "if you're in this for the long haul, don't worry about these short-term downturns", suggesting that what goes down will inevitably go up. But will it? If the last 12 years is any indication, I doubt it.

Let's take a look at the stock market's trajectory going back to the dawn of the new millennium. At the pinnacle of the tech bubble in early 2000, the Dow topped over at more than 10,000. After the bubble burst and the Enron-style scandals exploded, the Dow average dipped to about $6,000. And then it rose again, to nearly $12,000 if memory serves me, in 2007 when the country was artificially booming amidst the housing bubble. And then in the fall of 2008, the housing bubble worst and the Dow declined once again to.....$6,000.

At the halfway point of 2012, for no explicable reason, the Dow restored almost all that it lost since late 2008 and peaked at nearly $12,000 a couple of months ago. There's no rational explanation when looking at America's abysmal economic recovery why the Dow would rise about 80% over the 2 1/2 years since the financial crisis, but it nonetheless did....until the latest realization that the economy is sputtering again. There's no telling where exactly the economy's weakness will send the Dow in the weeks and months ahead, but based on past experience, my guess would be.....$6,000.

There has long been a disconnect with the hollow reed that America's economy has become in the postglobalization era of the past generation and the soaring value of its investment market. Our economy is scarcely based on anything real at all anymore, as is evident by the fact that absent a housing bubble the economy is stuck in the mud and can't climb out even with the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policies the nation has ever seen. However, the stock market has three times exploded its value over the last 15 years as if investors were looking at an economy poised to do incredible things in the future. What is behind this disconnect and why isn't anybody exposing it?

There was some justification for the "irrational exuberance" of the late 90s, when the internet explosion really did seem poised to radically raise America's long-term productivity and employment capabilities in a way that never actually materialized, but seemed plausible at the time. But after that, what has been the rationale for the market's explosive growth? If it's what I suspect, it's the most underreported story in America....the fact that imminently exploitable Baby Boomers with 401K's are looking to make an easy buck on the stock market to supplement their stagnant incomes....and the combination of ignorance and desperation to replace investments lost in market crashes of the recent past make them easily exploitable by Wall Street sharks looking to blow one bubble after another with other people's money and then pull out their own profits right before the crash.

I mean, seriously....why on Earth would the Dow have risen for a $6,500 ebb in the fall of 2008 back up to nearly $12,000 in April 2011? What has happened in America to possibly inspire such market confidence unless the game has been rigged all along? So I submit that for the foreseeable future, any day that the Dow is above $6,000 is a day that's living on borrowed time...and a "correction" will be imminent. America is very clearly a nation in decline, and nations in decline don't have investment markets that nearly double in three years after a brutal financial crisis. It's all a fraud...and scores of millions of people counting on these investments funding their retirement in lieu of actual livable wages and benefits are gonna learn and relearn this lesson with each new market bubble that is blown and burst. Let's just hope at some point they quit listening to the "analysts" assuring us that those of us in it for the "long-term" will be just fine weathering the latest market collapse.....because I'd bet my stock portfolio on the market's "long-term" value being somewhere in the neighborhood of.....$6,000.

Debt Ceiling: All Pain and No Gain For Democrats

2011-07-29T22:22:00.000-07:00

As has been the case with every legislative battle since the end of the Clinton administration, the Republicans have absolutely steamrolled Democrats on this debt ceiling increase. Obama once again assumed a braindead negotiating posture when he should have held firm on a clean debt ceiling vote, not allowing Republicans to hold this routine piece of Congressional bookkeeping hostage. Predictably it devolved from there to the point where Republicans managed to get Democrats to agree to deeper cuts than even the Republicans were demanding at the beginning of the year without any new revenues. The biggest problem with our budget deficit is that revenues have sunk to a 60-year low 14% of GDP, yet we will almost definitely not get a penny more of it in exchange for huge budget cuts. Only Democrats could negotiate a deal that bad.

So basically, the fight was lost a couple of weeks ago, indeed a few months ago if you go back to when the seeds of pending defeat were first planted. There's still plenty of room for Democrats to come out of this even worse than is currently expected, but even the best-case scenario is not gonna be pretty. As much as Democrats like to think they've exposed the intransigence and all-out insanity of the Tea Party refusing to vote with their own party's plan and pushing the country this close to brink of a crisis of choice, the narrative will be short-lived.

If the crisis is not averted, which I believe is still 40% likely, initial outrage may fall on Republicans, albeit much more narrowly than expected, but voters will be angry at everybody in Washington who oversaw this epic failure of the federal government to do its most basic functions....a narrative parroted by a press corps petrified by accusations of bias from the far right and thus finding a way to blame both sides equally. Even outside of that, Democrats are the incumbent party in two or three elected governing bodies, so they have the most to lose in the next election as a matter of pure arithmetic.

If the crisis is averted, Democrats believe they'll be seen as the adults in the room. That storyline may hold initially but will have as much staying power in the court of public opinion as Obama's post-Osama bin Laden bump. The policies of the Republican Party tanked America's economy in the fall of 2008, yet the voting public has such a low attention span that only two years later they rehired them en masse. With that in mind, there's no way that voters will still be thinking about the immaturity of the Congressional Republicans in the July 2011 debt ceiling debate by the fall of 2012, especially since we may well be in a double dip recession by then.

Furthermore, if the should-be discredited credit rating agencies choose to downgrade our credit even after the passage of a debt ceiling increase next week, which is more likely than not, any upside from passing the debt ceiling increase in the first place will be negated. One could envision a scenario where Republicans are able to convince the public that they were right to oppose the debt ceiling increase in the first place...the same way they've convinced the public that TARP, the stimulus, and the auto bailout were bad ideas and a waste of money despite all expert opinion to the contrary.

Ironically, the one way I could see Democrats benefiting politically from the debt ceiling issue is the one thing Obama and Democrats are ruling out as completely unacceptable....a six-month debt limit extension that would reignite the debate again. That's not to say I'd want to see the country put through this nightmare again, and it is almost certainly stalling any would-be recovery as is, but from a pure political standpoint, reminding the country of the GOP's petulance, gamesmanship, and cynicism every few months is the only way Democrats have a chance of the message sticking in the thick skulls of American voters. Once again, the Democrats find themselves with no good options.

Mr. President, you should have stuck to your guns on the clean debt ceiling increase six months ago....and at least remind Congress they still have that option on the table now.

Why Does Everybody Assume Long-Range Economic Growth?

2011-07-19T20:39:00.000-07:00

A lot of "really smart people" from both sides of the political spectrum (and the middle) all seem to be afflicted with the same irrational exuberance on one issue and fashion their policy platforms with it mind....that the sluggish economic growth we've been experiencing for nearly four years now is on the cusp of a sharp turnaround. It might not happen today or tomorrow, but it's coming soon. It's gotta be! Everybody in the Obama administration has clung to this article of faith going back to the early days of his Presidency, and Republicans always insist that the economy won't get any better so long as Obama's policies are in place, but maintain the same overall perspective as the Democrats...that all we need is their preferred policies to take effect and the economy will instantly snap back to whatever passes as economic glory days in recent American history. Perhaps this is just the nature of people who go into public service--an unflinching optimism even when there's absolutely nothing to be optimistic about--but I can't get over how nobody has come to terms with the likelihood that the economy of 2010 and 2011 is America's new normal.

The general nature of financial crises throughout American and global history has suggested the initial plunge is fast and deep, and the recovery process is slow and bumpy with an endless litany of false starts. This particular financial crisis, where trillions of dollars of artificial wealth was created and wiped out, devaluing homes and bankrupting consumers who borrowed against those homes, reeked from the get-go as being the instigator of a downward economic trajectory for the nation. Add to the already grim arrangement described decades worth of incentives for would-be job creators to do business overseas and the surge in unemployment was assured of being brutal and permanent. With the nature of the jobs lost, most of those who lost their jobs will never work again. Even after the comparatively mild 2001 recession, getting back on our feet took the entire first term of Bush's Presidency, and even when we found our footing it was merely fueled by a phony housing bubble. So why did anybody think back in 2009 that we'd be anywhere other than where we are right now 2 1/2 years later?

The lackluster growth was certainly not foreseen by the administration's would-be economic wizards Larry Summers and Christina Romer, who predicted the too-stingy stimulus package would hold unemployment below 8%. And they continue to be shocked at the lack of job growth and stalled consumer demand with each abysmal new monthly report. Worse yet, they support backloaded deficit-reduction packages, insisting the current fragile recovery can't sustain deep and immediate cuts (which is true) but apparently believing that in a couple short years the economy will be humming along to the point that it can absorb steep budget cuts. But why would it be?

They're stuck in the mindset that the old rules of the business cycle apply, where must goes down must go back up. But in an economy that has forfeited its industrial base (the sectors of the economy that are most traditionally affected by the business cycle) and is now driven entirely by the finance sector and binge consumerism by an emaciated peasantry, there's little indication that the business cycle will create jobs of any kind. Should some magical rebound in consumer confidence arise, even that won't bring back the jobs lost during the economic crisis....jobs disproportionately held by blue collar workers who are not likely to ever be employed again given their age and skill set.

But as usual, as deranged as the Democrats are on the economy, the increasingly unhinged Republican/Tea Party is orders of magnitude worse. The same party that is two weeks away from testing the theory that defaulting on our debt will bring about economic calamity is proposing as a remedy for frozen consumer confidence, among other things, the evisceration of Medicare and cutting unemployment benefits. In their worldview, the only thing stopping blistering 1950s style economic growth is a business community already sitting on $2 trillion in idle cash is funneling even more public resources their way. Even though consumers are flat on their backs with debt, all it will take is more giveaways to corporations and they'll magically hire more people to produce goods and services that the public is too bankrupt to afford.

Never has it occurred to them that they might get their hat trick in November 2012, with a President Michele Bachmann and Republican majorities in the House and Senate, yet still see economic growth of 1% or less in 2013 and 2014, after they've gutted the safety net, voucherized Medicare, and handed over Social Security to Goldman Sachs and AIG. Yet that's the almost certain outcome with a consumer base even more starved than it is today.

The fall of the American economic empire started at some point in the 1970s and really took shape in the 1980s when a production-based economy gave way to a finance economy, fueled by the transition from traditional pensions to 401Ks where every Joe Sixpack became an "investor" and every young hotshot with a Harvard business degree was licking his chops waiting to take advantage of the new "investors" ignorance. Once America codified through the trade agreements a laundry list of incentives to not operate manufacturing facilities on America soil in the 1990s, we sealed our fate. Now, in the year 2011, we're an exhausted economy that has sold its treasure and is left with a workforce that the world economy has no use for. There's only one way the American economy comes back in the foreseeable future, and unfortunately that is through another bubble blown by Wall Street's three-card monte machine. Backload spending cuts all you want....but they're gonna just as devastating to the sluggish economy of 2016 or 2021 as they would be for the sluggish economy of 2011. Why on Earth do the people who run our government, even the shrinking numbers of whom mean well, fail to see that?

Romney or Bachmann Will Be Our Next President

2011-06-15T15:20:00.001-07:00

My first serious look at the 2012 Republican primary field was a bit of a wake-up call. Two of the candidates I thought were longshots for the nomination looked pretty good, and coupling that with the latest rotten economic indicators, some long-term scenarios began forming in my head that conflicted with what I've thus far accepted as conventional wisdom.

First, the candidates that didn't impress....Santorum and Gingrich were never and still aren't serious players and they reinforced that on Monday night. Ron Paul is interesting and one-of-a-kind, but nobody will see him as Presidential. Herman Cain is only interesting in that he has the chutzpah to expect the American people to promote him from CEO of a second-rate regional pizza chain to President of the United States. And least impressive of all was Tim Pawlenty, the embarrassment that was the two-term Governor of my home state, whose lame performance was magnified given the degree of stature the media has given him as a "serious candidate" and Romney's top challenger. In one sense, I've always had the same back-of-my-mind impression that so many others have had about TPaw...that he's a minor-leaguer competing with grown-ups. Unfortunately for him, that perception was reinforced in the debate.....

It's not too late for Pawlenty, but he didn't win himself any support Monday night and my general sense is that it's always gonna be a hard for him to stand out in the crowd. He's always had a knack for clever wordplay along the lines of "Obamneycare" but he'll need more than that to be taken seriously by voters who have thus far resisted the media and party insiders' demands to do just that. I get the sense that Jon Huntsman is gonna prove to be as big of a dud as Pawlenty, if not bigger. Perhaps he'll surprise me, but nothing he's said or done so far has led me to believe he'll stand out in the crowd, and his refusal to compete in first-in-the-nation Iowa will hobble him at a time when he desperately needs headlines.

How about the "maybe later" crowd of candidates? History has showed those who aren't fully invested in the race early on make lousy candidates. Wesley Clark or Fred Thompson anyone? Sarah Palin's not running. Chris Christie's not running (and I suspect he'd be a disaster for the GOP if he did). Rudy Giuliani may run, but would go over like a fart in church just like last time if he did. I'd take immediate bets on Mike Huckabee to be America's 45th President tonight if he was running, but he isn't. That just leaves Rick Perry. On paper, he has a good story to tell, but frankly I don't know enough about him to qualify his political skills in a national election, but taking into account his secession comments and the fact that he only managed to eke out a 39% plurality in a four-way gubernatorial election IN TEXAS a few years back suggests to me he probably won't live up to the hype.

With all these candidates discounted, time to move on to those who I think have the clearest path to the nomination as well as the Presidency. First Willard Romney...up until the past week I bought into the conventional wisdom that his past support of the Massachusetts health care plan that was the boilerplate for Obama's health care plan would assure his defeat by hard-right Republican primary voters, but I had an epiphany on this issue a few days ago. These voters' opposition to health care reform is skin-deep and rooted in one source....Obama supports it. Up until January 20, 2009, the now-scandalous-in-Republican-circles "individual mandate" was a component in the health care reform plan of every Republican who every addressed the issue of health care reform. They don't really oppose the "individual mandate" or the general structure of Romneycare in a serious way....they're just against it because Obama's for it. For that reason, Romney is probably gonna get a pass on this issue if Republican primary voters otherwise reach the consensus he's their best chance to beat Obama. Sure, the other candidates will all try mightily to exploit Willard's health care connection to Obama, but in the end it will ring hollow....because Republican voter opposition to Obamacare is entirely artificial.

My pathway to the Presidency for Willard nonetheless hinges on a scenario where Republican primary voters are inclined to play it safe. Any false hope of a sustained economic recovery withered away a couple of weeks ago, when America had its "oh shit...things aren't gonna get better" epiphany with the release of troubling economic indicators. But one of two things is likely to happen between now and early 2012. The scenario of continued plodding 1% to 1.5% growth with unemployment rates lingering at the 9% range is the scenario where Republicans are likely to opt for Willard as the same choice. But what happens if the economy declines more significantly and the final two quarters of the year measure zero growth or a double-dip recession? That's when Michelle Bachmann comes in....

Bachmann is consistently underestimated by her opponents, including myself. I decreed she was too conservative for Minnesota, even her Republican MN-06 district, when she first ran in 2006. Even in that Democratic year, she topped a strong Democratic challenger by eight points. And keep in mind that her district, while always advertised as crimson red, is roughly the same degree of Republicanism as NY-26 recently won by Democrat Kathy Hochul in a special election. In other words, she can be persuasive even in places where she's well to the right of her constituents, and her charisma was on full display in Monday night's debate.

Bachmann's path to the nomination is still perhaps a longshot, and will be borne only if the nation's situation is worst-case scenario dire, at which point Bachmann's red meat rhetoric will be all the more delicious to Republican primary voters, who will be more willing to risk her candidacy if Obama looks especially vulnerable. If she's nominated, Democrats will foolishly breathe a sigh of relief, thinking she can't win nationally. Under normal circumstances she couldn't, but I venture to say she's no worse of a candidate than John Kasich or Rick Scott, the respective governors of Ohio and Florida, the nation's two foremost swing states, who were nonetheless elected in the wave election of 2010 as a vote of no-confidence against the incumbent party. If candidates as awful and unapologetically hard-right as Kasich and Scott can prevail in the two most electorally important states in the country, so can Bachmann.

Even under both of the described scenarios, I'd only give Romney or Bachmann 60-70% odds of victory, however. The wild card here is the Republicans' foolish trigger finger on gutting Medicare, which was pulled in 2011 instead of 2013 and thus leaving the Republican Party's true agenda exposed to a voting public that overwhelmingly opposes it. The Republican Party's key to electoral success has been making the casualties of their budget cuts an "other guy" problem....the guy across the tracks who "doesn't work as hard as I do" and who deserves a lower standard of living. Now they've shown that their 2011 equivalent of the welfare queen is grandma, and suddenly it's hitting home to Americans that when Republicans talk about freeloading parasites they're now talking about the overwhelming majority of their own voters. Couple this with the even worse messaging that ending Medicare will help finance yet another reduction in the top tax rate applicable to millionaires and Republicans have an easily exploitable messaging problem ("tax cuts for me and Medicare cuts for thee") that has the potential to derail their chances in 2012 no matter how badly voters hunger for Obama's scalp. If the Republican nominee is able to effectively distance themself from the Paul Ryan plan or muddle the issue in some way, it could reduce its impact, but right now it's the only thing standing between Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann and the Presidency.

My 30 Best Road Trips

2011-03-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

Easy as it would be to rage on with a post about the union-busting at home or the latest foolish U.S. military adventure, I choose to keep it light-hearted with a post profiling a list of favorites from my three decades of Midwestern road trips. Road trip season for me traditionally starts this time of year so it's a good time to look back to the classics. I was originally considering a top-20 list, then expanded it to a top-25, but realized I needed a top-30 list to do service to the best of the best of the 180 I've cataloged going back to 1990. Road trip season for me traditionally starts this time of year so it's a good time to look back to the classics.

#30. St. Peter/New Ulm 2007--I had a lot going on during my vacation week in August 2007, going to the county fair every night as well as doing a video of my hometown with a buddy and going out on a date with an old classmate. Good spirits abounded and with the help of perfect summer weather, made for a fun little five-hour getaway which always accentuates this trip, a retread of the towns I visited with my dad doing vinyl repair work at car lots in the summer of 1990. To this day, I get a thrill out of driving into the scenic town of New Ulm. And there's something that still gets me about going through population center Mankato as well.

#29. New Year's Eve 2001--Every year in the week between Christmas and New Year's I select a different destination, usually in scenic southeastern Minnesota, for a road trip. This year, I got to intensively explore Winona County for this time. Road trip fever hit its peak for me in 2001 as I made official my quest to visit all of Minnesota's 734 communities and went out of my way to score new ones, and this trip allowed me to score 17 new towns, and some very scenic ones at that including Elba and Stockton. It was a sunny but blustery winter day, perfect for this kind of trip, and on the way home I discovered a country station out of Rochester playing some songs I hadn't heard in years that kept things interesting on the slog home around dusk.
Defining songs: Aaron Tippin "Whole Lotta Love on the Line", David Lee Murphy "All Lit Up in Love"

#28. La Crosse 1990--At various points in the past, my parents would head out to La Crosse, Wisconsin, to see the fall colors in the Mississippi River Valley at their peak in October, but this was the first year it really stuck with me and became a tradition. I was 13 years old and after the previous summer had just gotten my first taste of road trip fever. I had remember some of these impressively scenic southeastern Minnesota towns from the past and loved revisiting them, particularly Lanesboro, Houston, and my favorite, Rushford. High points included driving up to the scenic overlook over Rushford, eating at Arby's in La Crosse back when Arby's was an exotic treat, and driving home through some previously unexplored little towns in northeastern Freeborn County including Oakland, Moscow, and Lerdal.

#27. Northern Minnesota 2009--Early last decade, I made a September tradition of exploring various areas of northern Minnesota, originally with the express purpose of getting to obscure little towns and help my cause of getting to all 734 Minnesota towns. I completed that expedition in 2007, but continued to head northward because I discovered it's a really nice time of year to be up there. Normally, these northern Minnesota trips send me to the woods of northeastern Minnesota, but on this trip most of my exploration was the Red River Valley in the Fargo-Moorhead area of northwestern Minnesota. I had been to this area several times before, but never during their fall sugar beet harvest. The back roads in Clay and Norman Counties were littered with sugar beets that fell off the truck and looked like dead armadillos on the highway. With perfect late summer weather as a backdrop to my thorough exploration of Clay and Norman Counties, I discovered that it's as nice to be in northwestern Minnesota in mid-September than it is in northeastern Minnesota.

#26. Minnesota River Valley 2000--During spring break in college, my dad was always another few weeks away from being called back to the railroad and I conned him into making journeys to western Minnesota. This was the last year of college and the third trip I made with him in last March. It was a gloomy day, but it was still a hoot visiting a flurry of new towns in west-central Minnesota, including Granite Falls, Montevideo, Appleton, Benson, and Willmar, among many others. Nothing electric happened on the trip, but I scored 24 new towns and got to see the geese migration along Lac qui Parle in western Minnesota for the first time. Great memories.

#25. Sioux Falls 2002--The Sioux Falls trip is the granddaddy of them all regarding my road trips, another throwback to the vinyl car lot repair summer of 1990 with my dad. The 2002 trip was significant because I had just begun a job at the newspaper and realized my schedule was gonna be more crowded and needed to bump up the Sioux Falls trip from its long-standing timeframe in late July to June, in this case mid-June, the first weekend I had free in several weeks. To my surprise, I found the trip more fun in June than in July, with the corn crop still barely peeking above the ground and giving me a much better vantage point than what I was used to in July. On top of that, it was a nice steamy summer day which I always prefer for this trip and everything just sort of clicked. I had a good feeling in the early weeks of 2002, preparing for long-distance girlfriend Dana's promised visit to my hacienda, and that undoubtedly raised my spirits for this road trip even though that wouldn't have a happy ending.
Defining music: Phil Vassar "American Child" playing on the radio as I was in the Arby's drive-thru in Sioux Falls.

#24. Trans-Freeborn County 1999--Normally I make my journey through most of the small towns of my home county the day after Thanksgiving, but in 1999, I had to spend the weekend working on a huge paper for my senior year of college and my dad, who usually came along back then, was busy roofing the barn. When I returned home for Christmas break, I found both parents were home in bed with the flu, and I figured the next day was a good opportunity to take to the road for a belated Freeborn County adventure. It was a bitter day, well below zero, and my Ford Fairmont had gas-line freeze-up and wouldn't start, leaving me navigating my mom's car on what was effectively my first solo road trip. Most people don't like doing things alone, but I always have and I found this solo safari to be inspiring, listening to music as I drove and experiencing the towns at my own pace. Turned out to be my best Freeborn County road trip experience since the original.
Defining music: Randy Travis "A Man Ain't Made of Stone"

#23. St. Peter/New Ulm 2001--I was out of work the entire year of 2001 and most obsessed with road tripping and picking up new territory. It was also the year that nearly all of my road trips were solo runs, as opposed to the years earlier where I usually went with my dad. The extra freedom was beneficial in setting my own terms for the exploration and in hitting some backroads through unexplored townships in south-central Minnesota. This is always a fun little half-day joy ride, usually in early August, but the "new frontier" aspect of this particular year's journey made it my favorite St. Peter-New Ulm trip.
Defining music: Jeff Carson "Real Life"

#22. New Year's Eve 1999--Here was a road trip literally on the dawn of the new millennium...on December 31, 1999. It was a beautiful sunny day in an unusually warm winter without a trace of snow on the ground as my dad and I safaried to northwestern Iowa, visiting the Okoboji area for the first time in my life, as well as towns like Estherville, Emmetsburg, Algona, and Buffalo Center. It was a nice change of pace and I had some good mojo about the Y2K event only hours away, and the delicious as always chicken and swiss sandwich from Hardee's in Estherville was frosting on the cake. I haven't been back to the area since but plan to return this coming New Year's Eve.

#21. La Crosse 1995--The family generally travels the same route every October to see the fall colors of southeastern Minnesota, which is understandable given the unparalleled scenery of this particular route. But this was the year that everything seemed to be perfect, most specifically the 75-degree weather that allowed short-sleeved exploration of the scenic overlook at Rushford, of which we explored additional trails with an even better vantage point of the town that year. This was at the beginning of my senior year of high school and I was increasingly glum about the major change in my life that lie ahead. This was a nice old-fashioned getaway to more relaxed times.

#20. Minnesota River Valley 2005--I had just been let go from my newspaper job in March 2005 but stuck around my apartment until the end of April before moving back in with the parents for a few months. One excursion that I enjoyed during that time was an April road trip across the Minnesota River Valley in western Minnesota on a Friday before heading home to the parents place for the weekend. This would be the sixth and final Minnesota River Valley road trip but I retired it in style on a perfect spring day with a sense of freedom and new beginnings on the horizon now that I was done with the newspaper while exploring the back roads of Kandiyohi and McLeod Counties, among other places.
Defining music: Def Leppard "Pour Some Sugar on Me" (which I got a kick out of blasting from my car radio while driving through the uber-religious Dutch town of Prinsburg); Dan Seals "Bop", Ronnie Milsap "Stranger in My House"

#19. New Year's Eve 1998--My New Year's Eve trip tradition started in 1995 and every year the destination was someplace different. This year would be my first journey to the Wabasha area in southeastern Minnesota. I had heard good things about the area, but ended up more impressed even than expected. The area's bluffs took on an interesting dynamic in the dead of winter with frozen water runoff on the edges of the bluffs looking like an ice waterfall. It was also my first experience with seeing the thousands of bald eagles that flourish in the area over the wintertime, and observing the hundreds of sail boats docked off of Lake Pepin at nearby Lake City. I've taken more than a dozen New Year's Eve journeys, with no two journeys having been the same over all these years...but this one was still my favorite.

#18. Sioux Falls 2001--My first solo Sioux Falls trip correlated with my peak interest in road trips in general and picking up new towns in particular. With that in mind, I took the opportunity to get off the freeway more frequently and take in a few nearby towns in southwestern Minnesota I had not yet visited, including Lakefield and Ellsworth, among others. The result was a much longer road trip to and from Sioux Falls than what I was used to. Now normally I get restless towards the end of long road trips, but not this one. For whatever reason, even after all those hours, I was in a chill state of mind and driving under 55 even in the home stretch that evening. My best Sioux Falls trip in several years.
Defining music: Carolyn Dawn Johnson "Complicated"

#17. Austin-Owatonna 2001--This is normally my least memorable road trip every year, a three or four-hour retread of my dad's vinyl repair summer in towns very close to home that I usually either do in late August or Labor Day weekend. But everything was always a little more exciting in 2001, the year I shook up my routines and explored some new area. For this trip, I went northwest from Owatonna to revisit Morristown and some unexplored backroads in Rice County. And instead of eating at Arby's in Owatonna like I had always done in the past on this trip, I dined on broasted chicken at The Broaster in Faribault, a family favorite that I loved dining at solo, and have returned to every Austin-Owatonna trip since.
Defining music: Rascal Flatts "Till You Loved Me"

#16. Southern Iowa 2006--For the previous six years, my tradition in April or May was to road trip through the Minnesota River Valley, but having exhausted every conceivable path on that trip and having moved to Des Moines, Iowa, in January 2006, it seemed like a good opportunity to add a different route in the spring. My choice was new territory in southern Iowa and northern Missouri, specifically places my dad told me about when he was on the road with the railroad in the 90s. The culture immediately changes south of Des Moines, and it was intriguing to visit the extremely rural and often impoverished small towns of southern Iowa, seeing the ever-present Amish buggies which looked like eerie Grim Reapers approaching on the gloomy Saturday morning, along with the twangy southern voices that became more prominent the further south I went. I hadn't been to Missouri since 1984 so it was pretty exciting crossing the line and later venturing to Chillicothe and Trenton, two decent-sized towns my dad mentioned while working on the railroad, and then heading north through Chariton, Iowa, hometown of Hy-Vee, the grocery store that is my mom's employer. All in all, a very insightful and exciting trip, with only one nagging downside. It was an ugly and gloomy day with spurts of heavy rain that really sucked away some of the energy of the day. In retrospect, it's hard to understand why I didn't just pick another day for this trip. Whatever the case, it was a great segue to a new road trip tradition exploring new parts of Iowa and Missouri every spring.
Defining music: Kellie Coffey "Texas Plates", Mark Wills "Hank"

#15. Trans-Faribault County 1994--My family visits the gravesites of relatives west and southwest of where I grew up on Memorial Day weekend every spring. In 1993, we visited a few towns on the east side of the neighboring county and unofficially began a tradition that became official the following year as we explored further into Faribault County, a quintessential farm county with lots of attractive little towns. The atmosphere was just perfect for this trip, in my dad's old truck without air conditioning on the hottest Memorial Day I ever recall with temps in the low 90s. It was the perfect segue to the beginning of one of my favorite summers which was only a few days away from kicking off. I've gone on this trip on Memorial Day weekend every year since and it always has some energy being the gateway to summer, but never have I enjoyed the trip as much as I did this year. Icing on the cake was visiting my grandma's place on the drive home and watching a Knight Rider rerun on cable.

#14. Buffalo Ridge 2005--A road trip that started out as a question mark due to the weather became one of my all-time favorites. Usually I take this trip in late March or early April, on the first nice Saturday of the season, but it was March 5 that I set to the highway for this trip, the earliest ever, due to a particularly nice forecast. It was foggy for the first two hours, but as predicted, the sun broke out and the temperature soared as I got closer to Minnesota's majestic southwest corner. I have a rotating route for this trip and this year's just happened to take me to Marshall early in the day and down to the south side of the Buffalo Ridge near Chandler and Edgerton by afternoon, which is one of my favorite routes for this annual trip. Everything was going well, but on the drive home I discovered a classic country station based out of Slayton that was playing a litany of great country songs from generations past one after another. A trip that was already an absolute hoot got that much better.
Defining music: Kathy Mattea "Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses"; Merle Haggard "If We Make it Through December"; Anne Murray "Lucky Me"; Don Williams "Tulsa Time"

#13. Northern Minnesota 2002--For quite some time, I'd been planning an opportunity to make a journey back to northeastern Minnesota, where I hadn't been for nearly 10 years at that point, and specifically to navigate Minnesota State Highway 23 which cuts from Duluth in northeastern Minnesota through central Minnesota and all the way down to the state's southwestern corner, encompassing a huge swath of territory and enabling me to score three dozen towns I'd never been to before. The timing of this road trip was particularly therapeutic, taking place in mid-September 2002 after a bruising breakup with long-distance girlfriend Dana and nearly a month of being the only reporter on staff at the newspaper before a new editor was hired that week. The trip lived up to expectations, with high points being the reacquaintance with Minnesota's north woods, seeing the paper mills and freshly cut timber lying next to the railroad, a typically delicious meal at the Taco John's in Cloquet followed by listening to a Twins game on the radio during their 2002 playoff run, and on Sunday, a pleasant and sunny drive down Highway 23 taking me to a number of new towns as well as different perspectives on towns I'd already been through but had never driven through on Highway 23. Listening to a classic country station from St. Cloud playing some golden oldies from generations gave the day some extra atmosphere.
Defining music: Andy Griggs "Practice Life", Johnny Horton "Sink the Bismarck", George Jones "Who's Gonna Fill Their Shoes"

#12. Buffalo Ridge 1998--A new road trip tradition began spectacularly on spring break of my sophomore year of college. I had never been anywhere in southwestern Minnesota north of either Highway 90 or Highway 60 and was clamoring to get there. My dad hadn't been called back to the railroad yet and I talked him into going to the Marshall area on a nice late spring day in late March. I immediately fell in love with the area and it was at this point, after scoring 15 new towns on this trip, that I officially decided it would be an interesting effort to try to get to all 734 Minnesota communities, so that gauntlet was effectively laid that day. Navigating the new territory gave me a renewed appreciation for my love of the wide open spaces of southwestern Minnesota and the Norman Rockwell look of many of the area's small towns. Up to this point, I was content to largely retravel my existing list of road trips year after year, but this was the trip that got me interested in visiting new places and conquering more Minnesota territory. From this point forward, no spring will go by without one of my several variations on this southwestern Minnesota voyage.

#11. Trans-Freeborn County 1990--One of my first road trips of all came together off the cuff on a Friday morning the day after Thanksgiving. I was in Albert Lea with my dad, drinking a can of Pepsi from one of their winter cans collection of 1990 and on a lark requested my dad take a little journey through the western side of Freeborn County to visit towns I'd never been to before. My dad's not one to go on "dry runs", very much unlike myself, so he said he'd do it if we got our pheasant-hunting gear and turned into a hybrid road trip/hunting safari. It was a good compromise and I enjoyed the drive through previously unexplored towns in western Freeborn County like Conger and Mansfield. We then stopped and visited my grandpa who lives on the Minnesota/Iowa line in southwestern Freeborn County and stuck around about a half hour. My dad was gonna take me home on a back road but missed his turn and we ended up deciding to visit more territory in southeastern Freeborn County, picking up several more little towns like Myrtle, London, and the memorable Deer Creek on the state line, which featured two houses, an abandoned creamery, and an abandoned general store complete with swinging door. Twenty years later, there is no evidence remaining that a town ever existed where Deer Creek once sat as it's all been plowed over. It was a fascinating approach to what would become my first road trip tradition and it certainly ignited a fire in me even at age 13 and has kept the tradition alive.

#10. Sioux Falls 1994--I didn't go to Sioux Falls at all in 1992 and was beset by terrible fog for the 1993 trip. I was overdue for a great Sioux Falls trip and got one in 1994, one of my favorite summers. It got to about 90 degrees, which is perfect weather for me on this quintessential summer trip, back then taking place in late July. My dad's truck was under repair so we took his buddy's old wreck of a Ford, which provided a unique memory of its own for this trip. It was on this trip that I got my first indication of the depth of the Hispanic population explosion in certain southwest Minnesota towns, particularly Worthington and St. James. Particularly back then, when my lineup of road trips was both in its infancy are far less extensive than it is today, there was no better feeling that coming home after a full day road tripping to Sioux Falls, bringing back all those great memories of the vinyl repair summer of four years earlier.

#9. Western Hump 2001--Purely by chance, a wedding in west-central Minnesota allowed me the opportunity the prior summer to take a road trip to the Western Hump of Minnesota and its surrounding area, allowing me to score dozens of new towns. As I often do, I wanted to try to capture lightning in a bottle again this summer, and came very close to pulling it off with another of my classic road trips. I shook up my route, going to a few of the same places as the summer before that I liked best, but going to multiple new places as well. The first day was full of speed bumps, with torrential rain in the first couple hours of the drive finally yielding, an attempt to meet a friend at a bible camp near Slayton, Minnesota, who I never was able to find, and getting pulled over for the first time in my life and accused of not wearing a seatbelt even though I had been (I must have convinced the cop...didn't get a ticket), but from there things went smoothly as I rented a motel room in Dawson, MN, and watched Miami Vice reruns on cable that evening. The next day, the weather was perfect as I explored my favorite communities on the trip in Minnesota's western hump and took a decidedly different route home through a bunch of additional unexplored terrain and scoring 17 new towns. I always love this trip in mid-to-late July but I've never had as good of a time in the years since as I did those first two years.
Defining music: Mark McGuinn "That's a Plan"; Phil Vassar "Six Pack Summer"

#8. Northern Minnesota 2003--I found a perfect balance on this road trip, with an extremely ambitious haul that took me west to east and then back in northern Minnesota, staying overnight at Grand Rapids, and scoring an astounding 47 new towns over two days, but not burning myself out with a route that was too ambitious. It was first time in more than decade that I had been to a number of places I visited on this trip in northeastern Minnesota (Aitkin County and the aforementioned Grand Rapids) while I had never been to several other places on the trip, particularly in northwestern Minnesota where I visited Moorhead and Crookston for the first time. And for most of the second day, I got a special treat journeying down I-29 in eastern North and South Dakota for nearly 300 miles, particularly impressed with the continental divide in South Dakota's northeastern corner. 2003 had been a pretty glum year for me in its first half but had really taken flight by this time of the year, with this very memorable road trip being part of 2003's heroic comeback.
Defining music: Ashley Gearing "Can You Hear Me When I Talk To You?", Josh Turner "Long Black Train", Darryl Worley "Tennessee River Run"

#7. Northern Minnesota 2004--It was a close call whether I loved the 2003 Northern Minnesota trip more or if the 2004 encore would trump it. I narrowly decided in favor of the epic three-day 2004 journey. Taking place in mid-September 2004, the trip added an extra dimension of fun as a lot of places already had yard sign wars between Bush and Kerry in the most exciting election campaign of my lifetime, and it was a blast seeing the turf war play out in western Minnesota where most of day one of the trip took place, and in heavily Democratic northeastern Minnesota where most of day two took place. I visited every town in the Iron Range for the first time on that second day before taking a very windy back road westward through northern Minnesota. I was thankful that I was the only car on the road because the road wouldn't have been nearly as fun with another car trailing close behind. My original plan was to trek through the isolated Red Lake Indian Reservation, but a native of a nearby town advised me only three days earlier not to even drive through Red Lake because of its hostility to outsiders. That was red flag enough for me and I complied by driving around the reservation and then towards the North Dakota border from there. I stayed overnight in Fargo and on day three explored some new terrain in the eastern Dakotas, including Valley City and Gwinnett in North Dakota, and then Webster and De Smet in South Dakota. This was the same year as the epic Daschle vs. Thune Senate race which made for some humorous radio ads and exciting yard sign wars, albeit somewhat misleading given that this is the most Democratic part of South Dakota. From there, it was an exhausting final couple of hours driving home to my apartment in St. James after this long but extremely worthwhile three-day detour.
Defining music: Jimmy Buffett and Martina McBride "Trip Around the Sun"; Restless Heart "Feel My Way To You"; Shania Twain and Billy Currington "Party for Two"

#6. Southern Iowa 2007--It was mid-May before I was able to organize my masterpiece of getting my then girlfriend Elise to tag along on my southern Iowa road trip. Unlike the prior year, I got a really nice day for the journey, which included some of the same areas just south of Des Moines to the Missouri border, but I went east from there to towns such as Centerville, Bloomfield, and Ottumwa. Elise was a great road companion in multiple ways and proved that just the right company can turn a good road trip into a great road trip.

#5. Dakota 2008--The high point of the summer of 2008 was my first voyage to the Black Hills in a quarter century (literally...I hadn't been there before since 1983). I had taken these journeys to South Dakota for five years at this point and had even crossed the Missouri River into the western part of the South Dakota a couple of times in those previous trips, but had never gone past Murdo to the area where South Dakota changes dramatically. And over a compressed time period, I took in a great deal of the Black Hills experience and even captured it on film, buying a throwaway camera at Wall Drug, and then visiting the outskirts of the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Sturgis, Deadwood, and the loop of the densest Black Hills from Deadwood to Spearfish where I stayed overnight. The next day I journeyed across the state line into Wyoming and almost hit two deer on the freeway. From there I traveled home on Highway 12 through remote northern South Dakota, an area most people wouldn't find much to like about but which I adored given the region's incredibly sparse terrain...the last place I expected to see a hot blond road construction worker who I got to flirt with while waiting for the pilot car to take me through the town of Dupree on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. It was exactly what the doctor ordered that summer and a nice return to the Black Hills after such a long time away.
Defining music: Luke Bryan "Country Man"; Jessica Simpson "Come On Over" (her lone country hit)

#4. Buffalo Ridge 2000--Only a few of my road trips can be looked back upon as moments of pure perfection, but this April 2000 road trip to southwestern Minnesota taken a month before my college graduation was one of them. I was planning to go myself and was surprised when my mom asked if she could come along. She's not much for road trips but it turned out to be a barnburner, a steamy 90-degree day that added perfect atmosphere to this adventure where my prior acquaintance with southwestern Minnesota was just enough to have a vague sense of what lied ahead but not well established enough to keep it from seeming fresh and original as I visited some of my favorite towns and discovered a handful of new ones in the Canby area. We stopped for lunch in Pipestone and explored the prairie highlands of Lake Benton and got stuck behind a train in St. James, the town that would be my home two short years later. This was the textbook perfect road trip and enough to make me wish my mom tagged along more often.
Defining music: Phil Vassar "Carlene", Yankee Grey "Another Nine Minutes", Lee Ann Womack "I Hope You Dance"

#3. Dakota 2003--Here was a road trip nearly three years in the making that I had neither the time nor the money to partake in up until my first vacation week from the newspaper in August 2003. The trip was planned out like a military operation and everything went breathtakingly well. I felt the energy soar as I passed Sioux Falls on I-90 for the first time since I was a little boy. The rest of that first day consisted of my first voyage to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, and points northward and westward from there including the most remote stretch of highway I had ever encountered up to that point in my life north of Highmore, SD, a 36-mile stretch of highway with only three homesteads. And all this transpired amidst 105-degree heat that wasn't as oppressive as one would expect given the limited humidity in central South Dakota. I stayed overnight at Aberdeen, hometown of Tom Daschle, and a town that left a considerable impression on me. Day Two took me to North Dakota through Jamestown and up to Devils Lake through the nearby Indian reservation and around the scenic lake itself just south of town. From there, I journeyed northeastward into far northwestern Minnesota, where I would score a flurry of new towns in the state's furthest northern reaches driving just across the Rainy River from Canada en route to International Falls where I stayed overnight for night two. It was 97 degrees that day, the warmest day in International Falls in more than a decade, and I remember burning through pop and bottled water by the jugful in the much stickier hit of Minnesota. The final day took me through the Iron Range and points southward through east-central Minnesota where I scored a half dozen or so new towns before wrapping up the road trip and returning home for the rest of my vacation. I said before that 2003 had been pretty weak up to that point, but this burst of energy was exactly what I needed to turn it around. I've gone on different vacations to the Dakotas almost every year since, but nothing has matched the magic of this rookie voyage, a trip that lived up to expectations completely after three years of build-up.
Defining music: Billy Dean "I'm in Love with You", Jennifer Hanson "Half a Heart Tattoo", Toby Keith "I Love This Bar"

#2. Western Hump 2000--The life-changing trip made possible through the wedding of my college roommate in Montevideo, Minnesota, where I stayed overnight. The summer of 2000 was my second favorite of all-time and as good of a time as I was having with it up to this point, this epic two-day trip was the segue to an even better second half of the summer. The journey to Montevideo was exciting in itself and the wedding went nicely, but it was the next day I was looking forward to most, scoring a motel room on the western edge of Montevideo and waking up that Sunday morning to see the sign for towns westward that I had been looking forward to getting to for years prior, and was finally about to get to. The energy was palpable, and it lived up to expectations completely. Most impressive was the western hump of Minnesota itself, a geographical anomaly on the cusp of a continental divide, with a breathtaking long-distance view for many miles into South Dakota. I scored more than three dozen new towns as I trekked through my well-planned route across west-central Minnesota through new towns like Wheaton, Morris, and Glenwood, before heading east to even more new towns such as Paynesville and Litchfield, all while traveling in my past-its-prime 1978 Ford Fairmont guzzling gas. Thankfully gas was only $1.25 a gallon back then. The whole trip was a hoot and my life was about to change in a profound way soon after my return.
Defining music: Vince Gill "Feels Like Love", Sons of the Desert "Everybody's Gotta Grow Up Sometime", Restless Heart "Back to the Heartbreak Kid"

#1. Sioux Falls 1991--I said at the outset that the Sioux Falls trip was the granddaddy of them all. It wasn't technically the first road trip I ever took, but it was the first planned as a road trip. I was one year to the day removed from the vinyl repair summer with my dad and had intense nostalgia to revisit. It was finally happening, and amazingly enough, my dad got a request from a dealership in Windom to do some work even though he had technically ended his vinyl repair gambit. But since he still had the supplies on hand, he was doing the work for a little bit of pocket change and it was downright eerie that it played out at the exact time needed to lend this road trip the perfect retro authenticity. We journeyed west on I-90 and the same good vibe that defined the summer of 1990 came rushing back and went into all the little towns to see all the car dealerships we had patronized the previous year. We never went all the way to Sioux Falls before, but it seemed like a worthy destination and gave us the opportunity to eat at Arby's, which as I said was a big deal for me at the time. On top of that, we went briefly into the Empire mall in Sioux Falls and I looked at the new TV Guide in the bookstore featuring an article about the upcoming seventh season of MacGyver. The weather was mid-80s, sunny, and perfect and the entire day was a perfect mix of new and nostalgia. Seems difficult to ever top this road trip for pure perfection.

So there's my list. There will undoubtedly be future road trips that will infiltrate this list. I have such a deep attachment with the road trips from the upper rungs of this list that they could very well stand as my all-time best for the duration of my life, but you never know when you set off for a road trip which ones you'll never forget. That's part of why I continue to go on them...as you never know which of them will remain in your soul forever.

Election 2012--A First Look

2011-02-13T16:12:00.000-08:00

The buzz has already started about the 2012 Presidential election, and the biennial array of Washington pundits is already handicapping the race, evaluating the selection of possible Republican candidates and considering their prospects of taking on Obama. Hilariously, there are plenty who are already decreeing that "Obama is looking better for re-election now", presumably based on a brief bounce in the polls that came after the Gabrielle Giffords speech. Up until last month, Obama's re-election chances hinged around the number of jobs the economy creates between now and the fall of 2012. But as of this month, it also hinges around whether or not the upheaval in the Middle East either settles down or results in unlikely stable democratic governments in Egypt and whatever other countries follow in its footsteps. If Obama appears not in control of events that unfold in the Middle East, he'll be blamed and independent voters will rally towards his opponent.

With that in mind, the candidate that the Republican Party nominates is very unlikely to matter, despite the monthslong obsession in front of us over which candidate is "electable". For the most part, all of them there. Perhaps not Ron Paul, but everybody from Sarah Palin to Newt Gingrich to Michele Bachmann is fair game for the Presidency if unemployment is still above 9% and the Middle East descends into regionwide chaos. On the other hand, Obama probably gets re-elected if unemployment is below 8% and the Middle Eastern situation cools. The only Republican candidate currently on my radar who could give Obama a run for his money even in ideal circumstances for the Democrats is Mike Huckabee, although he has skeletons in his closet too.

It's too early to know where things are going, but my lean is towards continued high unemployment and increasing vulnerabilities on foreign policy, whether it be the prolonging of the Middle Eastern crisis or something else. This would bode poorly for Obama. But before getting too deeply into that, here's my take on the states that are most likely off the table no matter what the political situation and who the nominees are. Current hypothetical polls aren't worth the paper they're written on, much as Democrats think a Sarah Palin candidacy would put Nebraska and Texas in play. Once the campaign gets underway, the usual suspects will move towards their usual tribes.

Likely Obama--California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.

Assuming my post-reapportionment figures are right, this gives Obama 191 electoral votes.

Likely GOP--Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

This would give the Republican 181 electoral votes.

Now for the most likely battleground states....

Colorado--It's been favorable turf for Democrats in the last few election cycles and if conditions look a bit better for the country, it's probably one of Obama's better prospects to hold onto if they can continue to get the Latino vote out and hang onto the suburban Denver swing vote. If Michael Bennet can win there in a climate as toxic as 2010, Obama has reason to be cautiously optimistic.

Florida--This one's gonna be tough to hold under any circumstances, as evidenced by the fringe-right wingnuts elected even in blue areas of Florida in 2010. Obama's enormous obstacles in this state include an elderly population hostile to him and a Jewish population that has never trusted him. He wouldn't have won the state even in the perfect storm of 2008 if not for the surge of Latino voters in the Orlando area that almost by itself made up the difference between Obama and McCain in the state. He'll need to duplicate that central Florida Latino surge in 2012 to have a prayer of winning the state. No easy task.

Indiana--Only because Obama won Indiana in 2008 do I even put the state on the list. I still can't believe he prevailed in Indiana, and I write it off as a fluke that's not likely to happen again anytime soon. Seems like no matter who the Republicans nominate, Indiana will revert back to tradition next year.

Iowa--Even Iowa's a tough call, as evidenced by the state's hard right shift in the midterms. It still might lean a little more towards Obama than a generic Republican challenger, but that state of the nation will have to look more favorable than they do now.

Michigan--On one hand, Obama can claim he single-handedly stopped the opposition party from turning Michigan into an apocalytpic no man's land by passing the auto bailout. But on the other hand, if unemployment is still over 15% there, he's not gonna get credit for "not making things worse". This one leans Obama, but never underestimate a desperate people's willingness to align themselves with political forces sworn to their destruction, as evidenced by Michigan sweeping in Republican lawmakers last fall despite the party's insistence the state's economy be vaporized only months earlier.

Minnesota--It definitely leans Obama, and I think that's the case even if favorite son Pawlenty is on the ballot. Minnesota is probably Obama's safest bet in the Midwest outside of Illinois, but again, if conditions are no better than they are today, a Republican victory is by no means out of the question.

Nevada--Given the massive surge of Latino voters in Nevada in recent years, things would have to be pretty bad in Nevada for Obama to be beaten by a militantly anti-immigration Republican. Even Harry Reid pulled off an improbable majority there last fall. With that said, things ARE that bad in Nevada, with the highest unemployment rate in the nation. It's possible that Reid's survival in Nevada could bode worse for Obama next year than it would have if Angle had won, because Nevadans may still be looking for someone with a (D) next to their name to punish.

New Hampshire--Another tough call, but with the war no longer looming as a hot-button issue, taxaphobic New Hampshire voters may revert back to form and vote Republican again at the Presidential level. If I had to put a wager on it right now, I'd bet Obama is denied New Hampshire this time.

North Carolina--It's a longshot that Obama will recapture one of his more eye-opening victories of 2008 with an encore win in North Carolina, but I'll say this. The demographic changes in North Carolina make that state seem like a somewhat better bet for Obama in 2012 than Florida.

Ohio--Here's a state that never had much love for Obama even at the height of Obamamania, so he doesn't have much of a margin for error here. Still, Ohio voters had their backlash vote of 2010 and installed Republicans at every level of government once again, and the state's destitute voters will get another taste of what life under Republican government is like...and I don't think they'll like it. If Obama seems like he has things at least a little bit under control by next year, I'd give him slight odds of holding Ohio.

Pennsylvania--Given the center-left nature of the Philadelphia suburbs that determine the winners and losers of Pennsylvania elections, one would be hard-pressed to predict that whatever nominee the Republicans put forward who has gone far off onto the right flank as is necessary to win the party's nomination has much chance of winning the state. Things would have to be 1980 Jimmy Carter bad for the incumbent to fail to win Pennsylvania.

Virginia--Like Colorado, I think the demographic shift of northern Virginia has changed this state's politics to the Democrats' advantage with all things being equal. Again, it depends on the economic conditions of election day, but my money is on Obama holding Virginia.

Wisconsin--After the beatdown Democrats took in Wisconsin last fall, we could be looking at a permanent change in the political environment in the Badger State. It's impossible to tell on this one, and I'll have to make a more informed call based on how Wisconsin voters respond to their new Tea Party Governor calling for members of the National Guard to fill the jobs of the state employees he plans to destroy. If Scott Walker doesn't scare straying 2008 Obama voters straight, nobody will.

Barring a 1984-style economic surge like Reagan enjoyed in the months before his landslide re-election, I expect the best Obama can hope for is a considerably narrower victory than he got in 2008 with losses all but inevitable in blue states like Indiana, North Carolina, and Florida. But on the other hand, there's potential for a Republican victory on par with Obama's 2008 victory, at least in the Electoral College.

Country Music History's Historical Timeline

2011-02-04T20:54:00.000-08:00

I've always had a soft spot for country music compared to other musical genres. While I enjoy other genres in more limited quantities, my car radio dial seems to gravitate towards country music far more often than the others. With that said, it's dominance on my musical radar has diminished some in the last decade, partly a product of mindlessly repetitious commerical country radio, and partly because the genre seems to be creatively depleted. Most commercial music has been creatively depleted for quite some time now, but country has clearly caught up with top-40 in recent years in its arid cliches.

As I so often do, I figured a timeline would be helpful to judge contemporary country music with its' origins as a stand-alone musical genre. Many recordings dating back to the 19th century would undoubtedly be judged as country music, but for all intents and purposes let's look at the genre's birth as being in the 1940s.

1940s and 1950s--This is the era of country music I know the least about since I was not alive at the time and even most "country oldies" shows rarely dig this far back. Hank Williams has long been credited as being the father of mainstream country music and was perhaps the gold standard for country-pop recordings of his era. He wasn't necessarily my thing as can be said of most of the era's mainstays such as Ray Price and Patsy Montana, among many others. Country music didn't start getting interesting for me until the mid-1950s with the introduction of two of my all-time favorite country artists, Johnny Cash and Johnny Horton, burst onto the scene, along with a few other crossover artists such as early Patsy Cline and Tennessee Ernie Ford that managed to rise above the genre's early hillbilly factor. On a future long weekend, it would probably be worth my time to dig into a number of old country recordings to see if I can find some lost treasures that have thus far flew beneath my radar. I'm sure there is plenty, but at least for me, country music hadn't hit its stride yet in this era.

Grade: B-

1960s--By and large, I still wasn't completely taken with what came out of Nashville in the 1960s. There was plenty to like, with the decade being the heyday of Johnny Cash, along with lesser but still quality acts like Jimmy Dean, Hank Snow, and the Statler Brothers, and the later years of the decade gave rise to upstarts like Glen Campbell, Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, and Dolly Parton that would take country music to an entirely different level. With that said, two of the genre's most promising early pioneers, Johnny Horton and Patsy Cline, were taken far too early in accidental deaths and stalled some of the genre's momentum. Furthermore, several of the decade's mainstays are all acts that, overall, didn't represent the kind of country music that grabbed me. I like several recordings by Loretta Lynn, but her style has never fully won me over....and that can be said to an even greater extent about 60s country stalwarts like George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Eddy Arnold, and early Conway Twitty. There were likeable aspects about all of these artists, and all had quality voices, but their sound just seemed a little too interchangeable to me. The rudimentary nature of country music production in the 1960s greatly limited the genre's appeal, meaning that artists really had to stand out stylistically to capture my fancy....and as far as I'm concerned, not enough of them did.

Grade: B-

1970s--Now that's a little more like it. Almost right away in the 70s, country music started to morph into a more satisfying package with a greater diversity of musical styles with rising production standards on the recordings, a number of promising artists who were holdovers from the previous decade really hitting their stride (Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Merle Haggard), and a greater overall acceptance of rocking the boat a little bit. The early 70s was an extension of some of the momentum from the late 60s and, in addition to artists mentioned who hit their stride in the era, also saw the rise to some crossover "countrypolitan" artists like Anne Murray, John Denver, and Charlie Rich who graced country airwaves with a more polished sound than what the genre had been used to. By the mid-70s, the exciting "outlaw era" was rarin' to go with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Charlie Daniels, David Allan Coe, the less commercially successful but still relevant Kris Kristofferson, and on the female side the young Tanya Tucker, redefining country music in an entirely different way than had ever been conceived in the previous generation. Former rocker Kenny Rogers picked the right time to enter country music world and his early recordings were also some of the more memorable cuts from the outlaw era, while Johnny Cash pretty much just kept doing what he'd always been doing in the 70s and the genre caught up with his vision.

An equally exciting development in the mid-70s was country music's outlaw era coexisting with the influx of additional new artists coming out of left field creatively, the best of whom were Ronnie Milsap, Emmylou Harris, and Crystal Gayle who combined elements of R & B and jazz into country music and would greatly influence the genre's direction in the post-Outlaw era in the decade to come. Meanwhile, new traditionalists like Don Williams emerged that kept the genre fresh and exciting and rooted in its historical origins. By the late 1970s, country had moved in a very pop direction, particularly with the advent of acts like Barbara Mandrell and Eddie Rabbitt, which would see the genre at its most commercially successful period in history at that time, with literally dozens of mainstream country hits crossing over into the top-10 of the pop charts in the late 1970s and into the decade ahead. It was the genre's second most exciting and second most pivotal decade in history.

Grade: A

1980s--The transition that began in the late 70s with more country music artists moving towards a pop/disco/Southern rock sound hit its peak in the early 1980s, with a great deal of help from John Travolta's 1980 "Urban Cowboy" movie which produced a surge in country music's popularity unlike anything the genre had ever experienced. Country traditionalists still bristle at the "urban cowboy" era as the time when country music lost its soul. It's true to an extent that the rough-around-the-edges country music of the previous decades would never be the same, but the era nonetheless produced a lot of outstanding music. While some established artists began making less interesting music as they embraced a more pop sound (Kenny Rogers, Eddie Rabbitt), other artists latched onto the genre's changing sound and made the best music of their career, none more than Ronnie Milsap but also T.G. Sheppard, Earl Thomas Conley, and Charly McClain. An exciting array of new artists also emerged that grabbed hold of country music's changing winds with tremendous results. Rosanne Cash was at the top of that list, but other quality newcomers would include Dan Seals, Steve Wariner, and Sylvia, the latter of whom was the poster child of urban cowboy era's most detested excesses, although she put out a couple outstanding albums before she officially became a caricature of bubblegum.

And while many look back to the early-to-mid 80s as being entirely defined by "urban cowboy" country pop, they're overlooking the continued chart dominance of traditionalists like Don Williams, Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty, Charley Pride, and even some newcomers like guitar-picking Ricky Skaggs, duo The Judds, and two of the genre's longest-lasting hitmakers, Reba McEntire and George Strait, the latter of whom has never been one of my favorites but still has a litany of quality recordings, the best of which came from the 1980s. The outlaw era was waning and hits became fewer and further between for country legends like Johnny Cash and George Jones, but Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson continued to score a plethora of impressive hits, with Willie in particular releasing some of my favorite of his recordings in the 1980s. Meanwhile, two of the decades biggest acts were Alabama and Hank Williams, Jr., newcomers that incorporated a decidedly Southern rock edge to country music. It was actually intriguing to see how the envelope was pushed with each progressive year in the 1980s with a more rock-edged sound going mainstream. It all made for a second consecutive decade of a compelling variety of sounds coming out of mainstream country music, but my the middle of the decade things had gone decidedly stale and by 1984-1985, the "urban cowboy" era was past its peak and country music needed another new reinvention to stay interesting.

It would get just that in the late 1980s with the neotraditionalist movement that brought us interesting newcomers like Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, and Clint Black sporting a traditional sound that still seemed contemporary. At the same time, some of the more progressive artists continued to flourish, particularly newcomers Restless Heart, Sawyer Brown, the Desert Rose Band, and Foster and Lloyd. With a little help from hitmaking wife Rosanne Cash who was at the top of her game in the late 80s, Rodney Crowell finally scored a successful solo career of his own after a decade of languishing in alt-country obscurity. Even some oddball alt-country types like Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett went mainstream with a handful of memorable hits in the era. The lull in the middle of the 80s definitely stalled some of the genre's momentum, but country music had another outstanding decade and was poised to bust out at the seams in the decade ahead.

Grade: A-

1990s--Far and away the most consequential decade in country music's history, the genre's metamorphisis began almost immediately in the decade and the blistering pace of change left the landscape at decade's end almost unrecognizable. The vast majority of country music's mainstays from decades past were swept away and never heard from again only a couple of years into the decade, with everybody from Ronnie Milsap to Don Williams to Hank Williams, Jr. to Dolly Parton scoring the final top-10hits of their careers and fading into oblivion, and late 80s wunderkinds Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam running out of gas by mid-decade. Only a handful of successful 80s acts survived the transition including George Strait, Reba McEntire, and Alabama, the latter two surviving by successfully adapting to the times and recording the best music of their careers. A few other unlikely survivors were Steve Wariner, Tanya Tucker, and comeback kid John Anderson who had a fine second chapter to his career which looked dead by the mid-80s. While it was certainly sad to see some of these artists go the way of the woolly mammoth, it really felt like the time was right for wholesale change in country music at the time and wholesale change is exactly what we got.

This change effectively came in four different waves of new artists in the first half of the decade. The first wave came right away in the decade when the genre was still embracing a more traditional sound and a handful of new artists that made traditional country sound fantastic including Alan Jackson, Mark Chesnutt, Joe Diffie, and Tracy Lawrence. In addition, the first wave of new artists produced some more risk-taking acts like Garth Brooks and Travis Tritt whose stylistic flourishes would more radically alter the genre's trajectory. In addition, struggling late 80s acts Mary Chapin Carpenter and Vince Gill finally found their groove at this time and would also define the decade's progressive thrust.

The second wave of new artists would really make me take notice and corresponded with the peak of the genre's "boom" times. Sadly, despite the eclectic mix of styles that this wave produced, only a few of the acts would have a shelf life beyond five years, which was truly unfortunate given the caliber of talent that emerged. Brooks and Dunn was the biggest act to come from this wave, with additional success stories including Trisha Yearwood, The Mavericks, Little Texas, Suzy Bogguss, Pam Tillis, Hal Ketchum, Lee Roy Parnell, and John Berry.

The third wave of new artists produced some really big names and very long careers, but in the long run would impress less creatively than the first and especially the second wave. Some of the names included Martina McBride, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Neal McCoy, Toby Keith, Clay Walker, John Michael Montgomery, Tracy Byrd, and one of my favorite country groups of all-time, BlackHawk. A very worthy list of names in the lexicon of modern country, but some of the drawbacks to this wave was that a number of the acts came out of the box with outstanding material but then managed to coast for many years to come with bland, middle of the road fare, while other acts have been defined by impressive musical highs and cringeworthy musical lows.

The fourth wave of new artists generally had the worst timing in that country music's population growth left them little room to maneuver and would ultimately shorten the careers of promising newcomers like Wade Hayes, George Ducas, David Lee Murphy, and Rhett Akins. Shania Twain was, for better or worse, a phenomenon all her own and at least has to be respected for shaking things up. The more successful crooners of this wave ended up being mush peddlers of varying levels of quality such as Ty Herndon, Mark Wills, Bryan White, and one of the genre's all-time biggest mush peddlers but nonetheless the biggest star to emerge from the wave, Kenny Chesney.

By the late 1990s, the transformation that was so exciting just a few years earlier had made country music fat and lazy with so many new artists competing for limited chart space all the while trending towards a more faceless and generic sound. Somewhere along the lines around 1996, things had gone wrong and Hot New Country's well-deserved momentum had stalled. Only a handful of new artists broke through in the later years of the 90s, albeit some impressive ones including Lee Ann Womack, LeAnn Rimes, Lonestar, the Dixie Chicks, and Jo Dee Messina. Thank goodness for these acts because by and large the survivors of the four waves of newcomers who seemed so fresh and original in the first half of the decade were growing stale by decade's end.

It's a little bit challenging to rate this decade in country music. With the first two-thirds of the decade being so impressive and putting out so much first-rate music in just a few short years, it's impossible not to rate the 90s and country music's best decade. But with that said, it crashed pretty hard by the late 90s, and by decade's end, Nashville was churning out its weakest batch of music in 30 years. And regrettably, the late 90s rut would continue in the decade ahead.

Grade: A

2000s--The biggest problem with the most recent decade of country music is that Nashville did not update and retool its sound the way that country music has historically done with the advent of each new decade. There was little to distinguish the Hot New Country sound of the 2000s from that of the 1990s, and as a result even the more impressive recordings of the decade ended up sounding just a little too familiar. Also, the artists themselves became more interchangeable and less positioned for staying power than top-tier acts from the past. Granted, the decade produced a handful of acts that carved out their own sound and style and have stayed fresh and exciting for the duration of the decade, including Brad Paisley, Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert, and despite the chasmic highs and lows of their musical selection, the group Rascal Flatts.

Beyond that, however, few of more promising acts from early in the decade lived up to expectations, whether it be the early flameouts of Lee Ann Womack, the Dixie Chicks, and Trick Pony to the creative drought that plagued Phil Vassar and Sara Evans after impressive early releases. Blake Shelton stands out as an artist who began his career as a breath of fresh air with a flurry of daring, outside-the-box singles but has since settled into a boring, middle-of-the-road groove. As the decade proceeded, Nashville gave us a number of male artists such as Dierks Bentley, Joe Nichols, Luke Bryan, and Jason Aldean who can best be described as "serviceable", keeping the genre on life support and occasionally releasing something mildly impressive, but definitely not leaving a lasting fingerprint on the genre's lexicon. Meanwhile, the new female artists like Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift have dominated the charts and almost all cut their teeth on an unapologetic country-pop sound, some of which works but hardly any of which sounds as good as the country-pop that came from the top female artists of decades past, where the vocalists and the songs were better.

Another trend from the 2000s that largely fizzled was an attempt to revive the country music outlaw era with a bunch of new acts (and rebranded old acts) that didn't have the cache to compare with Waylon, Willie, Hank, Jr., and the boys. The would-be new outlaws included Montgomery Gentry, Big and Rich, and the redneck woman herself Gretchen Wilson. The warmed-over older acts that "went outlaw" this decade were Toby Keith and Trace Adkins. All of these acts were able to pull off what they were selling a little bit, but all seemed like imitators rather than innovators at the end of the day. In addition to Keith and Adkins, a number of 90s acts effectively made the transition into the 2000s churning out many more hits. But few of them improved upon their early body of work with subsequent releases. One of the few who may have is Alan Jackson, but just about everybody else was at best uneven as Tim McGraw, Brooks and Dunn, and Kenny Chesney were, while others showed little reason why they would continue to even release music if this is the best they can do, as was the case with Reba McEntire and Garth Brooks.

Having sampled a significant amount of country music over the course of several decades, I have to conclude that this past decade was its weakest. While early country music didn't really jive with my style, it seemed original and interesting while this past decade's seems weary and cliched. And little that I have seen so far in the new decade gives me hope for a creative renaissance.

Grade: C

My conclusions from this timeline is that the country music that impressed me most came from 1975-1995, an era in which musical production standards rose and which traditional sounds coexisted with an adventurous and progressive new wave. Breaking it down to a smaller period of time, the most exciting time in country music's history was 1992-1995 when the genre was transforming at the speed of light and producing some of the most interesting music to ever come out of Nashville. But unfortunately this metamorphosis proved to be a bubble with the same trajectory as an economic bubble...unsustainable and followed by years of stagnancy after it pops. While country music is not nearly as intolerable as modern top-40 in the year 2011, it's been in a funk for quite some time now and needs a shot of adrenaline that doesn't seem to be on the horizon.

Early Thoughts on 2012 Senate Races

2011-01-22T15:40:00.000-08:00

I can't remember when the upcoming Senate contests have begun to take form as quickly after the last cycle ended as I have this year. Incumbents are declaring their retirements and contenders are declaring their candidacies months before the usual timeline. As is often the case more than 18 months before the next election, it's very hard to determine what the political climate will be by the time election day rolls around. Conventional wisdom says that even in a neutral climate, the Democrats are likely to lose control of the Senate given that they're defending 23 seats to the Republicans' 10 next year, with a loss of four seats ensuring GOP control.

I'll admit it's odds-on that the Republicans take over the Senate next year, but I still think it's too early to write the Democrats' obituary yet as I suspect the majority of a Presidential year electorate won't like what they see coming out of a Republican House, and perhaps even more so in the Republican-dominated statehouses, in the next two years. On the other hand, Obama is still the guy with the most culpability for the state of the nation in the eyes of the electorate, meaning that the nation's continued economic struggles could be another referendum against him much as 2006 and 2008 were both referendums against George Bush, with 2008 being an even bloodier year for Congressional Republicans than 2006.

Looking at it from a state-by-state perspective....

Arizona--There are murmurs that incumbent Republican Jon Kyl may retire, which would at least put Democrats in the game in this race, but their top prospective candidate, Gabrielle Giffords, has just been put out of commission for any 2012 Senate race. Beyond her, the Democratic bench is pretty thin in Arizona. Perhaps Harry Mitchell could be a credible statewide candidate, but I still can't envision a scenario where a Democrat is anything but a huge underdog in any Arizona Senate race in the foreseeable future.

California--The safe money is that 78-year-old incumbent Democrat Diane Feinstein will retire next year and the safe money says that she'll be replaced by another Democrat, particularly in a Presidential year. Certainly the odds are 90% or better for the latter, but don't underestimate voter anger towards the postapocalyptic state of affairs that will be occurring next year in California's state government, controlled entirely by Democrats. While it's still hard to see a Republican winning a federal statewide race in California, particularly with Obama at the top of the ballot, if a charismatic critic to the California status quo catches on, one can't rule it out. And I'm not coming up with any obvious heir apparent to Feinstein should she retire.

Connecticut--Voters in Connecticut have to be feeling a little down this week, never getting the chance to vote out Joe Lieberman now that he's declared his retirement. Congressman Chris Murphy is getting all the buzz on the Democratic side and it would require a masterstroke on the Republican side to beat him in modern-day Connecticut. The only Republican I could envision winning in Connecticut is former Congressman Rob Simmons.

Florida--The political climate in Florida was so toxic in 2010 that horrible candidates Rick Scott and Allen West were both victorious simply because of the (R) next to their name. There was zero chance Bill Nelson would have won reelection there if he was on the ballot in 2010, but 2012 could be another story. I'm not sensing that he's ever fully connected with Florida voters but he is a pretty good fit for the state and should win in a neutral political climate with an average GOP challenger, which would include former appointed Senator George Lemeiux. A bigger headache for Nelson would be if recently retired Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart decided to run.

Hawaii--The Republicans have a bench of one, or possibly two, in Hawaii. In a neutral year, that bench consisting of former Republican Governor Linda Lingle and possibly Republican Congressman Charles Djou would be formidable, especially for lukewarm Democratic incumbent Daniel Akaka, provided the 86-year-old Akaka chooses to run again. But 2012 will not be a neutral year in Hawaii because favorite son Barack Obama will be on the ballot, presumably with coattails. Whoever the Democrats nominate seems very likely to prevail even against Lingle.

Indiana--The state's brief dalliance with Democrats in 2006 and 2008 was fun while it lasted but definitely over, at least for the near term. Richard Lugar will run again, and my sense is that Tea Party fever that would have defeated him in a primary in 2010 will be on the downsurge by 2012. With that said, it's not out of the question that a wingnut Tea Partier could upset Lugar given the state of today's Republican Party, but my money's on Lugar surviving. Either way, the Republicans have a distinct advantage in holding this seat given that the Democrats' top Senate prospect, Brad Ellsworth, squandered his political capital and got crushed in 2010. Now theoretically if Ellsworth, Donnelly, or Baron Hill ran against a Sharron Angle-style Tea Party candidate in 2012, they'd have a chance, but it's hard to imagine things playing out that perfectly for Dems. The safe bet is that Lugar wins the primary and another term by a massive margin.

Maine--Either the best or second prospect for the Democrats to pick up a seat, victory in Maine requires the primary ouster of moderate Republican incumbent Olympia Snowe. While I think Lugar will survive a primary next year, Snowe is a different story, but if the Tea Party loses some momentum in the next year, Snowe could still pull this out the same way Lincoln Chafee did in the 2006 Rhode Island primary. Now Maine's Republicans are more conservative than Rhode Island's, but given that very conservative Republicans now dominate every level of Maine's state government, I'm sensing there will be a push back to the center and a recognition that Snowe is probably the only Republican who can win a Senate race in Maine in a Presidential year. There are a lot of variables in this race, but without a standout candidate on their bench, it still seems odds-against for Democrats getting this seat...because after all, if Snowe prevails in the primary, she wins the general election in a walk.

Maryland--Seems like Democrat Ben Cardin should have a cakewalk into a second term. Hard to envision a scenario where this race becomes competitive.

Massachusetts--Republican Scott Brown is gonna vote like a Democrat for the next two years and win a full term to the Senate quite handily in my opinion. It required a political climate as toxically anti-Republican as 2006 to get rid of Lincoln Chafee in demographically similar Rhode Island, and I suspect it would take a similar scenario to convince Massachusetts to vote out Scott Brown, and whatever the political climate is in 2012, I don't think it'll be that bad for the GOP.

Michigan--The economy is horrible in Michigan and will continue to be horrible next year. In 2006 and 2008, that helped Democrats big-time in the state. In 2010, it was equally beneficial for Republicans. Hard to see what the Michigan electorate will be thinking in 2012 in regards to a third term for Debbie Stabenow, but she has an excellent campaign narrative to run on regarding her party's insistence on bailing out the Detroit industry while the Republicans insisted on letting it be destroyed. Seems like any Republican challenger would have his or her hands full trying to defend their party's role in cheering on Detroit's collapse, so I'm leaning towards Stabenow hanging on here, particularly without any obvious GOP challengers on the horizon.

Minnesota--Democratic incumbent Amy Klobuchar crushed her opponent in a 20-point landslide for an open seat race. She's an extremely skillful campaigner who comes across as a likable moderate, and has thus maintained robust approval ratings even as those of her colleagues have plummeted. Particularly given that all top-tier Republicans are likely to be sharpening their knives for Franken in 2014, I'm guessing Klobuchar skates into a second term with another landslide victory and only token opposition.

Mississippi--If the Democrats couldn't beat Republican Roger Wicker in 2008, they definitely won't beat him in 2010. Now the Democrats have three potential top-tier candidates to run in the state with Travis Childers, Gene Taylor, and Mike Moore, but I doubt any of them would run and with Obama at the top of the ticket there's still virtually no chance they'd win.

Missouri--In my opinion this is the second most vulnerable Democratic-held seat. Even in the perfect political climate of 2006, Claire McCaskill won by a meek 51-49 margin. The tide has turned against Democrats significantly since then in Missouri and McCaskill's close ties with Obama almost by itself renders her unelectable for a second term against any generic Republican challenger. Expect her to be the Blanche Lincoln of 2012, losing by several points.

Montana--The odds are probably better that one-term Democratic incumbent Jon Tester will be defeated next year than of him winning a second term, but I'd rate his chances as better than McCaskill's. And part of what may work to his advantage is the GOP's threats to nix agriculture subsidies. With Tester being a farmer himself, there's good potential of him being a compelling figure to Montana voters who see the Tea Party as a bridge too far. There are number of Republicans who would be top-tier opponents to Tester, but the caliber of the opposition seems unlikely to be the difference in Montana next year. My guess is it will all hinge around how strong of a campaign Tester runs in a difficult state.

Nebraska--As vulnerable as Claire McCaskill is in Missouri, she's still infinitely better off than worthless right-wing corporate Democrat Ben Nelson in Nebraska. My guess is rotten poll numbers will nudge Nelson to retire. Whether Nelson stays or goes, any generic Republican will win by double digits next November.

Nevada--From the most vulnerable Democratic seat to the most vulnerable Republican-held seat, it's hard to imagine scandal-plagued Republican incumbent John Ensign could win either a primary or general election, so expect him to retire when a flurry of polls come out showing him in disastrous shape. At that point it will become a generic Democrat versus Republican contest. Conventional wisdom holds that Republican Congressman Dean Heller would be formidable if he ran for Senate, but given that Heller's district is entirely outside of Las Vegas, I'm not convinced of Heller's inevitability in the general election. Democrats have a fairly weak bench in Nevada, but I get the sense that very few people have come to terms with just how much Nevada has changed in the last couple of decades, and particularly with Presidential year turnout, Democrats should poll better than expected as they have been for about 20 years in Nevada.

New Jersey--Seems like it would be quite a feat to topple Bob Menendez in New Jersey, particularly with how weak the Republican bench is in the state. The political climate would have to be at least as bad as it was in 2010, and I don't see it happening.

New Mexico--If long-time Democratic incumbent Jeff Bingaman runs, he wins. If Bingaman retires, I'd still give the Democrats an advantage in a higher-turnout Presidential election year, but a hypothetical Heather Wilson candidacy for the Republicans would be formidable.

New York--If Republicans couldn't beat Kirsten Gillibrand in 2010, it's hard to see how they could beat her in 2012. A Rudy Giuliani or George Pataki candidacy could make things interesting, but I'd be surprised if either of those guys would bother with a Senate contest at this stage of their lives and/or careers.

North Dakota--Virtually everybody is conceding this seat to the Republicans after Kent Conrad's recent retirement announcement, but I'm not so sure. If former Democratic Congressman Earl Pomeroy chooses to run in what's likely to be a less toxic political environment than 2010, I'd rate him something close to a frontrunner. If Pomeroy doesn't run, then it's definitely odds-on for Republicans, but again, keep your eye on farm subsidies. If the Tea Party takes it on with any level of seriousness, the hypothetical "small government" advocates in states like North Dakota might discover they're not as big of advocates of free-market fundamentalism as they first suspected.

Ohio--There's no question that one-term Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown is vulnerable, but my money is that he'll hang on. Ohio's economy has been ground into dust and I suspect that after two years of Republican-controlled government at the state level making things worse by cutting off services to devastated communities, the populist message of Sherrod Brown is gonna sound pretty darn good by comparison. I think he's more likely to win than lose.

Pennsylvania--In a state demographically similar to Ohio, Bob Casey seems like a pretty good fit and is less ideologically left than is Sherrod Brown. On the other hand, he's hardly an electrifying personality and if he finds himself running against a charismatic challenger, he could hypothetically be in some trouble. But my bet is the pendulum swung further to the right than is natural for Pennsylvania in 2010, and that re-electing Casey will be the state's most practical correction.

Rhode Island--Without a Lincoln Chafee rematch likely, it seems pretty likely that freshman Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse will get a second term. There are some plausible Republican challengers, but it's hard to see them prevailing in a Presidential election year.

Tennessee--In theory, Democratic Congressman Lincoln Davis might make a credible Democratic candidate in a perfect political climate for Democrats, but with Obama running for re-election, it's hard to see that climate materializing for Democrats in Tennessee next year. Republican freshman Bob Corker's biggest risk is a right-wing primary challenge, but it's hard to make the case that Bob Corker has been insufficiently right-wing so I expect him to prevail in both the primary and the general election. Tennessee has simply become impossible turf for Democrats over the last decade.

Texas--Whoever has the (R) next to his or her name wins. Let's not kid ourselves. No matter who the Democrats run, even someone as generically appealing as Chet Edwards, won't be able to overcome the fierce partisan tide in Texas. We keep hearing how demographics will render the GOP unelectable even in Texas in a generation, but as conservative as even as the state's Latino population is, I wouldn't count on that.

Utah--I suspect Orrin Hatch will be prematurely retired by Tea Party wingnuts in his state's relatively exclusive nomination process that will deem him too "liberal". Of course in the state of Utah, it doesn't matter how big of a wingnut replaces Hatch as the GOP nominee, he or she will still win a Senate race by at least 20 points.

Vermont--My suspicion until I hear otherwise is that independent socialist Bernie Sanders will run for a second Senate term, and if he does, he'll win.

Virginia--It's no sure thing that quirky Democratic freshman Jim Webb will even run for a second term, but if he doesn't, former Governor Tim Kaine is waiting in the wings and will probably make for an even better Democratic nominee. My sense is that Virginia has turned a corner to a state that is more Democratic than Republican. Recent polls confirmed that even Obama is still reasonably popular there and leads prospective Republican challengers. With that in mind, I suspect either Webb or Kaine has a slight advantage heading into 2012, but if any wind at all is at the Republicans' back, that advantage will fade in an instant.

Washington--Democrat Maria Cantwell is always mentioned as potentially vulnerable, and she very well may have been ousted if she ran in 2010, but it seems like a stretch to believe she'll be beatable in 2012. The Republicans can't very well run Dino Rossi again, and their bench strikes me as incredibly weak.

West Virginia--Given that he's a comfortable fit for his state (or at least his shape-shifting ideological persona of the moment is), you have to give Democrat Joe Manchin at least a 50-50 chance of re-election. He'll dodge a bullet if the state's top Republican, Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito, chooses not to run. Also likely to work to his advantage will be no new climate change legislation floating through Congress in the next two years that will intensify sentiment that the Democratic Party is trying to destroy the state's coal industry. Still, Obama will be at the top of the ballot working as an anchor on Manchin's campaign, and re-election will be challenging even if he lucks out and gets a lousy challenger.

Wisconsin--Like Pennsylvania and Ohio, I suspect Wisconsin swung so far to the right last November that it will more likely than not vote Democratic again in 2012 to restore the center of gravity. Whether that Democratic candidate is current incumbent Herb Kohl or recently defeated Russ Feingold, I'd give the Democrat odds here. Then again, perhaps I shouldn't underestimate the prospects of a permanent ideological shift for the state.

Wyoming--Republican John Barrasso will win a full-term with a solid 70% majority.

Breaking down these races, I'm only inclined to give Republicans about four or five pickups, just barely enough to win back the Senate. They could certainly win a few more than that, but they could also just as easily find themselves on the short end in Montana and North Dakota and come up a seat short of winning the Senate back. Time will tell, as always, but at least right now, I don't have the feeling of impending doom for the election cycle ahead that I had at this time in 2009.

Will Any Economic Growth That May Happen in 2011 Be Felt on Main Street?

2011-01-09T13:34:00.000-08:00

The consensus opinion by just about everyone is that the economy is poised to experience measurable growth in 2011 for the first time in several years. It's not out of the question. With as far as we fell in 2008, the business cycle is overdue for a growth spurt. I'm skeptical that even that will happen though. Early in 2008, only 2% of economists surveyed projected we'd be in a recession by the end of the year. The expert opinions seldom prove beyond reproach, or in some cases even in the same light year as reality. There are plenty of anchors out there that could easily produce a double-dip recession.

First and foremost, the problem of toxic mortgages is far from solved. The debt associated with those foreclosed homes is not accounted for, and the numbers of foreclosures is still rising as the bad loans are still catching up to millions more underwater homeowners. Until the job market produces jobs capable of paying these underwater homeowners' mortgages, expect the debt to continue cycling through the economy. Even if the worst is behind us, we're nowhere close to being out of the woods.

Secondly, energy prices. As predictable as the sun rising in the east, the first signs of life in the American economy and the global economy is causing a surge in oil prices. It's not as if nobody could see this coming, but here we are nonetheless, poised to suffer through prices at the pump of at least $4 a gallon, and possibly as high as $5. Aside from raising the cost of doing business, it was also crimp already fragile consumer demand. There are no easy answers on reducing energy costs, but the political right has the most sellable talking points on the issue and will win the argument with more drilling, even after the Gulf Coast disaster.

Also, where are the jobs? It's hard to imagine a scenario where enough jobs are gonna be created to even measurably reduce the unemployment rate let alone create any upward momentum for wages. As jobless benefits get cut off for millions of Americans who will most likely never work again in our postglobalization economy, there's no telling what impact it will have in terms of rising crime and children unable to afford the pursuit of higher education because of their parents' long-term unemployment.

And along those lines, the continued budget shortfalls in the state will force austerity upon the economy and likely produce a combination of soaring tuitions and a loss of even more middle-class state jobs that currently offer almost single-handedly the purchasing power propping up consumer demand. So even if the jobs numbers appear good at various points in 2011, be sure that the jobs replacing those of well-paid government employees will be part-time temp jobs. In November 2010, 85% of the new jobs created were part-time temporary.

Add all this together and its hard to see how any economic surge in 2011 will be felt on Main Street. Expect the year to end with an unemployment rate of no lower than 9.2%, gas prices at near $4 a gallon (gas prices will likely peak in the summer as they usually do), and people who've run out of unemployment benefits moving back in with family or sleeping under bridges (the latter of which is the great underreported story of this recession....the hyperexpansion of the homeless). And none of this even accounts for the fallout if the deranged Tea Partiers who just took over the House make good on their promise not to raise the debt limit.

Perhaps we'll weather the storm with a better economy in 2011 than what I see as possible, but I think a little healthy cynicism is more than warranted here. And even in the best-case scenario of robust economic growth every month of 2011, the working class and what's left of the middle class will still end the year worse off than they started it. That's just the way the restructured post-NAFTA economy will roll for the foreseeable future.

Pretending Social Security Is Our Biggest Problem

2010-12-31T17:42:00.000-08:00

Every few years, a consensus opinion seems to form among Washington politicians that the finances of Social Security are so dire that we absolutely must take dramatic steps to reform it. While Social Security's long-term financing shortfall is very real, it doesn't even rank in the top-20 of America's most imminent problems. And the most obvious remedy--dramatically raising or lifting entirely the salary cap applied to the payroll tax--is no longer even being discussed by anybody. The only credible solutions, we're told, involve either redirecting the Social Security trust fund dollars to the oversight of Goldman Sachs or AIG in the form of "private accounts", or draconian cuts in payments and a raising of the retirement age. Whatever the viability of these arguments, the urgency just isn't there, and the pretense by politicians trying to convince us that it is generally represents an effort to both distract us from more serious and imminent threats and to convince us that all diagnosed "austerity" has to come almost entirely at the expense of those in the lower tax brackets.

All the focus on Social Security is a pathetic way of diverting attention from the fact that the most imminent entitlement threat is the bankruptcy of Medicare in just a few years, as opposed to the 30-some odd years before Social Security even begins to face math issues. The answers to fixing Medicare are much more elusive than those of Social Security, so it behooves politicians to avoid talking about it. That luxury is quickly slipping away from us though as soaring elder care costs are spiraling out of control and the bipartisan consensus that the very rationing of end-of-life costs that are absolutely necessary to avoid Medicare's bankruptcy are completely out of the question and tantamount to "death panels". Telling 85-year-old grandma no once in a while on $3,000-a-month prescriptions that are expected to keep her alive four more months absolutely can't be done, but telling her 65-year-old son he has to keep working for five more years before he can collect a reduced Social Security check is perfectly viable. It speaks to seriously messed-up priorities and a disconnect with what's going on in the real world.

Medicare's very real problems are fast approaching crisis mode because we're accepting an unsustainable premise of unlimited health care services for the demographic of Americans that run up the most health care bills and are the fastest-growing population cohort. Those declaring rations for end-of-life costs as tantamount to putting grandma to death could could not be more detached from reality, and they certainly threaten America's financial solvency much sooner than Social Security ever will. But we refuse to even have the conversation. When it's brought it, some faction shouts down the implications to the current elderly, pretending that Medicare by itself gives a permanent entitlement to a bottomless pit of taxpayer-financed medical care. The time wasted on convincing Americans to fear Social Security's bankruptcy should be spent on convincing us of the need to let go of granny when she becomes terminally ill as pretending she can live forever will bankrupt the country within the next 10 years.

And by contrast, let's take a look at a few of the implications of extending the Social Security eligibility age that the geniuses in Washington probably haven't thought through. With increased frequency, companies are letting go older employees because they don't want to bankroll their higher-risk health insurance costs. In other words, it's becoming increasingly difficult for people in their 50s and early 60s to stay on their employer's payroll now, so how much bigger will the problem be when the same employees are expected to stay on the job until age 69?

And just because life expectancy is increasing doesn't mean the human body's ability to do repetitive motions without becoming impaired will increase accordingly. Policymakers sitting on their asses all day pontificating on how store clerks and factory workers need to work an extra five years don't seem to have considered that whatever savings accrued through delayed access to Social Security checks will likely be offset and then some by higher health care costs accrued by working-class Americans continuing to work beyond their body's expiration date. A workforce full of cripples isn't one that saves society money, rendering any discussion of delaying the retirement age a nonstarter until the issue is addressed.

As it stands now, life expectancy isn't growing at all for the working-class Americans most dependent on Social Security, so the program will become that much more regressive if the only people who get to cash in on it are the office workers who live long enough to collect benefits. As Paul Krugman said, the argument effectively amounts to forcing janitors to work longer because corporate lawyers are living to older ages.

The leadership we need is from the President here, but I can't imagine he'll disavow the prescriptions of his own debt commission. The agenda will be set by Congress, and gutting Social Security has been a cause celebre for the Republican majority for years, even before the takeover of even further-right Tea Party radicals. Obama can't possibly think the assault they plan for Social Security is good politics even if he does think it's good policy, which he may given the cacophany of pointy heads in Washington insisting that it is. There are certain issues where taking an unpopular position is the right thing to do. Pretending that cutting Social Security is the nation's top priority is not one of them, and if Obama thinks it is, he'll find his approval ratings sinking even further underwater no matter what his advisers are telling him.

401Ks The Undoing of America?

2010-12-28T20:54:00.000-08:00

A generation from now, we may very look back at 401Ks as America's financial undoing. There are so many things contributing to America's fast approaching sunset as an economic superpower, but not since the trojan horse has such an unassuming menace managed to so effectively and quietly condemn a nation's future to rubble. Unfortunately, even as report after report comes out showing how dire the Baby Boomer generation's retirement prospects are, it seems I'm the only one reaching the conclusion. The very people lamenting how the Baby Boomers have been ruined by 401K's are doubling down on their endorsement of funneling still more money into 401Ks.

In an effort to cut costs, the American business community sold the clueless, nonunion American workforce into giving up a defined-benefit pension and into a plan where the worker paid for his own retirement but management still got to advertise it as a company retirement plan. From there, Wall Street barons were like sharks in a feeding frenzy taking advantage of a newly created amateur investor class looking to become millionaires as quickly as possible. Wall Street cleverly blew up all kinds of phony and unsustainable bubbles, reaped the short-lived uberprofits, and then left Joe Sixpack and taxpayers to lose their hair in the nuclear fallout. Twice this has happened now....in a little over 10 years....and with each new round of evidence that the 401K breeds foolhardy investment policy, it becomes all the more popular in contrast to defined-benefit pensions where the return on investment is a bastion of stability by contrast.

So here we are, a nation full of Baby Boomers approaching retirement age...with 401Ks that have lost 50% of their value since their 1999 peak, and which are almost assuredly overvalued right now in the post-TARP bubble that has no bearing on real-world economic conditions which continue to look disastrous. Yet here we are....insisting that still more workers join the 401K bandwagon so they can get caught in the next whirlpool. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

It's a Really Terrible Deal

2010-12-18T20:55:00.000-08:00

As I've said before, America has a permanent de facto Republican governing majority. Even if Democrats take over the Presidency and both houses of Congresses with historically large margins, the country will still be governed as though the entire city of Washington, DC, is populated by Tom DeLay clones. Democrats can run on ending pointless and idiotic wars, win by decisive majorities, and then take office and stay the course on the Republican foreign policy agenda. Democrats can run on ending tax cuts for the rich and shoring up Social Security, win by decisive majorities, and then take office and cut taxes for the rich while looting money designated for Social Security.

The latter is the "bipartisan compromise" we just saw brokered, passed by large majorities in both houses of Congress and now signed by the President, to the eternal shame of every last one of them. And even the few sensible liberals who opposed this abomination did so with the caveat that "there are a lot of good things in here...". Like what I ask? Far as I can tell, this "compromise" is one of the first sweeping pieces of legislation in ages in which every item in it is a very obvious mistake.

On the surface, I suppose you could say 13 months of additional unemployment benefits are a good thing, but what's not mentioned is that the people running out of benefits who need them most are not covered by this deal. I'm struggling to understand who is getting additional benefits that wouldn't otherwise. Far as I can tell, what Obama and the Democrats got out of this deal is merely the unemployment insurance program continuing to exist until 2012 before the Republicans get the opportunity to dismantle unemployment insurance entirely.

And a payroll tax holiday? Seriously? This coming only one week after the most recent breathless frenzy on Washington about Social Security's imminent financial trainwreck and how we HAD TO DO SOMETHING....QUICK! Who knew that for all the bluster about Social Security's financial desperation, Washington politicians only nonrhetorical remedy would be to defund the program's current insufficient financing? What could Democrats be thinking by allowing this defunding, expediting the program's financial ruin and strengthening Republican arguments that Social Security's shortfall is so dire that it must be redirected to Wall Street. Even before that, the Democrats also most likely made permanent yet another tax cut that Obama insisted upon himself, as Republicans will scream bloody murder in 2012 about "raising taxes on working families" in the event of the payroll tax holiday expiring. Does anybody really think in a Presidential election year that Republicans will be unable to win that argument in a nation as mindlessly gluttonous as this one? Especially since they're winning arguments now in which only 26% of the public agrees with them?

Also, how exactly did the shrinking of the estate tax get into this "compromise"? Isn't the idea of a compromise that the other side gets things it wants in exchange for giving them exactly what they want? The Republicans got exactly what they wanted with the extension of the Bush tax cuts on high-income earners. How does any negotiator with any mojo at all somehow throw in that freebie as part of the negotiation rather than fight for things HE SUPPORTS?

The new narrative of both the tax deal's supporters and its detractors is that Obama was able to sneak in a second economic stimulus under the Republicans' noses. Well if it's a stimulus it's a stimulus in name only. Nothing in this package will beget economic growth and has the potential of actually stalling it further by weakening America's financial standing in the global markets with another $1 trillion in borrowing. Any serious overture towards stimulus would include financial relief for the states who are beholden to a stack of unfunded mandates from the federal government as well as a balanced budget requirement even in the middle of a serious economic recession. For Obama's negotiating emissaries to not fight for that even while presumably securing a second stimulus for the opposition suggests stunning incompetence as deep cuts to much-needed programs are on the horizon in state governments across the country in 2011.

What should have been done is a two-year extension of existing tax rates only for the middle class, with them set to expire on January 1, 2013, barring an economic calamity. It's almost comical that politicians of both parties pretend to support the draconian budget-balancing recommendations of the debt commission yet can't even ask for sacrifice on the easy stuff like returning to the Clinton era tax rates.

Even the tax rates on the middle class have very little role in the trajectory of the business cycle, but at the current point in time where the hour of reckoning has befallen consumers whose lengthy expanse of financing a consumer binge on credit, it's probably true that it would be economically harmful to let their tax cuts expire. No such equivocation is needed on extending tax cuts for the rich, which will have absolutely no impact on the economy. These "job creators" are already sitting on $2 trillion of idle money and not creating jobs with it. Extend the Bush tax cuts and they'll merely be sitting on $3 trillion and not creating jobs with it. Robust consumer demand is required to propel even marginal job growth, and the fundamentals of our economy indicate that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.

That's why the Republican Presidential candidates who are coming out against this deal (usually justified with the typically monstrous Republican arguments, such as its being too generous to the unemployed) are wise. They're making a credible calculation that this latest mindless and profligate giveaway will not trigger meaningful economic growth, and even if it does, it won't be felt by Joe Sixpack. I'd be very surprised to see unemployment below 9% in November 2012, and it appears that Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin are coming to the same conclusion given that they've come out in opposition to the deal. By doing so, they get to paint the inevitable ineffectiveness of extending tax cuts for the rich as the Obama economic plan while simultaneously being in support of extending tax cuts for the rich permanently. And this will play effectively to the typical low-information voter.

How on Earth do Democrats continually get themselves in this situation? Superficially, there is still a wide chasm of differences between the two parties, but in practice they all seem to agree on the most indefensible public policies when push comes to shove. As I said in the lead-up to the election, the Democratic Party is making it very hard to justify its very existence by folding on this issue. We could just as well have a Republican President and 535 Republican members of Congress because they all end up governing the same destructive way.

2010 Election Postmortem

2010-11-11T13:23:00.000-08:00

Normally, I try to write my election postmortem within two days after the election but considering how many races tend to hang out there for days or even weeks after election night, I figured I might as well hang back a week or so and crunch some election returns while waiting for the West Coast to get their ballots counted at the usual snail's pace. Overall, the Democrats didn't do quite as bad as I expected, but they still got smashed, wiping out 37 of the 48 Democrats in Congress from districts won by John McCain. In other words, districts we have almost no chance of ever getting back. I think the best explanation why the 90-plus seat loss I anticipated didn't happen is that the Democrats have a strong enough GOTV operation in enough places to assure a historic once-in-a-century wipeout is an almost impossible feat. In places where Democrats have a strong machine, such as Philadelphia and now Las Vegas, enough Democratic voters are always gonna be produced to mitigate losses, effectively in the case of Harry Reid, but falling just short in the case of Joe Sestak.

But "not being as bad as I predicted" still qualifies this as nothing less than a crushing defeat. As I anticipated two years ago, the most damage was indeed done in state legislatures across the country, handing the GOP legislative majorities that will redistrict themselves a favorable map for the next decade. Just as was the case in 2000, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania stand out as the states where we're poised to get the least favorable district map. What passes for good news is that the Republicans controlled redistricting in all three states in 2001 as well so there isn't a lot more damage that can be done to us. Still, expect at least one Democrat to fall in all three states. Dennis Kucinich and Betty Sutton will probably be districted together in Ohio. Gary Peters and Sander Levin in Michigan. And probably Mark Critz districted into Tim Murphy's turf in Pennsylvania. Other Democrats are likely to be felled in a number of other states as well. It was a bad year to lose big, but there was no other outcome possible, which was evident two years ago.

Anyway, as always, as state-by-state analysis...

Alabama--It was obvious that there were gonna be some states where Democrats would be utterly vaporized on election night 2010 and Alabama was one of them. Dems lost both houses of the Alabama Legislature, and despite early October confidence that conservative Democrat Bobby Bright had inoculated himself against the charge of being one of those "lib'ruls" in Congress, the race broke late along party lines and Bright ended up losing 51-49. No great loss, but nonetheless frightening to see more turf permanently ceded to the other side as Bright's defeat assures in Montgomery, Alabama. More depressing is that Democrats ran the only gubernatorial candidate who could possibly win in Alabama (Ron Sparks) and he still got destroyed by double digits.

Alaska--Hard to get too excited about the likelihood that Lisa Murkowski is going back to the Senate, but her victory was nonetheless a rare moment of sanity from election season 2010 in the rejection of Tea Party wingnut and hypocrite Joe Miller. It was also nice to see Sarah Palin get embarrassed when her archrival overcame Palin's hand-picked candidate. Beyond that, Don Young who was expected to lose in 2008 won again handily while Palin's GOP successor Sean Parnell held the Governor's office. Across-the-board Republican year in Alaska, but the worst possible outcome of a Miller victory was likely averted.

Arizona--I don't have strong feelings either way on Arizona's new anti-immigration law, but the shocking level of incompetence displayed by Governor Jan Brewer in virtually all public appearances was frightening, particularly given that she was still re-elected by double digits. In the Congressional races, I never really felt as though Raul Grijalva would be taken out in his majority Hispanic district, but was surprised by how narrow his winning margin was. In the other four contested races, an October PPP poll suggesting Ben Quayle was trailing his Demcratic challenger proved fruitless and, as everyone expected, Democratic incumbents Ann Kirkpatrick and Harry Mitchell were felled. Kirkpatrick's seat seems winnable again in a better climate, but I can't see any other Democrat but Harry Mitchell ever winning AZ-05 again. The one pleasant surprise in Arizona is that attractive and charismatic Class of 2006 Democrat Gabrielle Giffords narrowly held on for her third term.

Arkansas--I had anticipated Arkansas would be an across-the-board killing fields for Democrats this year in much the way Georgia was for Democrats in 2002. As such, I expected popular Democratic Governor Mike Beebe would end up falling in the same way Roy Barnes did in Georgia eight years earlier. That certainly didn't happen as Beebe prevailed in all 75 Arkansas counties. In the House races, the open seats vacated by Democrats Marion Berry and Vic Snyder slipped away to the other side as expected, but Blue Dog Mike Ross held on by a surprisingly comfortable double-digit margin in southern Arkansas. The state's marquee race was the Senate race, of course, and that was over a year ago with Republican John Boozman laying waste to two-term Democratic incumbent Blanche Lincoln by more than 20 points, leaving Lincoln as the last incumbent Senator who lost by 20 points since George McGovern in 1980.

California--The state of California remains an impenetrable indigo blue fortress even in this most inhospitable political climate. Neither of the GOP candidates for Senate or Governor were particularly bad this year, although their political instincts were fairly mediocre and ultimately allowed Democrats to prevail. Jerry Brown now retakes ownership of the most thankless job in the country, one I'm not so sure Democrats should have really wanted to win. Barbara Boxer also won by a surprisingly lopsided margin and effectively consolidated the 2004 John Kerry coalition for a nine-point win. Just as impressive if not more so was the Democrats hanging onto every California House seat, even Jerry McNerney in his conservative-leaning Central Valley district. The combination of white liberals and Hispanics now look like an overwhelming coalition for Democrats in California elections, but the state's impending bankruptcy could change a lot of attitudes pretty quickly out there.

Colorado--Thanks to the GOP's nomination of horrible candidates for both the Governor and Senate races, the Democrats kept their Colorado winning streak alive for another election cycle. Good guy Democratic Senator Michael Bennet mercifully prevailed over noxious opponent Ken Buck while Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper prevailed in a complicated gubernatorial election where the Republican candidate barely got 10%. The House races were less accommodating to Democrats, however, as John Salazar and Betsy Markey both got ousted. Both districts continue to trend Democratic, however, and I suspect we may see them turn blue again in a less toxic cycle.

Connecticut--The northeast continued to be a blue sanctuary in 2010 despite legitimate Republican threats at every level. In the Senate race, Attorney General Dick Blumenthal's self-aggrandizement almost put his race at serious risk, but his long-standing popularity along with the GOP's nomination of WWE baroness Linda McMahon rather than moderate war hero Rob Simmons helped Blumenthal win handily. Two House districts held by Jim Himes and Chris Murphy appeared to be at risk in the closing weeks of the campaign, yet both prevailed. Himes' victory wasn't official until some late votes arrived from Bridgeport, which also sealed the deal for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan Malloy, another Democrat whose long-held lead nearly slipped away in the closing weeks of the campaign. In the end, the Democrats couldn't have asked for a much better year in Connecticut in defiance of national trendlines.

Delaware--Perhaps the only state where Democrats had a better 2010 than Connecticut was Delaware where moderate Republican Mike Castle forfeited his safe House seat to run for the Senate, only to get hoodwinked in the primary by right-wing nutball Christine O'Donnell. Republicans also ran a Tea Party wingnut for Castle's old House race and the result was a double-digit margin of victory for Democrats in both races. Newly elected Senator Chris Coons is the luckiest man in politics this year and the unluckiest is perhaps Beau Biden, who passed on a Senate run believing he couldn't beat Mike Castle.

Florida--From the good to the very bad, Florida was a killing fields for Democrats this year, and candidates who verifiably belong in prison ended up winning. At the top of that list is new Governor Rick Scott, a corporate crook who plead the fifth dozens of times to crimes but managed to buy the seat with stolen cash, beating a very credible challenge from top-tier Democrat Alex Sink. One of the worst clusterfucks in recent history catapulted charismatic right-wing newcomer Marco Rubio into the Senate, although I highly doubt either Kendrick Meek or Charlie Crist could have beaten him in a two-person race. Dems lost four House seats to boot, three of which were predictable with Allen Boyd, Alan Grayson, and Suzanne Kosmas. The Democratic trendlines of the Orlando area make it likely we'll get Grayson's seat back with a less abrasive emissary. But the ultimate kick in the teeth from Florida voters in 2010 was the eight-point victory for Allen West over incumbent Ron Klein in Democratic-leaning Palm Beach County. I have no idea what the retired Jews of Boca Raton found so compelling about a candidate who rode with a criminal biker gang, said he had a higher security clearance than the President, and said he wanted to make it so his opponent was afraid to leave his home. West's victory stands out even now as one of the worst outcomes of an incredibly bad election night.

Georgia--A lot of crooks were elected to the highest levels of government last week...literally. In addition to Rick Scott in Florida, Nathan Deal of Georgia weathered about 10 different scandals that would have sunk just about any other candidate, but Deal prevailed by double digits because of one secret weapon....the (R) next to his name. Beyond that, Democrats lucked out by losing only one House seat, and that was of course Jim Marshall in central Georgia who was always living on borrowed time in his conservative district. On the plus side, despite an embarrassing scandal, Sanford Bishop held on by the barest of margins in his southwestern Georgia district. I'm hoping Bishop steps aside after this close call as his 44% black district is not one that Republicans have any right winning.

Hawaii--It's always hard to poll Hawaii so it wasn't clear until late that Democrats were gonna retake the governorship with Neil Abercrombie, which is a particular plus in Hawaii with two Democratic Senators older than 85 years old. Hawaii's love of incumbents led me to mistakenly believe that when Charles Djou prevailed in a three-candidate race in the special Congressional election last spring, it was his for life. Luckily, in one of their three pickups in the nation, Democrat Coleen Hanabusa was able to get the job done and beat Djou in November.

Idaho--The only contested race was one I knew was too good to be true for Democrats when Walt Minnick held a comfortable lead in his accidental House race right up until the last couple of weeks and the partisan tide of Idaho caught up to him. In the end, it wasn't even close. Minnick, who had led by about 10 points in most polls, ended up losing to Hispanic Republican Raul Labrador by nearly 10 points. What's amazing is that Minnick ever won this seat in the first place and held a lead in the polls for months.

Illinois--Every election year, no matter how massive the partisan wave, there's an incumbent Congressperson who survives despite everybody proclaiming him or her dead. This year, it wasn't a Congressman who rose from the dead to score a surprise win. It was Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, who inherited the seat when Rod Blagojevich and was expected to suffer for that connection by just about everybody. But Quinn narrowly survived. There were other Democratic gubernatorial candidates I would have preferred to see survive besides Quinn but it was nice to be able to hold one Midwestern statehouse this year as the region swung heavily to Republicans. Unfortunately, Democrats got mauled everywhere else in Illinois, managing to lose Obama's Senate seat to Republican Mark Kirk thanks to a perfect storm of lousy candidate selection and the shadow of scandal haunting the Dems, especially downstate. Meanwhile, Democrats lost four House seats, including a heavily Democratic seat in the Rock Island area that was drawn to specifically condense all the Democratic industrial cities of downstate Illinois, and including Melissa Bean's seat which nobody considered vulnerable. On top of that, Kirk's old House district in the northern suburbs of Chicago, which leans considerably blue, stayed in Republican hands by a 51-49 margin, denying Democrats one of the few expected pickups. So Quinn's unexpected victory notwithstanding, it was still a horrific year for Democrats in Illinois and one has to hope for a much more hospitable climate in 2012 with Barack Obama back on the ballot, positioning Democrats to win at least a couple of these seats back.

Indiana--Two consecutive good cycles for Democrats in traditionally Republican Indiana evened out last week as Democrats got mauled in Evan Bayh's old Senate seat with a candidate that appeared strong on paper, and also lost two Democratic-held House districts in southern Indiana that are gonna be very hard to get back. Joe Donnelly narrowly held on in his northern Indiana seat, but even that is a pyrrhic victory since his district is likely to be merged with IN-01 in redistricting. It wasn't realistic that we would hold conservative Indiana, but here we are right back to where we were in 2004 in the state.

Iowa--Another Midwestern bloodbath with unjustifiably popular former Governor-for-life Terry Branstad defeating incumbent Democrat Chet Culver and scoring an unprecedented fifth term, bringing along a Republican supermajority in the Iowa state House and a reduced Democratic majority in the state Senate with him. The only good news that came out of this carnage is that all three Congressional Democrats, endangered to various degrees, narrowly prevailed even with Republicans dominant at the top of the ticket. On the other hand, it's a certain bet that with Iowa losing one of their House seats, next year, one of the three Democrats will be extinguished.

Kansas--Not much to say here. A state that's always been red becomes monolithically so this cycle, with a new hard-right Republican Governor and Dennis Moore's old House seat picked up by a Republican.

Kentucky--There was no way Jack Conway was gonna beat Rand Paul in Kentucky this year, but the tacky Aqua Buddha ad predictably backfired and turned what may have been a close race into a double-digit Paul blowout, nearly taking down Democratic Congressman Ben Chandler in the firestorm. Something tells me a lot of voters could find themselves with buyers' remorse thanks to the incessant grandstanding that Paul can expected to put on once he becomes a Senator. Whatever the case, we're stuck with him for six years.

Louisiana--My gut said Charlie Melancon's well-run campaign would ultimately bring him to within single digits of David Vitter, but it wasn't meant to be as Vitter prevailed by almost 20 points despite all of his considerable warts and the fact that he barely even campaigned. Beyond that, an even swap of House races as Charlie Melancon's seat went easily to the GOP while a Democrat had no trouble winning back the New Orleans-based LA-02 that Republican Joseph Cao picked up in a perfect storm special election.

Maine--The state of Maine took a hard right turn at the state level, with a three-way gubernatorial race allowing a Tea Party wingnut to prevail with a plurality, Minnesota-style. Beyond that, both houses of the Maine legislature swung to the Republicans, creating a perilous situation for progressives in that state for at least the next two years. The good news was that both nominally endangered Democratic Congresspersons from Maine prevailed fairly handily.

Maryland--In one of the most Democratic states in the country, little changed with easy re-elections for Senator Barbara Mikulski and Governor Martin O'Malley. The only loss was accidental Democratic Congressman Frank Kratovil from the state's Eastern Shore who picked up a seat in a perfect storm in 2008 and was never gonna hold the seat under normal electoral conditions, let alone the 2010 GOP tsunami.

Massachusetts--I was very surprised by how well Democrats did this year in Massachusetts, expecting the Scott Brown phenomenon to continue along with the general softening of Democratic strength in the state. Instead, three potentially endangered Democratic incumbents all prevailed handily and even the open seat in the state's least Democratic district stayed in Democratic hands. On top of that, Governor Deval Patrick prevailed by a comfortable margin in a race that was no sure thing for him. It's definitely nice that there are a few bastions of Democratic strength that can generally withstand even a Category 5 hurricane.

Michigan--With the combination of Michigan's rotten economy overseen exclusively by Democrats currently in control of Congress and Michigan state government, it was pretty obvious that it would be an ugly year for Democrats in the state. And it was. As expected, Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Snyder won in a landslide, and his coattails produced GOP supermajorities in both houses of the legislature as well. What a kick in the teeth that the same Republican Party that wanted to let the Detroit automakers be vaporized just two years ago is now rewarded by the state's voters. How quickly we forget. Despite some promising late poll numbers, Democrat Mark Schauer was taken out by the GOP tide. I was a little surprised that Gary Peters was able to hang on in Oakland County, but as I said, his seat is likely to be merged with MI-12 after the Republican gerrymander, so two years is probably all Peters has left. Very rough year for Michigan to go crimson red.

Minnesota--It was a mixed night in Minnesota. It looks like we'll have a Democrat Governor in Mark Dayton, but after the DFL supermajorities became Republican majorities, Dayton's not gonna have much to work with. Minnesota's legislative districts are very competitive so with any kind of partisan wind a whole pit of seats change hands. But even I didn't see this big of a GOP wave in the legislature. I was surprised on the other hand that Democrats were able to hold all three constitutional offices (Secretary of State, Auditor, Attorney General) even with the weakness at the top of the ticket. Southern Minnesota Democratic Congressman Tim Walz held on fairly comfortable, but regrettably one of the smartest and most effective Congressmen in the country, Jim Oberstar, was caught flat-footed at the worst possible time and his charismatic challenger managed to slay the dragon in an election that became a referendum on Oberstar's decadeslong tenure in Congress. Much as I hate to say it, I saw this coming back in the summer. It's not at all certain this seat is gonna be a cinch to win back either as the parts of MN-08 that are growing are comfortably Republican. While Minnesota's overall trajectory still makes it more accommodating for Democrats than Republicans, it's halcyon days as one of the nation's most Democratic states is over.

Mississippi--Reality finally caught up with two conservative Democratic Congressman who had been winning in districts where they had no business winning given their significant GOP lean. Gene Taylor is no real loss as far as I'm concerned, but Travis Childers was an excellent politician who seemed to fit his district very well and had the potential to be a rising star. We're unlikely to see the kind of perfect storm that will make him electable in Mississippi again the way he was in 2008.

Missouri--A state that's been getting progressively redder for a generation now took another giant leap that direction last week, where even the very poor Republican Senate candidate Roy Blunt crushed his Democratic challenger by 13 points in an open seat. In the U.S. House, long-time red district Democrat Ike Skelton was voted out in a seat that we'll never get back while Democrat Russ Carnahan barely hung on even in a traditionally Democratic seat on the south side of St. Louis. And Carnahan's seat seems likely to be eliminated if Missouri loses a seat after reapportionment, which they're poised to do. So yeah....bad situation in Missouri.

Montana--Of all 50 states, one of the least eventful was Montana which had no Senate or gubernatorial races this year, nor any competitive House races. There's effectively nothing that can be said about election night 2010 in Montana.

Nebraska--Not much can be said about Nebraska either. There was some optimistic chatter about taking out Republican Congressman Lee Terry in the Omaha area, but it never materialized and Terry won re-election big-time along with every other Republican on the ballot in Nebraska.

Nevada--The marquee Senate race in the nation turned out to be an unexpected pleasant surprise for Democrats. Not only did Harry Reid beat back the most delusional Tea Partier of all, he beat Sharron Angle by five points and got more than 50% of the vote, which nobody believed would happen. Even though I predicted Angle would win along with just about everybody else, I always kept in the back of my mind that Democrats have overperformed expectations and polling data in Nevada in the last five Presidential elections. Latino voters and union activists were pivotal in Reid's amazing comeback, and Reid has to be credited with running a fantastic campaign. He said last year he would "vaporize" his opponent in the 2010 midterm, and against all odds, he did just that. Son Rory Reid didn't fare as well in the gubernatorial race, but even he performed several points better than the polls suggested. Meanwhile, Harry Reid's coattails weren't quite enough to save Dina Titus in NV-03, but with Nevada adding a fourth Congressional seat next year, it's a likely bet the new seat will be Democratic majority and potentially allow Titus back into a safer seat. All in all, a bright spot for the Democrats, particularly with Nevada being one of the fastest growing states in the country.

New Hampshire--From a bright spot to a very dark spot, all the gains the Democrats made in New Hampshire in 2006 and 2008 were wiped out and then some last week. Against the grain of the rest of the northeast which mostly held strong for Democrats, New Hampshire saw the most widespread turnover to the Republicans, even though once invincible Democratic Governor John Lynch did hold on. Beyond that, Republican Kelly Ayotte crushed Paul Hodes by more than 20 points in a Senate race once considered competitive. Meanwhile, Hodes' old House seat went back to Republican hands in a race the Democrats thought they had a good chance of holding given the district's Democratic trendline. In the more conservative NH-01 district, Democratic incumbent Carol Shea-Porter was ousted. But the most damage was done in the legislature where Republicans gained more than 100 seats in the 400-seat state House and somehow flipped a Democratic state Senate to a 19-6 Republican majority. Astounding. It always seemed that New Hampshire's swing to the Democrats was predicated more on distaste for the excesses of the Bush era than any real movement to the left. Particularly with the state's population centers in the southeast solidifying for Republicans, it looks like New Hampshire has reverted back to form.

New Jersey--The damage was done in New Jersey in 2009 with the election of middle class-destroying GOP gubernatorial hero Chris Christie. This year, the Democrats managed to hold back that GOP momentum for the most part. Democratic freshman Congressman John Adler in a marginal South Jersey district was taken out, but the other House races considered nominally competitive remained in Democratic hands.

New Mexico--A mixed night in New Mexico and a partial correction following the Democratic tsunami of 2008 which flipped the state's entire Congressional delegation to Democrats. This year, a Hispanic Republican woman won picked up the Governor's seat for the GOP, albeit with a smaller than expected margin. Meanwhile, the two competitive House races had a split decision with Albuquerque-area Congressman Martin Heinrich hanging on but southern New Mexico's Harry Teague getting taken out by former GOP Congressman Steve Pearce. The fact that Teague kept it relatively close even in the state's most conservative district which John McCain won was comforting, and suggests that the growing Latino vote being largely consolidated by Democrats means the party's future in New Mexico is bright.

New York--Ultimately a very bad night for Democrats. Sure, Democratic incumbent Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand won in 20-point landslides as did Andrew Cuomo in the gubernatorial race, but it now appears we lost SEVEN House races in New York. Some were predictable, including Mike Arcuri, John Hall, and Eric Massa's old seat, but even I thought Tim Bishop and Dan Maffei were odds-on for re-election until late-breaking developments showed Republicans with the whip hand in both as-yet-uncalled races. Meanwhile, Scott Murphy and Michael McMahon somehow failed to hold onto their huge leads, in Murphy's case losing by double digits. Kind of amazing that the one Democrat who held on was Bill Owens in the very marginal NY-23 seat and arguably the most vulnerable incumbent of all in New York. Also amazing that Cuomo, Schumer, and Gillibrand had zero coattails to save some of these guys. Given that New York is poised to lose at least one more House seat, one of these Republican freshmen is likely to be felled, while a couple others (like Maffei's current seat in NY-25) are odds-on to go blue again. But still, a pretty pathetic showing.

North Carolina--From a short-term perspective, Democrats didn't have a terrible night in North Carolina. It was obvious months ago that Democrats were gonna be crushed in the Senate race, but the 12-point defeat handed to weak Democratic nominee Elaine Marshall was actually less severe than was the battleground Senate race in Missouri. Better yet, of the four Democratic Congressmen who were considered endangered to some degree, three survived. The only casualty was Bob Etheridge, who barely lost even after an ugly outburst with a voter caught on tape. Now for the long-term bad news. Republicans won both houses of the North Carolina legislature and Democratic Governor Bev Perdue can't veto their redistricting plan. This is particularly consequential in North Carolina because the Democrats drew up a very effective gerrymander in 2000 and a less friendly map could easily wipe out two Democrats in 2012. The trendlines in North Carolina remain favorable for Democrats, but this is a huge setback.

North Dakota--The all-Democratic Congressional delegation in this Republican stronghold was always living on borrowed time, and the time officially expired last week when Byron Dorgan's seat went to Republican John Hoeven and Earl Pomeroy got trounced by 10 points in the state's at-large Congressional seat. Pomeroy was as good of a Democrat as you're ever gonna get out of North Dakota and in the current polarized climate perhaps the only one who could ever win there. At this point, I'd wager against a comeback in 2012 or less hostile future election cycles, unfortunately.

Ohio--One of the night's predictable but nonetheless brutal wipeouts. It was encouraging to see Governor Ted Strickland's 11th hour comeback given what was at stake in holding Ohio's governorship. It also put to the test whether the arithmatic would still hold up that the previous generation's "inverted C" Ohio county map producing Democratic victories from Toledo and Cleveland in the north to Youngstown in the east to Steubenville and Portsmouth in the south would still be enough to win. The answer was no as Ted Strickland won that baseline and even did better than I expected in John Kasich's Columbus home base, but still lost by more than 100,000 votes. Worse yet, Strickland's base in southern Ohio provided no coattails for Democratic Congressional incumbents Zack Space and Charlie Wilson, who both lost by comfortable margins along with the predictable defeats of marginal Democratic incumbent freshmen Steve Dreihaus, Mary Jo Kilroy, and John Boccieri. And on top of that, Bush's former outsourcing czar managed to convince Ohioans to give him a promotion to the Senate so he can continue his work of exporting what's left of their jobs overseas. As bad as the night was in Ohio, it's still not fully clear what the state's trendlines are. If Columbus, the only part of Ohio that is growing, continues to get bluer, things not be as bad as they look today. On the other hand, the state is poised to lose two Congressional seats next year. One of them is likely to be Betty Sutton's in northern Ohio while the other is likely to be one of the two freshman Republican in southern Ohio. The merging of those southern Ohio districts will make it harder for Democrats to win the current configuration of OH-06 back.

Oklahoma--With only token Democratic opposition in one of the nation's most conservative states, Republicans Tom Coburn and Mary Fallin easily dominated their respective Senate and gubernatorial races, while the Boren name continues to allow Dan Boren the ability to keep getting re-electing in his reddening-by-the-day eastern Oklahoma district.

Oregon--Another Democratic success story, with both endangered Democratic Congressional candidates prevailing and with Governor John Kitzhaber narrowly beating back a strong challenge from Republican Chris Dudley. Not encouraging, however, that the Democrats were only able to avoid calamity in the northeast and west coast in 2010 while the rest of the country swung hard right. But at least the tsunami didn't hit the coasts, as ironic as that analogy may be.

Pennsylvania--Another horrible state for Democrats. With as much ink has been given to Joe Sestak's would-be comeback falling just short in the Senate race, what's most telling is that the Philadelphia machine cranked out just about every last vote possible and it still wasn't enough for Sestak as the exurban enclaves that were pushing Pennsylvania deep into Democratic hands reverted back to GOP form for Toomey. Much like Portman in Ohio, country club Republican Toomey is not a natural fit for Pennsylvania and passionately advocates for policies that will destroy the state, but we're stuck with him for six years nonetheless. Five Democratic seats swung to the GOP, and only one of them (Sestak's old seat) seems ripe for winning back in a more favorable cycle. Worse yet, two conservative Democrats in southwestern Pennsylvania considered reasonably safe eked out scant 51-49 margins, underscoring how deep of trouble the Democrats are in that part of the state. And one of those seats is almost certain to be eliminated in the redistricting, which will of course be overseen by the state's Republican legislature and newly elected Republican Governor. Basically, another Middle American swing state, another doomsday election night outcome last week.

Rhode Island--Democratic gubernatorial candidate Frank Caprio's angry outburst probably saved the state from going Republican, as so many of Caprio's voters swung to left-of-center independent Lincoln Chafee and kept the left's vote from being so divided that Robatellie won. Meanwhile, Patrick Kennedy's old House seat stayed Democrat, after a brief scare, and Jim Langevin held onto his seat. A generally good night for Democrats in Rhode Island.

South Carolina--I was taken aback by how modest Nikki Haley's margin of victory was, and find it fascinating how blue a South Carolina county map can be and still produce a Republican victory, contrary to most states where the opposite is true. Also kind of amusing that the Democrats worst candidate in the country, Alvin Greene, still managed to win the majority black counties in the Senate race. The state has become a virtually impenetrable GOP fortress and Democratic Congressman John Spratt, who had successfully lived on borrowed time for decades, was finally taken out. Like Fritz Hollings before him, we're losing a genuinely left-of-center Southern Democrat and we'll never get someone that good again. The one possible upside is that South Carolina is gaining a House district and there's a decent possibility it will be another majority minority seat protected by the Voting Rights Act and conceivably giving the state a second Democrat in the House.

South Dakota--I love close elections in South Dakota and was feverishly tracking on election night the contest between two attractive female candidates in the state's at-large House race. Despite the majority of polls showing Democratic incumbent Stephanie Herseth Sandlin narrowly leading, I had my doubts. But as the returns rolled in, it was looking like Herseth Sandlin's baseline numbers were coming in favorable enough to produce a narrow victory for her. She was doing a little bit better in key counties than did Tim Johnson in 2002, and Johnson won. It must simply have been a matter of higher voter turnout in Republican counties because Republican Kristi Noem took her over when the western SD precincts rolled in and in the end won reasonably comfortably. Very low turnout on the reservations wasn't helpful to Herseth Sandlin, but even 2004-level turnouts on the reservations wouldn't have been enough for her. Sad to see this seat go red, and one has to believe the Democrats are kicking themselves a little for not putting up a challenger to John Thune in the hope of raising turnout a little. Tim Johnson definitely lucked out in not having to run this year because it would likely have been his Waterloo.

Tennessee--A really terrible year in Tennessee was inevitable this year, and lived up to expectations entirely with a 20-point GOP blowout in the gubernatorial election and three of the Democrats five House seats flipping to the GOP. TN-06 and TN-08 were predictable, but it was only in the final weeks that Lincoln Davis' seat started looking increasingly vulnerable, ironically only weeks after a New York Times story highlighting how Davis looked like he was gonna weather the storm. In the end, Davis not only lost, but earned the distinction of being the House Democrat who lost by the widest margin in an 18-point blowout. And if there was any hope of Democrats winning these seats back, the upcoming GOP-dominated gerrymander should render all of them unwinnable, enshrining a permanent 7-2 GOP House majority in Tennessee, a state rivaled only by Oklahoma in how inhospitable it's become for Democrats in the last decade.

Texas--Even in a year like 2006, I would have bet against Houston Mayor Bill White taking out incumbent Rick Perry in Texas. The fact that so many Democrats were so bullish about the prospect of beating Perry in a year like 2010 was laughable, particularly with Texas' oil-inflated economy standing tall among its peers. The turmoil downballot is a bigger problem. It was clear in 2008 that Chet Edwards was gonna have a tough time hanging on in his brutally conservative central Texas district, but his double-digit thumping was nonetheless eye-opening. And low voter turnout in Hispanic districts, always a problem, managed to unseat Democrat Solomon Ortiz. That seat should be pretty easy to win back, but the same can't be said for Ciro Rodriguez' more conservative southwestern Texas seat. With Texas poised to gain four seats, it's a good bet that the Voting Rights Act will generate an even split of two Democratic seats and two Republicans. Plus it's possible the district lines won't be as toxic as they current are after Tom Delay's 2003 gerrymander.

Utah--The only thing worth reporting here is that Democrat Jim Matheson held on reasonably comfortably even in his red district, one of the few Blue Dogs to do so. It'll be interesting to see what kind of map the Republicans draw for Matheson heading into 2012. With Utah gaining a seat, it's possible they could go easy on Matheson in favor of shoring up three solid Republican seats. Also likely to be intriguing is seeing whether Utah's unique primary nominating process will result in the ouster of Senate institution Orrin Hatch on the grounds that he's insufficiently far-right. My guess is he's going down in favor of a Tea Party wingnut who vows that, unlike Hatch, he will never work with those disgusting Democrats on a single issue.

Vermont--Only one high profile race in Vermont and it was the gubernatorial race, which broke in the very end for the Democrat. Once again, the northeast holds strong for Democrats as the rest of the country swing the other direction.

Virginia--A year every bit as bad as predicted with no high-profile races at the top of the ballot providing coattails. Democrat Gerry Connolly held on by the skin of his teeth in his suburban DC district, but beyond that, three other Democrats lost their seats and the Democrats are stuck at the same place they were in 2006 with an 8-3 Republican map. I had a hard time believing Democrat Rick Boucher in the state's most conservative district was gonna hold on after his cap-and-trade vote, and sure enough, even after months of leads in the polls, the race broke late and broke hard for his Republican challenger. Crazy that Boucher ended up losing by as much as Tom Perriello in central Virginia, long considered the most endangered Democratic incumbent in the country. Perriello lost, but only by four points, even in his conservative district while running on an unapologetically progressive platform. Perhaps in a more favorable political climate, Perriello can run again and win. Despite two consecutive years of "corrections" among the Virginia electorate which swung a little too passionately for Democrats than its demographics suggested were sustainable back in 2006 and 2008, I still think the trendlines favor Democrats here with the DC suburbs constituting most of the state's growth.

Washington--Like the rest of the coastal states, Democrats made out well in Washington state, with Patty Murray narrowly prevailing over a top-tier challenge from Dino Rossi in the Senate race and two of the three endangered Democratic seats staying in Democratic hands. Only the marginal open seat vacated by Brian Baird turned over to the Republican. It was a sharp contrast to the last Republican wave in 1994 when Washington saw the most turnover of any state in the country, losing SIX Democratic-held House seats. Looking to the future, Washington is poised to gain a House seat next year, and it's one of the rare instances where the seat and those drawing it up are likely to be Democrats.

West Virginia--As good of an outcome as could be expected in a state as toxic to Democrats as this one is becoming. I was way off base when predicting John Raese
would consolidate the late-breaking vote. Apparently, Raese was considered a bridge too far even in the current political climate as the late-breaking vote instead went to Manchin. Of course it's a pyrrhic victory since Manchin will have to vote with the Republicans on virtually every issue between now and 2012 if he has any chance of holding his seat. And then, top-tier Republican Shelley Moore Capito could well decide to challenge him and really put his back against the wall. Meanwhile, a split decision in the West Virginia House races. Nick Rahall somehow managed to hold onto his seat comfortably while virtually all the Democrats surrounding him were getting taken out. And the Republican very narrowly captured the northern West Virginia seat, which I was ambivalent about since Democratic nominee Mike Oliverio would have probably made Bobby Bright seem liberal by comparison.

Wisconsin--I could sense an extremely ugly political climate in Wisconsin last summer driving through a number of 60% Obama counties in western Wisconsin and seeing all Republican signs in just about every yard. Even then, however, it was no sure thing that Russ Feingold was in as deep of trouble as he ended up being. I like to think a more aggressive Feingold campaign could have proven victorious against his nothing challenger, but honestly it probably just wasn't gonna happen for him no matter what he did in Wisconsin this year. As expected, the Republicans got a clean sweep in the Governor's office and both Houses of the legislature (good luck with improving the economy with that trifecta, Wisconsin) and taking out two Democratic seats in northern Wisconsin. The only survivor was Democrat Ron Kind in western Wisconsin, who I thought was also gonna get washed away in the tide. The only solace is that it's hard to imagine the state not improving a bit in the next election cycle after such a thorough Democratic beatdown this year.

Wyoming--Nothing to report here beyond the GOP handily taking over the Governor's mansion after eight years of inexplicable Democratic control in one of the nation's most Republican states.

The most telling consequence of last week's election results is that the struggling masses in Middle America are advocating dramatic steps be taken to fix our broken economy while simultaneously insisting on balancing the budget. Make the economy better....but don't you dare spend a penny doing so. We're entering a modern-day Know-Nothing era, and the consequences of this disinvestment will be evident very early as voters will be able to tell next year that the consequences of austerity and inflexible no-new-taxes mantras are inevitably paralysis. Government is the only engine capable of producing economic growth in the current climate, and voters just kneecapped it, putting their faith exclusively in the same private sector that brought the economy to the brink of ruin 24 months ago to single-handedly fix it, even though they have repeatedly shown they have zero interest in further investment in America amidst a world with decidedly more convenient options.

So it's gonna be an ugly two years and there's no way of knowing what the political fallout will be in 2012. Will the President's party continue to be blamed for what will inevitably be an economy in the same general condition as the current one? Or will voters realize that their 2010 remedy did more bad than good? To be continued...but it's hard to get too excited either way, particularly with Democrats already poised to fold on the no-brainer issue of not extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires. As I said before, if Democrats won't fight even for that, then they deserve to lose.

Might As Well Hit The Governors' Races

2010-10-31T16:57:00.000-07:00

I haven't been fully engaged in this year's gubernatorial races until lately, mostly because they're so depressing, but here's my predictions for how they play out on Tuesday....

Alabama--Bentley by 21

Alaska--Parnell by 17

Arizona--Brewer by 15 (often overlooked in the lexicon of unimaginably bad GOP candidates nonetheless poised to have easy victories this week)

Arkansas--Beebe by 15 (a few weeks ago, I thought the tidal wave in Arkansas was so big that it was even gonna sweep Beebe away in the same way Roy Barnes was in Georgia in 2002, but a couple polls since then have show Beebe still comfortably ahead and have changed my mind)

California--Brown by 8 (the one major race that Democrats should be doing everything they can to lose so they don't take ownership over ungovernable California is, naturally, the one race breaking decidedly their way)

Colorado--Tancredo by 1 (one of the biggest upsets of the nights....the wingnut tidal wave will push Tancredo past the finish line and render Hickenlooper the biggest imbecile of the year for managing to piss this one away)

Connecticut--Foley by 3 (another last-minute Republican upset, of which we're gonna see dozens all across the country)

Florida--Scott by 5 (Cell phone gate and the insane fallout from the Meek-Crist pissing match in the Senate race will help the GOP crook pull ahead in the clutch...along with the usual Republican overperformance in Florida polls)

Georgia--Deal by 11 (even if Deal got caught on camera murdering a nun on top of his dozens of additional scandals, the (R) next to his name would still lead him to victory in Georgia this year)

Hawaii--Abercrombie by 6 (the upside to this is when Inouye or Akaka die in office, we'll at least get a Democratic Senator appointed to fill their shoes)

Idaho--Otter by 44

Illinois--Brady by 4 (simply no way in the wake of Blago that we were gonna hold this one)

Iowa--Branstad by 11 (Iowans are gonna be damn sorry six months from now when they remember how much of a douche this guy is)

Kansas--Brownback by 38

Maine--LePage by 7 (another idiotic three-way race helps the wingnut win....will allegedly sane voters ever learn?)

Maryland--O'Malley by 10

Massachusetts--Baker by 2 (third-party candidate implosion at the last minute tips this one to the Republicans)

Michigan--Snyder by 23 (gotta love how the Dems are able to win these big-state governorships at the worst time....the eight years in between redistricting fights...before handing them back to the GOP)

Minnesota--Emmer by 3 (another upset as Democrat Mark Dayton falls apart in the final days of the campaign....I've been watching this movie for 20 years now regarding Minnesota gubernatorial races)

Nebraska--Heineman by 47

Nevada--Sandoval by 18 (who's ever bright idea it was to put a second Reid on the ticket in Nevada this year should be shot)

New Hampshire--Lynch by 3 (Democrat barely hangs on with GOP wave in his state)

New Mexico--Martinez by 14 (wins so big that Democrats Heinrich and Teague both lose their House seats)

New York--Cuomo by 20

Ohio--Kasich by 4 (the fact that Kasich has home-field advantage in Columbus, the region of Ohio that has been moving most towards Democrats in recent years, will be what keeps Strickland from scoring a second term)

Oklahoma--Fallin by 18

Oregon--Dudley by 2

Pennsylvania--Corbett by 9

Rhode Island--Chafee by 8 (looked like he was gonna win even before Caprio's meltdown)

South Carolina--Haley by 14

South Dakota--Daugaard by 13

Tennessee--Haslam by 23

Texas--Perry by 14 (some dreamers still think Bill White is gonna make this close...wrong year)

Vermont--Shumlin by 6 (rare case of a Democrat that gets late momentum)

Wisconsin--Walker by 10

Wyoming--Mead by 47

Right now, there are 25 Democratic Governors and 25 Republicans. After next Tuesday, the breakdown will be 14 Democratic Governors and 36 Republicans counting Tancredo.

Absolute Last Call on the Election

2010-10-24T11:02:00.000-07:00

It looks as though my September for 110 Republican seats gained in the House was overly bullish for the GOP, although I submit that conditions on the ground at the time made such a scenario possible. I'm now rolling back my calls for Republican gains back to my original instinct from earlier this summer....in the 92 range. A number of Democrats who I suspected were endangered have showed enough polling data to suggest they're not, but much of this polling remains dubious. Two polls showed Ben Chandler in KY-06 with a comfortable lead but the latest shows him with a scant four-point lead. Meanwhile, also as predicted, other polls are coming out to show Democrats long believed untouchable to be very vulnerable. Solomon Ortiz in Texas is the latest to be caught flat-footed.

Whatever the case, conditions are still rotten and far more rotten than what most believe. I fully expect a bare minimum of 80 lost seats for Democrats in the House.

Moving onto the Senate, I'll update most of my calls with predicted margins.

Alabama--Shelby by 31

Alaska--Miller by 3 (Murkowski's write-in campaign will come up short because of the obvious inconvenience of it, as Shelley Sekula-Gibbs can attest to, managing to lose by 10 points to a Democrat among an electorate of suburban Houston oil barons!)

Arizona--McCain by 43

Arkansas--Boozman by 28 (Even I wouldn't have thought Blanche Lincoln would underperform Obama in AR, but now I suspect she will)

California--Boxer by 3 (This morning's LA Times poll showing her up by eight is bullshit but I do suspect the SEIU's ground game will save her)

Colorado--Buck by 3 (Barring another major gaffe, suburban Denver voters that swing CO elections will hold their nose and cast a protest vote for this clown)

Connecticut--Blumenthal by 10 (McMahon's momentum that I thought would guide her to victory last month was short-lived)

Delaware--Coons by 15 (O'Donnell has proven an even worse candidate than I suspected last month at this time)

Florida--Rubio by 21 (Disgusting that the divided non-Rubio vote couldn't consolidate and keep this very dangerous GOP all-star out of the Senate....Crist vs. Rubio would probably produce a Crist win)

Georgia--Isaakson by 23

Hawaii--Inouye by 14 (This will be closer than a lot of people think with plenty thinking Inouye has overstayed his welcome)

Idaho--Crapo by 45

Illinois--Kirk by 3 (Alexi overplayed by calling Kirk a "traitor"....otherwise this race may have broken the other way....a perfect storm for the GOP in the wake of Blagojevich and an incredibly bad Democratic Senate candidate capable of pushing this unlikely state to the GOP)

Indiana--Coats by 22 (Another horribly wasted opportunity mismanaged from the get-go. Rot in hell, Evan Bayh)

Iowa--Grassley by 30

Kansas--Moran by 40

Kentucky--Paul by 10 (Conway will slowly lose support by those who grow into disrespecting him because of the over-the-top Aqua Buddha ad. He wasn't gonna win, but he could have had a two-point race here with the quality campaign he was running up to that point)

Louisiana--Vitter by 15

Maryland--Mikulski by 17

Missouri--Blunt by 10

Nevada--Angle by 3 (The blowback from Reid's monthslong ad campaign that "this woman is crazy" backfired during their only debate when she did not appear crazy. She remains a walking gaffe machine but Reid is too weak and too pitiful to effectively take advantage of it. The SEIU could still theoretically pull this out for Reid, but I'm not optimistic.)

New Hampshire--Ayotte by 8 (Crazy how silent this race has been this month)

New York A--Schumer by 37

New York B--Gillibrand by 16 (DioGuardi needed a surge of momentum and a bully pulpit to win as I thought he would last month. He didn't get the surge and the insanely awful Carl Palladino stole his bully pulpit and wasted it.)

North Carolina--Burr by 16 (Another pathetic waste)

North Dakota--Hoeven by 50

Ohio--Portman by 20 (The saddest waste of all. How do you lose by 20 points in Ohio to Bush's former outsourcing guru?)

Oklahoma--Coburn by 42

Oregon--Wyden by 16

Pennsylvania--Toomey by 4 (I think Sestak peaked a week too soon)

South Carolina--De Mint by 46 (Greene may finish third place here)

South Dakota--Thune uncontested

Utah--Lee by 43

Vermont--Leahy by 31

Washington--Murray by 2 (By no means are we out of the woods here)

West Virginia--Raese by 12 (Breaks BIG for Raese in the closing week, effectively leaving Manchin with nothing more than the 2008 Obama voters as everybody else will buy into Raese's "don't give Obama an ally" argument. Raese's "hicky" ad came two weeks too early. The anger by WV voters will be long forgotten by November 2.)

Wisconsin--Johnson by 4 (Feingold could have pulled this one out if he had taken the challenge seriously. He was his own worst enemy and his late surge will be too little, too late.)

The Race Is NOT "Tightening Up"

2010-10-03T09:44:00.000-07:00

Every election cycle it's the same story. A combination of obsessive poll watching and wishful thinking triggers the punditocracy to doubt conventional wisdom about the advantage one party has had as soon as a couple of conflicting polls turn up. We saw it at various points in 2006, where Republicans briefly breathed a sigh of relief that things were getting better for their team. Even in 1994, the Democrats thought they were out of the woods a few times when some polls swung the slightest bit in their favor. Now it's time for the biennial tradition in 2010, with column after column and talking head after talking head telling us the tide has turned and Democrats are on their way to reducing losses.

The only problem is that it's not at all true, and even if it was, the fundamentals of the election favor the opposition party by every conceivable metric, far more so even than 1994 and 2006. This means two things.....the climate will almost assuredly worsen further as more low-information voters become engaged and that late-breaking voters will go predominately to the challenger. In the last two wave midterm elections, losses on election day ended up far worse than most imagined one month before the election. Few would have expected, for example, that Chris Carney would have so handily spanked Don Sherwood in his conservative PA-10 district on October 7 until they saw the actual returns on November 7. The problems that the incumbent party has in a toxic political party very seldom resolve themselves in a month...they usually worsen.

Now that's not to say that vulnerable Democrats in blue states like Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray won't win. My expectation is that both will....just as Ted Kennedy and Dianne Feinstein ended up prevailing in 1994 after a flirtation with vulnerability. But other races will go the other direction, such as West Virginia, Wisconsin, and probably Connecticut as well, and we won't even get into the lower-profile House races where Democrats nobody considers vulnerable today will be fired by voters on November 2 because of the national tide.

Yet people that should know better are nonetheless convinced the worst of the Democrats' problems are over....that they've moved votes since August...that they've fired up a lethargic base....and that most of the undecided voters are Democrats who are likely to come home. Don't buy it. To whatever extent it is occurring, it's the ebb and flow of public (and private) polling which produces a lot of very bad samples. But the real hilarity of it all is that the polling hasn't changed that much except for a few Democratic candidates who have seen an uptick. Most of them are in worse standing than they were in August. Just ask Russ Feingold, Dick Blumenthal, and Joe Manchin for just a few examples. And for the majority of Democrats, their standing will get only worse leading up to November 2.

What Good Are They?

2010-09-30T18:49:00.000-07:00

I'm a hardcore Democratic partisan. Voting for a candidate without a (D) next to his or her name is almost unthinkable for me. I'll be voting for Democratic candidates in on November 2, but not for lack of trying on the part of current Democratic officeholders who seem hellbent on keeping me home.

Why am I so disillusioned? The spectacle yesterday with Speaker Pelosi making a motion to adjourn the session so that her members could go back to their districts to campaign. The fact that the House Democratic supermajority was unable to unite around canceling the Bush tax cuts for the rich was pitiful enough, but the fact that 39 members of Pelosi's caucus voted against her motion to adjourn--on the grounds that they should stick around to PASS rather than deny tax cuts to millionaires before the election--was arguably the most disgusting move by the "Blue Dogs" since they took over Congress. And given their proclivity for unimaginable cowardice, that's a pretty low bar for them to slither under.

The whole thing reeked of a stunt, with exactly the number of House Democrats voting against adjournment in order to force Pelosi to break the tie. Exactly 39 of them. If they could have gotten just one more, the motion to adjourn would have failed, but lo and behold they couldn't get that 40th vote. You don't suppose Pelosi was giving these assholes cover to say they "stood up to House leadership in favor of tax relief for Americans" during the final stretch of their campaigns, do you?

Whatever the case, this sad sack of lawmakers gives us precious little reason to justify sending them back to Washington less than five weeks before the election. The level of cowardice and lack of organization is worse than I ever imagined, and I'm questioning my previous position of the utility of these Blue Dogs. What good is a numerical majority if dozens in your ranks will ALWAYS betray you and snuggle up with the other side on EVERY major vote?

And the issue here is tax cuts for the rich at a time where American business is already flush with money that it's sitting on waiting for consumer demand to pick up....not to mention a time when we're looking at ruinous budget deficits in the not-so-distant future. Every Congressional Republican favors borrowing a trillion dollars from the Chinese to give the already-affluent $100,000 tax cuts. That's to be expected from the pachyderms. But dozens of Democrats agree with this position?!? And not only do they agree with it, they agree with it so strongly that they're insisting the House not adjourn until these tax cuts for the rich on borrowed money go through?!? Well fuck them. Fuck them in the eye.

Given that no matter how Democrats we have in Congress, we'll always have a de facto Republican majority. With that in mind, officially losing the House to the other side is the best-case scenario for the future of the Democratic Party. In 2012, Obama and his party will not have sole ownership of the mess we'll still be festering in if the Republicans have a majority. In the unlikely event that the Democrats hang onto a Congressional majority in five weeks, they'll go into 2012 looking at an even bloodier election night. After this week's spectacle, the Democrats deserve to lose the House...and it's hard for me to hope they don't given the long-range dynamic.

House Predictions

2010-09-21T16:33:00.000-07:00

When I made my first predictions about the battle for the U.S. House of Representatives last spring, I predicted a net gain of 90 seats for the Republican Party. Since that time I realize that my initial prediction was ridiculous....it was far too low. As toxic as electoral conditions were last June, they're infinitely worse now, and every indication is they'll only get worse yet in the next six weeks.

There are a number of factors guiding my theory that things will be far worse for House Democrats than what even the most bullish GOP operatives believe. First and foremost, the national anti-incumbent mood is unprecedented. Recent polls show that voters intend to dump THEIR OWN CONGRESSMAN this year by a nearly 2-1 margin. That tells me that the polls are understating just how bloody of a night November 2 is going to be for the party that holds the most House seats. It also tells me that scores of Congressmen who are being told by everybody that their seats are safe, and who are on virtually nobody's endangered list currently, will be on the receiving end of a stunning upset on election night. Indeed, polls in the last couple of weeks have been released showing several long-thought-safe Democratic incumbents below 50% and holding five-point leads over Republican challengers with 5% name recognition. This represents Armageddon for Democrats, as my list of seats poised to turnover suggests....

Turning Over From Republican to Democrat....

DE-AL (open--Mike Castle)
LA-02 (Joseph Cao)

Hard to imagine Cao can survive in a D+25 district, but I won't even rest on this one until I see polling showing that Cao's an assured goner.

Turning Over From Democrat to Republican....

1. AL-02 (Bobby Bright)
2. AZ-01 (Ann Kirkpatrick)
3. AZ-05 (Harry Mitchell)
4. AZ-08 (Gabrielle Giffords)
5. AR-01 (open--Marion Berry)
6. AR-02 (open--Vic Snyder)
7. AR-04 (Mike Ross)
8. CA-11 (Jerry McNerney)
9. CA-18 (Dennis Cardoza)
10. CA-20 (Jim Costa)
11. CA-39 (Linda Sanchez)
12. CA-47 (Loretta Sanchez)
13. CO-03 (John Salazar)
14. CO-04 (Betsy Markey)
15. CO-07 (Ed Perlmutter)
16. CT-04 (Jim Himes)
17. CT-05 (Chris Murphy)
18. FL-02 (Allen Boyd)
19. FL-08 (Alan Grayson)
20. FL-22 (Ron Klein)
21. FL-24 (Suzanne Kosmas)
22. GA-02 (Sanford Bishop)
23. GA-08 (Jim Marshall)
24. GA-12 (John Barrow)
25. ID-01 (Walt Minnick)
26. IL-03 (Dan Lipinski)
27. IL-08 (Melissa Bean)
28. IL-11 (Debbie Halvorson)
29. IL-14 (Bill Foster)
30. IL-17 (Phil Hare)
31. IN-02 (Joe Donnelly)
32. IN-08 (open--Brad Ellsworth)
33. IN-09 (Baron Hill)
34. IA-01 (Bruce Braley)
35. IA-02 (Dave Loebsack)
36. IA-03 (Leonard Boswell)
37. KS-03 (Dennis Moore)
38. KY-03 (John Yarmuth)
39. KY-06 (Ben Chandler)
40. LA-03 (open--Charlie Melancon)
41. ME-01 (Chelie Pingree)
42. ME-02 (Michael Michaud)
43. MD-01 (Frank Kratovil)
44. MA-05 (Niki Tsongas)
45. MA-06 (John Tierney)
46. MA-10 (open--William Delahunt)
47. MI-01 (open--Bart Stupak)
48. MI-07 (Mark Schauer)
49. MI-08 (Gary Peters)
50. MN-01 (Tim Walz)
51. MN-08 (Jim Oberstar)
52. MS-01 (Travis Childers)
53. MS-04 (Gene Taylor)
54. MO-03 (Russ Carnahan)
55. MO-04 (Ike Skelton)
56. NV-03 (Dina Titus)
57. NH-01 (Carol Shea Porter)
58. NH-02 (open--Paul Hodes)
59. NJ-03 (Jim Adler)
60. NJ-12 (Rush Holt)
61. NM-01 (Martin Heinrich)
62. NM-02 (Harry Teague)
63. NY-01 (Tim Bishop)
64. NY-02 (Steve Israel)
65. NY-13 (Michael McMahon)
66. NY-19 (John Hall)
67. NY-20 (Scott Murphy)
68. NY-23 (Bill Owens)
69. NY-24 (Mike Arcuri)
70. NY-25 (Dan Maffei)
71. NY-29 (open--Eric Massa)
72. NC-02 (Bob Etheridge)
73. NC-07 (Mike McIntyre)
74. NC-08 (Larry Kissell)
75. NC-11 (Heath Shuler)
76. ND-AL (Earl Pomeroy)
77. OH-01 (Steve Dreihaus)
78. OH-06 (Charlie Wilson)
79. OH-10 (Dennis Kucinich)
80. OH-13 (Betty Sutton)
81. OH-15 (Mary Jo Kilroy)
82. OH-16 (John Boccieri)
83. OH-18 (Zack Space)
84. OR-04 (Peter DeFazio)
85. OR-05 (Kurt Schrader)
86. PA-03 (Kathy Dahlkemper)
87. PA-04 (Jason Altmire)
88. PA-07 (open--Joe Sestak)
89. PA-08 (Patrick Murphy)
90. PA-10 (Chris Carney)
91. PA-11 (Paul Kanjorski)
92. PA-12 (Mark Critz)
93. PA-17 (Tim Holden)
94. RI-01 (open--Patrick Kennedy)
95. RI-02 (Jim Langevin)
96. SC-05 (John Spratt)
97. SD-AL (Stephanie Herseth Sandlin)
98. TN-04 (Lincoln Davis)
99. TN-06 (open--Bart Gordon)
100. TN-08 (John Tanner)
101. TX-17 (Chet Edwards)
102. TX-23 (Ciro Rodriguez)
103. UT-02 (Jim Matheson)
104. VA-02 (Glenn Nye)
105. VA-05 (Tom Perriello)
106. VA-09 (Rick Boucher)
107. VA-11 (Gerry Connolly)
108. WA-02 (Rick Larsen)
109. WA-03 (open--Brian Baird)
110. WV-01 (open--Alan Mollohan)
111. WV-03 (Nick Rahall)
112. WI-03 (Ron Kind)
113. WI-07 (open--David Obey)
114. WI-08 (Steve Kagen)

So there you go. A net loss of the Democrats of 112 seats. And frankly I suspect they'll hang on by the skin of their teeth in a number of other races, including Blue Dogs Collin Peterson and Dan Boren in their respective districts, along with a number of incumbents that are in only modestly Democratic districts and probably think right now, erroneously, that November 2 will be smooth sailing for them....incumbents like Raul Grijalva, Adam Smith, and Anthony Weiner. They'll survive...but barely.

Obviously these losses will be the result of a once-in-a-lifetime tsunami. A good many of these seats will revert back to the Democrats in 2012, but of course a number of them will stay in Republican hands forever. Whatever the case, I suspect the bleak picture I paint will become clearer as the final weeks of the campaign approach. More and more polls will come out showing increasing numbers of House Democrats in imminent peril, many of them who fancied themselves untouchable.

And for those who believe that the tide will turn back the other way in a mere six weeks, the only example I can think of where that has happened was 1998 in the midst of the Clinton impeachment scandal when the GOP overreached. Generally speaking, when a party loses momentum in the final weeks before an election, the damage is done. Recall how in 2006 it was still unclear in mid-September whether Democrats would even be able to win the 15 seats needed to take back the House let alone the Senate. But in the week before the election, virtually nobody believed the Republicans would still be able to hang onto the House as a number of seats that were in question moved dramatically against them in the final days. We're starting seeing the same thing happening in polls across the country right now, and things are almost certain to get dramatically worse.

Republicans Won't Need Delaware To Win Back The Senate.....

2010-09-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

The Republicans are gonna win back the United States Senate in November....and they'll win it with seats to spare. As usual, the conventional wisdom accepted by both Democrats and Republicans is wrong here. Mike Castle's defeat in the GOP primary on Tuesday did not kill the GOP's chances of retaking the Senate. There's better-than-anybody-expects odds that it didn't even kill their chances in the Delaware Senate race. Voters are heading into the 2010 midterm election in a unified temper tantrum, and the result will be a Democratic wipeout of historic proportions, the magnitude of which virtually nobody sees coming, even the most bullish GOP operatives.

Let's take another look at this year's Senate contests in the final seven weeks before election day...

Alabama--Richard Shelby wins by the biggest margin of his career.

Alaska--I just heard minutes ago that Lisa Murkowski is moving forward with a write-in campaign after losing the nomination last month to Tea Party wingnut Joe Miller. While this is the only scenario is which Democrat Scott McAdams can possibly win in Alaska, I still think the effort will be a short-lived failure. It reeks of sour grapes and I suspect the pressure will be on by the national Republican Party for her to bow out well before the election. Even if that doesn't happen, I suspect Murkowski's write-in effort yields less than 10% of the vote, and that won't be enough distance for McAdams to beat Miller, or even to really come that close.

Arizona--John McCain gets more than 75% of the vote.

Arkansas--In November 2008, I thought Barack Obama's 20-point defeat in Arkansas marked the inevitable low-water mark for a Democrat even in modern-day Arkansas. I no longer believe that to be the case, and expect John Boozman to trounce Blanche Lincoln by at least 25 points. I think Bill Halter would have done narrowly better if he was the nominee, but in a year like this I still can't see him getting within a mile of a single-digit defeat. GOP +1

California--This is a very tough call, but I still think Boxer will narrowly eke it out. Fiorina strikes me as a tough sell as a candidate in a state as blue as California, despite her self-funding capabilities. It's easy to envision a Scott Brown-style Republican candidate toppling Boxer, but I just don't think Fiorina will get the job done. She will, however, get within two points and win 20-point victories in a number of central California counties that Obama won just two years ago.

Colorado--Ken Buck is often bunched in with the craziest candidates of the Tea Party, but he's clearly not in the same league as Sharron Angle despite some unfortunate misogynistic comments he made during the primary. The guy is Ivy League-educated and a generally mainstream political figure. I completely disagree with him on the issues, but the point is the Democrats aren't gonna have any success branding him as a wingnut. And I think the lack of a competitive gubernatorial race at this stage will suppress turnout and make it even harder for Michael Bennet to overcome Buck's thus far modest advantage. In the end, Buck should win with a comfortable high single-digit margin. GOP +2

Connecticut--I'm reversing course on this one. I underestimated the extent to which Linda McMahon's personal fortune could finance a transformation of her image and buy her way into being taken seriously...particularly against a weakened Democratic challenger. Blumenthal hangs onto a narrow lead, Martha Coakley style, but it'll be gone by election day. McMahon will prevail. GOP +3

Delaware--Nobody thinks Christine O'Donnell has a chance of winning. I don't think she'll win, but her meteoric rise and subsequent mainstream derision will be accompanied by a persecution complex that will have some traction despite her sketchy personal history and nutty policy positions. So here we have a candidate who is very likely to be facing felony charges of misusing campaign funds, yet will probably come within three points of victory in November.

Florida--The Democrats' sole hope of stopping Marco Rubio died when Kendrick Meek won the Democratic nomination, ensuring the non-Rubio vote would be split between he and Crist. There was no way Rubio was gonna get less than 40%, so barring Meek getting out of the race (not gonna happen), Rubio will prevail by a double-digit margin and will immediately become the face of the Republican Party and an epic problem for Democrats.

Georgia--Johnny Isaakson scoots in for a second term by a 2-1 margin

Hawaii--Dan Inouye is a rare breed...a safe Democrat unlikely to lose in November.

Illinois--Both candidates are wildly unpopular so the contest will be a classic race to the bottom with very low voter turnout. Unfortunately in this Republican year, Democratic turnout will be more suppressed, meaning Mark Kirk is the very likely bet to take Barack Obama's Senate seat. Illinois has become a next-to-impossible state for a Republican to win, but Kirk will pull it off. GOP +4

Indiana--This seat had the potential to become a contest given the vulnerabilities of Republican Dan Coats, but if generally impressive Democratic candidate Brad Ellsworth was gonna catch on, he would have had to have done it by now. Very unfortunate situation to lose this rising star in such a toxic year, as Coats will assuredly win in a 20-point blowout. GOP +5

Iowa--Same prediction as this spring....Chuck Grassley win have his lowest margin in decades, but will still win by double digits, perhaps 20 points.

Kansas--Jerry Moran could run one of the highest margins of victory of any candidate in the country, particularly for an open seat.

Kentucky--It looked early on as though the Democrats might be able to define Rand Paul as such a wingnut that he wouldn't even be able to win in Kentucky. But the first impression didn't last and Paul is breaking away with what looks like a probable double-digit victory. If impressive Democratic challenger Jack Conway had been our nominee in 2008, Mitch McConnell would not currently be poised to take over as the Senate leader. You picked a horrible year to run, Jack.

Louisiana--Charlie Melancon really picked the wrong year to run. The bottom line is that in the post-Obama era, a Democrat is unlikely to win another statewide election in Louisiana for a generation....even up against a pervert like Vitter, poised to win by more than 20 points this November simply because he doesn't have a (D) next to his name.

Maryland--I'm a little nervous resting easy about this race since I haven't seen any polls, but I do feel more comfortable in Democrat Barbara Mikulski prevailing in her re-election bid than I do just about any other Democratic incumbent.

Missouri--In 2008, even as John McCain was narrowly beating Obama, a Senate matchup between Robin Carnahan and Roy Blunt would have resulted in a double-digit Carnahan landslide. My how much difference two years make. In 2010, the baggage-adled Blunt is poised to score the double-digit victory.

Nevada--As soon as Democrats got cocky upon seeing uber-wingnut Sharron Angle's lead in the polls evaporate last month, I knew they were popping the champagne bottles too soon. It's tough to predict whether Angle will be able to control herself from saying anything completely unhinged between now and November 2, but I'm betting she does and that she wins by a good 4-5 points against Harry Reid. GOP +6

New Hampshire--Hard to imagine Paul Hodes' lifeless campaign would be able to catch on now. Even a weakened Kelly Ayotte should be able to comfortably prevail.

New York 1--Chuck Schumer will have one of the few 20-point winning margins for Democratic Senate incumbents this year.

New York 2--The next upset in the making. Remember the last northeastern Republican Senate candidate with "American Idol" connections? Richard Dio Guardi will come from behind to take down the imminently vulnerable but thus far under-the-radar Kirsten Gillibrand in Hillary Clinton's old Senate seat. GOP +7

North Carolina--As suspected, in this political environment, Richard Burr is pulling comfortably ahead of Elaine Marshall despite his serious vulnerability. In the end, his margin of victory is very likely to be in the double digits.

North Dakota--The freebie takeover seat for the GOP. Popular Republican Governor John Hoeven easily wins Byron Dorgan's old seat. GOP +8

Ohio--I held out a little hope that the state most battered by the loss of manufacturing jobs would not be dumb enough to elect Bush's outsourcing captain Rob Portman to the Senate, but it looks like I was wrong. They are indeed that dumb. To be fair though, Democratic candidate Lee Fisher hasn't given voters much to work with.

Oklahoma--I had forgotten that Tom Coburn was even up this year until now. Seemed like even in right-wing Oklahoma there was some hope that a conservative Democrat might be able to take this guy out. Instead, I'm not even sure he has a challenger.

Oregon--I was holding my breath hoping that Democrat Ron Wyden was as secure as the conventional wisdom was, but the most recent poll had him leading by double digits, so I'm reasonably confident he'll be a rare incumbent Democrat who prevails.

Pennsylvania--Another reversal for me. I thought Pat Toomey was too conservative for Pennsylvania last spring, but he's pulling away from thus far unimpressive Democratic challenger Joe Sestak. Right now, I'm kind of wishing feisty pit bull Arlen Specter was still our nominee. Seems like he'd be putting up more of a fight than Sestak, who looks poised to lose by at least five points at this stage. GOP +9

South Carolina--Jim DeMint may have been able to be held down to 10 points if the Democrats weren't running a candidate less electable than Christine O'Donnell.

South Dakota--John Thune has no Democratic opponent. He wins.

Utah--Obviously the Republican Mike Lee wins by 40 points.

Vermont--Pat Leahy will be another rare Democratic incumbent to win handily

Washington--My gut says Dino Rossi doesn't have quite enough to topple Patty Murray in this blue state. It'll be damn close though and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it goes the other way.

West Virginia--I knew this was too good to be true. No matter how much West Virginians may like Joe Manchin as Governor, they hate Barack Obama as President more and there was no way they were gonna elect an Obama ally to the Senate in this environment. Once Republican John Raese gets done with him, Joe Manchin will probably lose by double digits. GOP +10

Wisconsin--I first speculated on Russ Feingold's possible vulnerability last year and was laughed out of the room by the Daily Kos crowd. One month removed from driving through Wisconsin and seeing all Republican yard signs dotting the landscape in counties that Barack Obama won with 63% of the vote, I now suspect that not only will Feingold lose, he'll lose by double-digits...to a plastics manufacturer who believes that global warming is caused by sunspots. GOP +11

I'm going easy on the Democrats here, predicting they'll hang on to California and Washington despite a once-in-a-century Republican tsunami. The reality is the GOP has the potential to pick up 14 seats counting Delaware. Next week I'll cover the House, where things will be even worse for Democrats.

Becoming Easier To See How 1930s Germany Happened

2010-08-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-12T18:54:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-08-01T21:55:00.000-07:00

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.

So How Did Last Summer Stack Up?

2010-06-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

This is my favorite time of year, at the threshold of summer with warm weather and sunny skies as far as the eye can see. Last year, I had all kinds of fun profiling and ranking every summer dating back to 1983, when I was five years old. With a year's worth of distance since the summer of 2009, I feel as though I can now speculate on how it stacked up compared to other summers. The diagnosis: pretty darn good.

In the summer of 2009, I lucked out with fantastic weather for all of my summer road trips. I got to go to my first Minnesota Twins game in years in the final year that they played in the Metrodome, the stadium which helped the Twins score two World Series victories. I got to make two visits to the Minnesota State Fair for the first time ever, and got a much nicer day the second trip than the first. And I was also going out with a cute 19-year-old college girl whose presence I always felt comfortable with, our courtship capstoning with an impressive visit to a waterpark in eastern Iowa last August. Overall, I just had a good vibe from the summer of 2009, probably my best summer since 2000 and easily upstaging the summer of 2008, which seems even more mediocre when stacked up to 2009. Grade: A-

The best two summers of my life were 1990 and 2000, which suggests that 2010 should be spectacular as well if the current pattern holds. There's no evidence yet that this summer is poised to be a classic, but it's obviously early. The sense of "morning in America" that I always feel this time of year is what makes it so exciting though as its perhaps the only time every year where I feel an undercurrent of hope that lasting memories could be just around the corner. I may be a cynical pessimist 11 months a year, but in June I'm an optomist.

Finale Episodes For "Lost" and "24": The End of a TV Era

2010-05-24T19:34:00.000-07:00

Over the course of the last two nights, I've taken in the lengthy finale episodes of two television series that were among the most groundbreaking of the past decade, each helping to turn around a medium that in the previous decade was drowning in a seemingly irredeemable cesspool of low-budget comedy and infotainment. Watching these series take their final bows was bittersweet in a number of ways. It was definitely time for both of them to go, but at the same time, I'll be losing two of the most consistently entertaining programs that have been fixtures on my viewing schedule for years now.

"Lost" wrapped up on Sunday night. I had limited expectations going into this series back in 2004 and even though the first couple episodes were entertaining, I wasn't fully taken in for a few weeks when I realized there was gonna be a steady diet of first-rate storytelling unfolding here. There were ebbs and flows to the series' creative juices, but every time I thought the show had gone stale, the writers found another mind-blowingly clever gimmick to hang their hats on and keep the show fresh. Science fiction has never been my genre of choice, but "Lost" made it accessible even to skeptics.

Unfortunately, the finale disappointed. The series' last two seasons, while still imaginative, seemed like they were trying to hard and I lost some enthusiasm for the show. Still, I was expecting that with both the intense hype and the series' track record for epic revelations that there would be a satisfying, overarching resolution. There wasn't....not even close. It actually seemed downright lazy, effectively negating the narratives of entire seasons during the middle of the series' run. All that said, it was a great ride getting there and "Lost" deserves several spots in the TV history books for some of the most compelling hours the medium has ever delivered....even though the finale was definitely not one of them.

"24" bowed out tonight. Unlike "Lost" which still seemed fairly vibrant in season six even though its narrative direction lost some appeal for me, "24" definitely died of old age, a burned-out husk of a once-brilliant show that leaned on its rigid formula for a couple seasons too long. There was a disappointing dearth of action on tonight's two-hour finale, but the political drama was nonetheless pretty captivating, even if it had a "been there, done that" air to it. I didn't figure there'd be much of a resolution given that they're planning a theatrical "24" film...and there wasn't. The absence of a tidy ending did leave me a little unsatisfied, but when we all know Jack will be back, what's the point? It almost made me wish there wasn't a movie in the pipeline so that I could have seen how "24" would have ended in the context of a stand-alone series.

The high-intensity action-adventure format of "24" is more of a natural fit for me than the science fiction of "Lost", so the series was an easier sell for me from the get-go when it premiered in the fall of 2001. With a nudge from "CSI" which premiered the year earlier, "24" helped usher in a desperately needed higher standard of production and creativity for network television at the turn of the last decade. In its first five seasons, "24" was far and away my favorite show on television, operating masterfully within its real-time format and producing an action thriller for television unlike anything that had ever been made before. I'm actually impressed that they were able to make the formula work for five strong seasons given how quickly they raised the stakes of imminent national threat by means of weapons of mass destruction in season two, but they nonetheless finessed five great seasons before the format got the better of the writers by a bleak sixth season. I actually enjoyed the writers strike-delayed seventh season, but series' weariness was hard to ignore and this final season has been pretty mediocre.

I was pleasantly surprised by the entries on this fall's TV lineup. My fear was the exodus of "Lost" and "24" would come at the worst time, with TV programmers no long keen on the prospects of intelligent, big-budget scripted shows, but several new entries look compelling from early indicators. If even one of them matches the creative flourishes of "Lost" or "24" in their prime seasons, then the fall of 2010 will give viewers something worth tuning in for.

House Seats I Expect To Turnover

2010-05-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

Here's my very early list of predicted House seat turnovers for 2010. It's still too early to declare anybody absolutely safe or anybody certain to succumb to defeat. At this time in 2006, everybody thought Jim Gerlach and Chris Shays were finished. But at the same time nobody thought Curt Weldon, Gil Gutknecht, Jeb Bradley, or Jim Ryun could be defeated. In other words, there are likely to be surprises both in which incumbents hang on and in which incumbents don't realize they have a race on their hands until days or even minutes before the votes are counted. Just ask Nassau County Executive, er private citizen, Tom Suozzi, a prime example of a trend I expect to see with a number of House races this fall unless the political climate changes dramatically.

First of all, Democratic pickups....

1. LA-02 (Joseph Cao)
2. DE-AL (open-Mike Castle)

I'm on the borderline with IL-10. Democrat Dan Seals definitely has the name advantage, but with native son Mark Kirk running up the score in that district in the Senate race in what I expect will be a Republican year in the Chicago suburbs, I have to give a narrow advantage to the Republican challenger. As for HI-02, Hawaii loves incumbents. Once Djou wins on Saturday, he'll do as all Hawaii incumbents do and hold onto the seat virtually uncontested until he's 106 years old.

Now onto the lengthier list of Republican pickups....

1. AL-02 (Bobby Bright)
2. AZ-01 (Ann Kirkpatrick)
3. AZ-05 (Harry Mitchell)
4. AZ-08 (Gabrielle Giffords)
5. AR-01 (open-Marion Berry)
6. AR-02 (open-Vic Snyder)
7. AR-04 (Mike Ross)
8. CA-11 (Jerry McNerney)
9. CA-18 (Dennis Cardoza)
10. CO-03 (John Salazar)
11. CO-04 (Betsy Markey)
12. CO-07 (Ed Perlmutter)
13. CT-04 (Jim Himes)
14. FL-02 (Allen Boyd)
15. FL-08 (Alan Grayson)
16. FL-22 (Ron Klein)
17. FL-24 (Suzanne Kosmas)
18. GA-02 (Sanford Bishop)
19. GA-08 (Jim Marshall)
20. GA-12 (John Barrow)
21. HA-01 (open-Neil Abercrombie)
22. ID-01 (Walt Minnick)
23. IL-08 (Melissa Bean)
24. IL-11 (Debbie Halvorson)
25. IL-14 (Bill Foster)
26. IN-02 (Joe Donnelly)
27. IN-08 (open-Brad Ellsworth)
28. IN-09 (Baron Hill)
29. IA-03 (Leonard Boswell)
30. KS-03 (open-Dennis Moore)
31. KY-03 (John Yarmuth)
32. KY-06 (Ben Chandler)
33. LA-03 (open-Charlie Melancon)
34. MD-01 (Frank Kratovil)
35. MA-05 (Niki Tsongas)
36. MA-06 (John Tierney)
37. MA-10 (open-William Delahunt)
38. MI-01 (open-Bart Stupak)
39. MI-07 (Mark Schauer)
40. MI-09 (Gary Peters)
41. MN-01 (Tim Walz)
42. MS-01 (Travis Childers)
43. MS-04 (Gene Taylor)
44. MO-04 (Ike Skelton)
45. NV-01 (Shelley Berkeley)
46. NV-03 (Dina Titus)
47. NH-01 (Carol Shea-Porter)
48. NH-02 (open-Paul Hodes)
49. NJ-03 (John Adler)
50. NM-02 (Harry Teague)
51. NY-01 (Tim Bishop)
52. NY-02 (Steve Israel)
53. NY-13 (Michael McMahon)
54. NY-23 (Bill Owens)
55. NY-24 (Mike Arcuri)
56. NY-29 (open-Eric Massa)
57. NC-02 (Bob Etheridge)
58. NC-07 (Mike McIntyre)
59. NC-08 (Larry Kissell)
60. NC-11 (Heath Shuler)
61. ND-AL (Earl Pomeroy)
62. OH-01 (Steve Dreihaus)
63. OH-06 (Charlie Wilson)
64. OH-15 (Mary Jo Kilroy)
65. OH-16 (John Boccieri)
66. OH-18 (Zack Space)
67. OR-05 (Kurt Schraeder)
68. PA-03 (Kathy Dahlkemper)
69. PA-04 (Jason Altmire)
70. PA-07 (open-Joe Sestak)
71. PA-08 (Patrick Murphy)
72. PA-10 (Chris Carney)
73. PA-11 (Paul Kanjorski)
74. PA-12 (open-John Murtha)
75. PA-17 (Tim Holden)
76. SC-05 (John Spratt)
77. SD-AL (Stephanie Herseth Sandlin)
78. TN-04 (Lincoln Davis)
79. TN-06 (open-Bart Gordon)
80. TN-08 (open-John Tanner)
81. TX-17 (Chet Edwards)
82. TX-23 (Ciro Rodriguez)
83. UT-02 (Jim Matheson)
84. VA-02 (Glenn Nye)
85. VA-05 (Tom Perriello)
86. VA-09 (Rick Boucher)
87. VA-11 (Gerry Connolly)
88. WA-03 (open--Brian Baird)
89. WV-01 (open--Alan Mollohan)
90. WV-03 (Nick Rahall)
91. WI-07 (open-David Obey)
92. WI-08 (Steve Kagen)

Without breaking a sweat, I've come up with 92 seats that I believe are odds-on to swing to the GOP in the prevailing political climate. Sure, there are a few controversial calls here. Will Jim Matheson and Tim Holden get washed away in the tide in their Republican-leaning districts as I predicted? Will the minority turnout show up to save incumbents like Sanford Bishop and Shelley Berkeley who I'm predicting tumble? Will the lack of credible GOP statewide challengers in New York save Democrats on Long Island and Staten Island? My gut says no.

But on the other hand, I'm predicting red district Democrats like Dan Boren and Collin Peterson hang on because of conservative voting records and a lack of top-tier or second-tier challenger, but can they survive a massive red tide? I've also given the benefit of the doubt to purple district incumbents like Rick Larsen and Chris Murphy who could easily be among the surprise casualties of a wave election who never see it coming when the 2006 equivalent of Carol Shea-Porter surges to the finish ahead of them.

Honestly, I challenge anybody to come up with a realistic prediction map in which the Democrats lose less than 40 House seats in this toxic climate.

Early Thoughts on 2010 Senate Races

2010-05-07T16:24:00.000-07:00

Usual caveats. It's still early and much can change in the next six months, but here's how I see this fall's Senate races playing out with the current state of affairs....

Alabama--Not sure who Richard Shelby's Democratic challenger is likely to be. Doesn't matter anyway. Shelby will win in the biggest landslide of his career.

Alaska--It truly was a remarkable political recovery for Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who looked as though she was toast in the 2004 race against popular former Democratic Governor Tony Knowles. She prevailed on election night, however, as Republicans almost always seem to in Alaska. This year, I haven't heard a name cited for a possible challenger. Whatever anger there was about her being appointed by her father seems to be long gone.

Arizona--At first I thought J.D. Hayworth was poised to upset McCain in the Republican primary, but his strength seems to be waning as McCain tacks further and further right. I would have temporarily enjoyed the headline if Hayworth had defeated the GOP's Presidential nominee of just two years prior, but it wouldn't have mattered in the end as Hayworth would have been elected Senator in November. Then again, there really isn't much difference between Hayworth and McCain's politics at this point anyway.

Arkansas--Blanche Lincoln has always been worthless, but at this point I would rate her as the most worthless Democrat in Congress. At least Ben Nelson is from a genuine red state and serves a hypothetical mathematical purpose for his party. There's nothing I'd love to see more than Bill Halter topple Lincoln later this month in the Democratic primary, but it seems like a longshot. I have no illusions that Halter would be the second coming of Paul Wellstone, or that he could even win a statewide election in Arkansas this year, but he would be likely be better at either than Lincoln. At least with Halter, there's no legislative trail of unpopular votes and blatant, opportunistic bet-hedging as there is with Lincoln. I suspect Boozman will be the GOP nominee but it doesn't matter this year. Barring an epic Republican scandal, any Republican would beat Lincoln. The odds are nominally better with Halter, but still very unlikely. GOP +1

California--I've already given my position on the California Senate race in the previous entry. It's such a target-rich environment for NRSC headhunters that I doubt they'll be able to pour the kind of financial resources into this race to compete toe-to-toe with Boxer. If they could, I think Boxer could be beaten this year. I have no idea how compelling either Tom Campbell or Carly Fiorina's campaign will end up being, and it would have to quite compelling if they were gonna topple a street fighter like Boxer, but Boxer's biggest liability is likely to be a lethargic Democratic base. Perhaps the latest kerfuffle over the Arizona immigration law will stoke Latino passions and compel them to the voting booth, an event that would certainly help Boxer's cause, but right now I'm looking for a very weak two-or-three-point victory for Boxer with a voter turnout comparable to the anemic 2002 Gray Davis gubernatorial election year.

Colorado--I've been very impressed with interim Democratic Senator Michael Bennet, who has been putting principles over politics on a variety of different issues and positioning himself as considerably more progressive than predecessor Ken Salazar. Unfortunately, that's one of a number of reasons he's not likely to be re-elected. I'm hoping Bennet wins the primary against the more DLC-leaning Andrew Romanoff, largely because I don't think either one has a chance against either Republican. After three election cycles of centrist Colorado moving heavily towards Democrats, a course correction seems inevitable. Democrats have been winning recent Colorado elections by winning over affluent Denver suburbs that are historically Republican but had issues with the Bush administration. With the bogeyman out of the picture, these decidedly nonliberal voters will be coming home to the GOP. GOP +2

Connecticut--I'm not entirely convinced this race isn't still in play. Tell me if you've heard this one before. A popular Democratic Attorney General in a New England state faces off in a Senate campaign against a likeable moderate Republican, coming out of the starting gate with a huge lead in the polls. Now there's no way of knowing that Blumenthal will turn out to be another Martha Coakley, but there's also no way of knowing that he isn't. It would be great if the GOP is dumb enough to nominate WWE mogul Linda McMahon as their party's emissary, but the likely bet is they'll go with Rob Simmons, who could prove to be just what the doctor ordered for moderate New England voters "fed up with the status quo". Given his commanding lead in the polls, you still have to give the edge to Blumenthal, but this is definitely a race to watch.

Delaware--I think Beau Biden could see the writing on the walls and backed away from this race knowing his chances were not great against Republican Mike Castle. Certainly Castle's victory is odds-on, but he's no spring chicken and, like Connecticut, I wouldn't rule out an upset if Democrat Chris Coons runs a competent campaign. This is another race to watch, but certainly likely Republican. GOP +3

Florida--Right now, Florida's Senate race looks to be the most exciting in the country, with a plausible path to victory for all three of the candidates. It would be in the Democrats' interest to put a stop to insurgent right-wing hero Marco Rubio by whatever means necessary given the dangerous implications if he's given a megaphone for the national GOP, so my hope is that if Democrats see that our likely nominee Kendrick Meek is struggling, enough hold their nose and vote for Charlie Crist. Unfortunately, I still think Rubio has the best hand of three candidates, unless of course this financing scandal blows up on him. It's gonna be a Republican year and Florida is still a Republican-leaning state full of geriatrics not looking to reward Obama with anybody perceived as a likely ally. Beyond that, Rubio could consolidate the Democratic-leaning Latino vote in central Florida responsible for putting Obama over the top in the state. If Rubio gets that key vote along with the party's northern FL base, it's hard to see how Crist and Meek can individually overcome him.

Georgia--Does Johnny Isaakson even have an opponent in the wings? Gotta figure it'll be a fourth-tier opponent if there is one, capable of winning only in Georgia counties with populations that are 60% black or more.

Hawaii--I'm assuming at this point that octagenarian Daniel Inouye is running for yet another term, and without Republican Governor Linda Lingle on the ballot, this is likely to be an extremely rare political phenomenon in the year 2010....a safe Democratic Senate seat.

Illinois--Republicans got a perfect storm in this race, comfortably nominating their electable suburban moderate (or at least perceived moderate) candidate while Democrats narrowly nominated a deeply flawed millionaire candidate whose family runs a bank that failed a few weeks after he was nominated. You have to give Kirk the edge in this race, but I'm not certain his current lead in the polls will hold up or that Giannoulias is definitely ruined. The arithmatic for a statewide Republican victory in Illinois has become almost impossible in the past decade--in my opinion at least as hard as Massachusetts--and one mistake is likely to be too many for Kirk. It may not even require a mistake if the Dems can point out that Kirk's voting record is nowhere near as moderate as he'd like us to think it is. Still, if the election were held today Kirk would win, but of all our at-risk seats, this is the one I'm the most optimistic about being salvaged. GOP +4

Indiana--Evan Bayh really screwed his party over by retiring a few days before the filing deadline. I'm reasonably confident Bayh could have prevailed in the general election, particularly against Coats who's bringing plenty of warts to his Senate comeback run. But Indiana's poised for a very Republican year and Coats is likely to prevail. Conservative Democrat Brad Ellsworth would have been a great statewide candidate in 2006 or 2008, but will need a number of things to dramatically go his way if he's gonna pull this one out. His one advantage is having a geographic foothold in a conservative-leaning region of the state, so if things do become competitive, Ellsworth wouldn't even need the 2008 Obama coalition to come together to eke out a victory. Still, the safe bet's on Coats by double digits. GOP +5

Iowa--The good news: Charles Grassley will have his weakest showing in decades in his bid for a sixth term in the Senate. The bad news: Charles Grassley will still likely win by double digits over Democratic challenger Roxanne Conlin. For about a year now, there's been some anecdotal evidence that Iowans' long-standing adoration with Chuck Grassley might be waning, but his campaign warchest is such that if the race becomes even faintly competitive, he'll flood the airwaves with his homespun colloquialisms and win back a good share of those currently waffling. I see very little chance of him losing.

Kansas--I have no idea who any of the candidates are who are running for Sam Brownback's open seat, but even under ideal electoral circumstances it's a virtual given that the Republican will prevail in a Kansas Senate election. Given how terrible this year's political climate is, the GOP candidate's victory seems even more assured.

Kentucky--It's a shame this contest didn't come up in either 2006 or 2008. Both of the Democratic candidates, Attorney General Jack Conway and Lt. Governor Dan Mongiardo, are more than capable of winning a Senate election in Kentucky under traditional electoral circumstances. Unfortunately, in a state brimming with a disproportionate level of Obama Derangement Syndrome, along with a festering national debate on coal mining, it's hard to imagine any situation where either Conway or Mongiardo could win in 2010. On the Republican side, I'm pulling for Secretary of State Trey Grayson who would be a conventional Republican backbencher incapable of doing the Democratic narrative any harm. A victory by libertarian Republican Rand Paul would theoretically yield at least a few correct votes on the Senate floor, particularly on foreign policy issues, but it would catapult a mostly radical, fringe ideologue to the front and center of Republican politics. At one level, it's difficult to see how government-dependent Kentuckians could come out ahead in any way latching onto libertarianism, but the rhetoric is nonetheless likely to sound good to them and one Senator is unlikely to give voters a true sense of what libertarianism politics in actual practice is really like. Regrettably, Paul has a comfortable lead in the primary polls and I'd give significant odds to his being the next Senator of Kentucky.

Louisiana--Another contest that I would have loved to have seen come up in 2006 or 2008. Charlie Melancon is the perfect profile of a successful Southern Democrat in the early 21st century and under normal circumstances would pose a serious challenge to an assclown like GOP incumbent David Vitter. Unfortunately, he picked a terrible year to go for a promotion in a state as rabidly anti-Obama as Louisiana. Now that Melancon's district is about to be economically devastated once again after the big oil spill, even his base voters are gonna be in a sour mood and that's only likely to further help Vitter. Crazy how a race that would have been odds-on for Melancon two years ago is now likely to be a 20-point flogging for a "family values" Republican who visits prostitutes while wearing diapers.

Maryland--Democrat Barbara Mikulski appears to be running for another term and should make this another rare comfortably Democratic seat. Even in an open seat, the demographics of Maryland in 2010 make it virtually impossible to see how a Republican could win.

Missouri--A cycle that should have been a target-rich bonanza for Democrats turned into a nightmare. Exhibit A is Missouri, where it would have been inconceivable in any recent election to envision much-maligned Washington insider Roy Blunt defeating Robin Carnahan. But in 2010, that now seems like an inevitable outcome as increasingly conservative Missouri hardens in opposition to Obama and seems poised to latch onto whatever candidate has an (R) next to his or her name come fall. This race is not so far gone that there's no hope for Carnahan, but it's definitely an uphill fight to win a race that seemed like a slam-dunk 12 months ago.

Nevada--If Republicans are smart, they will run away from gaffe-prone frontrunner Sue Lowden in favor of primary opponent Danny Tarkanian now while they still have the chance. If Lowden's political instincts continue to be as rotten in the general election as they have so far, she could manage to do the seemingly impossible...lose to Harry Reid. Of course, since Tarkanian is by no means a veteran of political campaigns either, so he could end up being just as gaffe-prone as Lowden. Hapless opposition may give Harry Reid a glimmer of hope that he could hang onto his seat by default but it still seems like a longshot. Voters know they don't like him....and they have to be convinced that his opponent is even less likable. That's no easy task for Reid. GOP +6

New Hampshire--Much like Colorado, the apparent wholesale realignment of New Hampshire to the Democrats in the last three election cycles seemed too good to be true....and was. The same libertarian instincts prominent among New Hampshire voters that worked to Democrats' advantage during the Bush years are now poised to crush the Democrats during the Obama years. Republican Attorney General Kelly Ayotte is the likely GOP nominee and all polls indicate she has a commanding lead over Democratic Congressman Paul Hodes, another House member that picked a bad year to go for a promotion and could likely forfeit his Democrat-held House seat as well as lose the Senate election. Barring a huge change in the campaign's existing dynamic, Ayotte seems poised for an easy victory.

New York 1--Chuck Schumer is actually a ripe target for a number of reasons, but is benefiting mightily from the fact that lower-hanging fruit Kirsten Gillibrand makes for an easier Republican target. Even a challenge from Pataki or Giuliani would have a tough time taking down Schumer given the Democratic bent of New York as well as Schumer's ferocious ambition, but without any big-name challenger poised to take him on, Schumer should score an easy victory.

New York 2--Kirsten Gillibrand should be toast in a political environment as tough as 2010, but has lucked out by the conspicuous lack of GOP opposition which still baffles me. Why isn't Giuliani running? And why not Pataki? How was John Cornyn incapable of convincing these guys to take on the easily beatable Gillibrand with a likely consequence of a GOP-controlled Senate? It's quite a mystery, and one the Democrats must be hitting their knees in appreciation for every day. As weak as Gillibrand is, I still wouldn't rule out a Scott Brown-style GOP newcomer taking her down, but right now you definitely have to give her odds of holding the seat.

North Carolina--Republican backbencher Richard Burr looked to be toast at this time a year ago, with an insurgent Democratic Party in North Carolina and little goodwill built up for Burr even amongst his party's base. While I still think North Carolina is in the midst of a more permanent Democratic realignment than Colorado or Indiana, 2010 nonetheless looks like a rough year. Both Elaine Marshall and Cal Cunningham seem like credible candidates and would have likely beaten Burr in either 2006 or 2008, but whoever prevails in the primary runoff is gonna have a huge uphill fight in November. As weak as Burr might be and as strong as either Marshall or Cunningham may end up being, it's hard to envision a scenario where this race isn't nationalized to Burr's benefit.

North Dakota--I knew in November 2008 that backlash to a Democratic-controlled Washington would jeopardize my favorite Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan and his re-election became my top concern. Never did it cross my mind that Dorgan would retire and my heart sank when I heard he was gonna do just that. It's almost certain that popular Republican Governor John Hoeven will now win the seat, but the upside is that there's a reason for Hoeven's broad popularity at home. He's a pragmatic moderate who reaches out to the other side. Considering the kind of wingnut that North Dakota would be capable of promoting to the Senate in an electoral climate such as this, a victory by Hoeven is about as good of an outcome as we can hope for. GOP +7

Ohio--On the surface, Ohio seems like the Democrats' best chance of winning a Republican-held seat this year. Unfortunately, I have less hope of that happening now than I did a week ago. Newly minted Democratic nominee Lee Fisher shows little sign of being a scrappy street fighter or of being an aggressive populist capable of turning the heat on his opponent, Bush's former budget director Rob Portman. I have no idea how good of a candidate Jennifer Brunner would have been, but she was ideologically closer to Sherrod Brown, the kind of Democrat with a track record of winning in Ohio. Maybe Fisher will surprise me, and goodness knows Portman is about the best opponent any Democrat could ask for this year, especially in a state as devastated by the Bush economy as Ohio, but given the national climate and Ohio's
bellwether reputation, Portman nonetheless has the advantage.

Oklahoma--I'm against Tom Coburn on most issues and he certainly shows flashes of being a despicable human being, but even I have to acknowledge that he serves a vital role in the Senate as a gadfly to reckless spending. And if even I'm willing to acknowledge that he's more useful than most Republicans in the Senate, you know he's a shoo-in for a second term in the nation's most conservative state.

Oregon--I've only seen one poll but thus far it looks like Ron Wyden should weather the red tidal wave crashing onto America's shore this year. His numbers were soft enough to still be of some concern, but it's hard to see how the NRSC will have the money to bankroll a serious challenge to Wyden in Oregon given how many other states they have to target. His victory isn't quite a certainty, but he's better off than just about every other Democrat this year.

Pennsylvania--This race is becoming very unpredictable. At the very time that Arlen Specter was expected to be running away with a primary victory against Joe Sestak, it is Sestak that is closing the gap. My money is still on Specter. The man is a master at defining his opponents and ripping them apart. And for the same reason, my money is on Specter in November. Pat Toomey is way too conservative for Pennsylvania, and seems unlikely to have the political skills to win statewide against Specter. If it's Toomey vs. Sestak, then I would rate the race as a toss-up with a narrow advantage to Toomey. Sestak has a geographic advantage representing the Philadelphia suburbs in the House, the region where PA elections are won or lost in recent cycles. Still, my best bet is that Specter wins the primary and then wins the general.

South Carolina--While I have a certain respect for Oklahoma right-winger Tom Coburn, I have no respect at all for the equally right-wing Jim DeMint, who's much more of a demagogue and seems to be positioning himself for a higher profile in his second term by attaching himself to the furthest reaches of Tea Party wingnuttia.
Nonetheless, he's a Republican Senator in the state of South Carolina. He'll be re-elected by a double-digit margin.

South Dakota--In a more hospitable political climate, and before he made a total ass of himself by fudging on his taxes, I would have loved to have seen a rematch to the epic 2004 Senate race pitting Tom Daschle versus the man who narrowly defeated him in 2004, John Thune. Even in 2008, Thune would have probably won such a rematch, but it still would have been fun. Thune has no Democratic opposition in his bid for a second term which is just as well since he's unbeatable anyway. I'm just happy Stephanie Herseth Sandlin didn't challenge Thune for a promotion of her own the way Charlie Melancon is doing in Louisiana. Herseth will be lucky if she can pull off a victory in her House race this year.

Utah--Whether Republican Robert Bennett prevails in tomorrow's interparty skirmish or not, the ultimate victor in November's Senate election in the state of Utah will assuredly have an (R) next to his/her name.

Vermont--Pat Leahy is another of the selective class of Democratic Senate incumbents cruising towards safe re-election.

Washington--Biggest prediction of the bunch: Dino Rossi will decide to run for Senate and he will defeat three-term Democratic incumbent Patty Murray in November. GOP +8

Wisconsin--Tommy Thompson's decision to sit this race out cost the Republicans a Senate seat and conceivably a Senate majority. Without Thompson, I'm leaning towards Russ Feingold pulling it out, but if the GOP's challenger proves the least bit articulate, Feingold could be defeated in the current political climate.

So I have the GOP winning eight seats, which would leave us with a 51-49 Senate. Of course, you can never trust that the party's weakest link, Joe Lieberman, would stay with the Democrats in such a scenario. Furthermore, current polling indicates Pennsylvania is poised to move to the GOP despite my long-range prediction otherwise, and the slightest additional wind at the backs of the GOP would win them additional seats in California and Wisconsin....or an upset in Connecticut for that matter. Basically, the Republicans have a little less than 50% chance of winning back the Senate in the current political climate, despite the fact that virtually nobody is acknowledging how good their chances are right now. An even more alarming scenario for Democrats may come in 2012, where the Democrats will be defending 24 of 33 total seats, and almost certainly poised to lose control of the Senate if they haven't already after the 2010 midterms. If the GOP has a really strong 2012, which isn't nearly as likely as it was in 2010, it's not inconceivable that in two election cycles, the U.S. Senate could swing from a filibuster-proof Democratic majority to a filibuster-proof Republican majority. To be continued....

Okay, So Maybe They Weren't Bluffing

2010-05-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

I'm still amazed that the Dems managed to muscle through health care reform after my last blog post predicting the renewed effort was little more than a headfake designed to show Democrats "tried as hard as they could to pass it" knowing they ultimately didn't have the votes. Whether passage of this unpopular legislation makes the looming midterm election tsunami even worse for the Democrats is another question, but despite the bill's numerous warts, passing it was the right thing to do.

With my prediction-making record having taken a big hit over health care, I'm gonna be slow to get back into the political prediction business, but I nonetheless am dumbstruck by Democrats jumping by choice onto the immigration gernade. At one level I understand the logic in that they see the Arizona immigration law as a great opportunity to stoke the passions of the Latino vote, which up to this point has been disillusioned by the lack of progress on federal immigration policy. To that extent, they'll probably succeed in bolstering enthusiasm in the Latino community and pushing Latinos further away from the Republican Party.

At the same time, the Democrats apparently do not realize that for every Latino vote they win over in support of liberalized immigration law, they likely lose two or more non-Latino votes, a fact that few pundits seem to realize as they assure us that it's the Republican position on immigration that is political suicide. The Dems were lucky enough in 2008 to have illegal immigration off the radar screen of opponents but still prevalent in the minds of Latinos, creating a perfect storm of all gain and no pain. My best guess is that Democrats are playing a high-risk game of hot potato, hoping to repeat that perfect storm by firing up the Latino vote with immigration reform but planning to pull back in a few weeks with the hope that the vast majority of the electorate that opposes liberalized reform legislation will have forgotten about it come election day. As I said, it's a high-risk gambit with a best-case scenario of helping out Harry Reid in Nevada.

It was pretty clear in November 2008 that the prevailing political winds were gonna cook up a hurricane for Democrats in 2010. At the time I said the best hedge against catastrophe in 2010 would be to run up the score of Congressional Democrats as high as possible in 2008, requiring Republicans to take out massive numbers of them to win back Congress in 2010. I still believe that was the best strategy, but with a fickle electorate desperate for "divided government" despite their claims of hating gridlock, the anti-Democratic tsunami may be so extreme that any-sized majority would be an ineffective firewall.

And even though it appears Dick Cheney was singularly responsible for the ecological calamity in the Gulf Coast right now, that's also likely to work into Republicans' favor based on a narrative of "nothing going right" in the country. Hold on tight because things are likely to be every bit as ugly this November as anybody predicted for Democrats in the last 18 months.

It's a Bluff Folks

2010-02-22T21:30:00.000-08:00

I gotta hand it to the Obama administration and the House and Senate leadership. As inept as they were in advancing health care reform legislation, they are doing a fantastic job of pretending they might still be able to muscle it through. Nancy Pelosi is talking about the House voting on the already-passed Senate bill. Harry Reid is talking about using reconciliation to pass an amended version of their own bill through with only 51 votes instead of 60....perhaps even resurrecting the public option!!! And the President is releasing his own plan and is convening a bipartisan summit with Republicans to discuss the legislation and "seek out compromise".

There's only one problem with this sudden with this new aggressive approach to health care legislation. Actually, scratch that. There are a ton of problems. The first, and most obvious, is that Obama's plan is pure political theater. The House and Senate have already passed a bill. There is zero chance they're going to drop that legislation entirely and start anew with Obama's bill.

Second, Nancy Pelosi passed the first bill with exactly two votes to spare, and that was with tough concessions to satisfy anti-abortion hardliners in the Democratic caucus. I cannot imagine a scenario where she could finnagle 218 votes for health care reform now with increasingly nervous members of her caucus hearing overwhelming opposition from their constituents, even those in Massachusetts. Plus, the Senate bill that they'd have to vote on doesn't contain tough anti-abortion language needed to get the support of Bart Stupak and his boys. The House is only slightly more likely to relegalize slavery than they are to pass the Senate health care bill between now and Election Day.

And as for the Senate, at the last count, Harry Reid was lacking the 51 votes needed to push through health care reform via reconciliation. The specific number is hard to pin down, but the last I heard 12 Democrats were "no's" on reconciliation, meaning Reid is only pretending that's an option.

Everybody in Washington has known health care reform died on January 19 with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. The Democrats' "Weekend at Bernie's" routine feigning continued life for the legislation is a gamble on their part being instigated exclusively for the purpose of trying to control the postmortem narrative and possibly cutting their losses in November. If nothing else it promises to be entertaining. Democrats are giving one final faux-herculean push to show their base they've done everything possible while shining the spotlight on the opposition in the hopes of reminding the American people that the Republicans are not bargaining in good faith.

It certainly is a gamble. I think they'd be better off forcing the GOP to spend endless hours filibustering to kill the bill, but that could backfire to if a public that opposes this legislation 2-1 blames the Democrats for the maneuver and wasting even more time that they believe should be dedicated to creating jobs (or rather magically producing jobs out of thin air without adding a nickel to the deficit).

The best I can hope for out of this gambit is some entertaining gamesmanship between two political parties engaged in fight-to-the-death trench warfare, but I can't help but think it'll be all for naught for the Democrats. They greatly overestimated the intelligence of the American people believing that, amidst the worst economy since the Great Depression, they'd be given a little latitude to govern following their 2008 mandate before the public turned on them. On the contrary, the inability of the economy to immediately bounce back to 1999-era growth rates within a year has voters clamoring to return the reins of power back to the very people who caused the crisis.

Basically, the picked the worst time in more than a century to become a governing majority, they never coalesced as a party given their internal ideological fractures, and they wildly underestimated the opposition's ability to monolithically hamstring them on every piece of legislation of even modest significance. And as a consequence, a new generation of unimaginable radicals is about to land on Washington's doorsteps in the months ahead.

The Top 100 TV Shows of My Lifetime

2010-02-01T19:39:00.000-08:00

First the list. Then the commentary...

1. MacGyver (1985-92)
2. 24 (2001-present)
3. Prison Break (2005-2009)
4. Seinfeld (1990-98)
5. Hardcastle and McCormick (1983-86)
6. Growing Pains (1985-92)
7. The Fall Guy (1981-86)
8. Miami Vice (1984-89)
9. New York Undercover (1994-98)
10. The A-Team (1983-87)
11. La Femme Nikita (1997-2001)
12. The Wonder Years (1988-93)
13. Lost (2004-2010)
14. Crime Story (1986-88)
15. Burn Notice (2007-present)
16. Survivor (2000-present)
17. Night Court (1984-92)
18. Desperate Housewives (2004-present)
19. Sledge Hammer! (1986-88)
20. Wiseguy (1987-90)
21. American Gothic (1995-96)
22. Traveler (2007)
23. The Equalizer (1985-89)
24. The Practice (1997-2004)
25. Harper’s Island (2009)
26. The Office (2005-present)
27. Magnum, P.I. (1980-88)
28. The X-Files (1993-2002)
29. Vengeance Unlimited (1998-99)
30. The Disney Sunday Movie (1986-88)
31. Boomtown (2002-03)
32. Hill Street Blues (1981-87)
33. Perfect Strangers (1986-93)
34. St. Elsewhere (1982-88)
35. FX: The Series (1996-98)
36. Family Ties (1982-89)
37. Alias (2001-06)
38. High Incident (1996-97)
39. Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher (1996-2002)
40. Spenser: For Hire (1985-88)
41. Roseanne (1988-97)
42. U.C. Undercover (2001-02)
43. Midnight Caller (1988-91)
44. Threat Matrix (2003-04)
45. Remington Steele (1982-87)
46. Hart to Hart (1979-84)
47. The Simpsons (1989-present)
48. Quantum Leap (1989-93)
49. Airwolf (1984-86)
50. Simon and Simon (1981-88)
51. Without a Trace (2002-09)
52. K-Ville (2007)
53. Twin Peaks (1990-91)
54. Tour of Duty (1987-90)
55. L.A. Law (1986-94)
56. The Commish (1991-95)
57. Spin City (1996-2002)
58. Kids in the Hall (1990-95)
59. Law and Order (1990-present)
60. Our World (1986-87)
61. Cheers (1982-93)
62. The Pretender (1996-2000)
63. T.J. Hooker (1982-86)
64. Knight Rider (1982-86)
65. Smallville (2001-present)
66. Mission: Impossible (remake) (1988-90)
67. Street Hawk (1985)
68. Cracker (1997-98)
69. Soldier of Fortune, Inc. (1997-99)
70. Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982-83)
71. Cold Case (2003-present)
72. Cover-Up (1984-85)
73. Stingray (1986-87)
74. The Flash (1990-91)
75. CSI (2000-present)
76. Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983-87)
77. The Fugitive (remake) (2000-01)
78. Viper (1994, 1997-2000)
79. 21 Jump Street (1987-90)
80. Line of Fire (2003-04)
81. Moonlight (2007-08)
82. Houston Knights (1987-88)
83. Vanished (2006)
84. The Cosby Show (1984-92)
85. The Twilight Zone (remake) (1985-88)
86. Life on Mars (2008-09)
87. Flashpoint (2008-present)
88. Sable (1987-88)
89. American Gladiators (1989-96)
90. In the Heat of the Night (1988-94)
91. Misfits of Science (1985-86)
92. Kid Nation (2007)
93. Dynasty (1981-89)
94. Shadow Chasers (1985-86)
95. Dark Angel (2000-02)
96. Automan (1983-84)
97. Brimstone (1998-99)
98. Stargate SG-1 (1997-2007)
99. Close to Home (2005-07)
100. Mike Hammer (1984-87)

What's on here:

1) alot of action-adventure/crimefighter shows...those are my favorites
2) shows that had flashes of all-out brilliance even if they sputtered at various points in their run
3) shows that were rarely brilliant but were consistently above-average for several years
4) shows I watched at least semiregularly...sadly there are undoubtedly plenty of classics I never watched
5) shows that I have a nostalgic attachment to even if they're pretty hard to take watching as an adult

What's not on here:

1) anything on pay-per-view cable...I have resisted that genre despite hearing about all the great shows produced for it
2) with one exception, medical dramas....not my genre of choice
3) hard-core science fiction shows...again, not my genre
4) shows that had one or two good seasons but five or six weak seasons (i.e. Murphy Brown)

With that said, I tried to present a decent cross-section of genres and even included a couple reality shows despite my not being a fan of that genre. I make no apologies for elevating my personal favorites to the top despite the "flaws" that more snobbish TV critics may apply to those shows. The most important part of TV for me is the fun factor.

The toughest balancing act was trying to judge shows that lasted eight episodes versus shows that lasted eight years. Even my favorite short-lived series failed to crack the top-10 because it's not fair to suggest a very limited-run series is worthy of an iconic, long-lasting series that faced both the benefits and drawbacks of endurance.

Anyway, there's my list, subject to change in the months and years ahead of course.

Obama's Smackdown of House GOP

2010-01-31T13:32:00.000-08:00

It was entertaining to watch President Obama take on the hapless GOP House caucus last Friday. It was basically 140 vs. 1....and the 140 fell one-by-one to blistering defeat. Unfortunately, it was no more than that....a two-hour intellectual mismatch between scores of obstructionist hacks fighting to control the levers of power once again and one intellectually superior man desperately trying to govern a nation in decline. In no way does it change the political scorecard beyond a couple news cycles. But the unfortunate reality is that it would if we were able to see the Barack Obama that we saw last Friday more than once a year. Regretably, we won't.

Paul Krugman's 2008 primary season criticism of Obama proved right on one front. Obama lacks the fight in him to effectively take on a city as cynical as Washington. Obama underestimated the opposition's obsession to destroy him and went into office the way so many before him did, extending the hand of "bipartisan cooperation" only to have it slapped. Obama's problem is that he let that argument define his candidacy to the point where he can't now respond to Republicans with the Nixonian partisan bloodlust needed to put fear in them. He threaded the needle about as well as possible last Friday, but the Republicans can be expected to continue rebuking him at every corner on every issue because Obama has not yet given them a downside to doing so.

With every two-year political cycle, Washington gets more partisan, even when it seemed at points in the recent past that it would be impossible for the town to get more partisan. Hard to see what can change this and the country has become almost ungovernable as a consequence, but it's a reality Obama needs to come to terms with if he has any hopes of saving his Presidency. The opposition party wants to ruin him and will never bargain in good faith no matter how many olive branches he extends to them. He should use Friday's smackdown as a stepping stone to heightened aggressiveness and more persistent reminders to the American people of how badly the opposition is playing politics. It's painfully clear that if he doesn't, those playing politics so cynically will be rewarded by a confused and angry voting public looking to make the most convenient target pay, and that convenient target now happens to be the majority party that Obama belongs to.

The End of Obama's Presidency?

2010-01-23T09:24:00.000-08:00

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Tuesday's election represented an effective end to Obama's Presidency. When it comes to passing any major legislation the he campaigned on, that ship has now sailed. It's not just losing the 60th vote that makes things tactically difficult, it's the psychological defeat that will, and in fact already is, prove to be the undoing of a party that's full of nervous bed-wetters even in the best of times. At this point, if a President as radioactive as Obama supports something, the majority in Congress will oppose it.

Controversial and arguably counterproductive measures like comprehensive immigration reform and cap and trade were DOA long before anyone heard of Scott Brown, but a stake has officially been driven into the heart of health care reform at this point too and any efforts to funnel desperately needed government money into jobs programs will be obstructed by the chuckleheaded descendants-of-Hoover worried about the deficit in the middle of a depression. Had these people gotten their way on TARP, the auto bailout, and the stimulus, we'd be looking at 25% unemployment and a $5.4 trillion deficit this year rather than 10% unemployment and a $1.4 trillion deficit, but you can't reason with crazy.

It's also amazing to listen to teabaggers and naive "moderates" whipped up into a frenzy over anti-health care reform propaganda cheer on the prospect that we can now "start over" with health care reform. THIS IS IT, FOLKS! This was our only shot at health care reform in the next generation....and you blew it. Public gullibility fueled by right-wing hacks and insurance industry barons turned once-promising reform legislation into a pale shadow of its former self and has now officially doomed it.

Presidents and Congresses for 60 years have been trying to reform our increasingly dysfunctional health care system and everyone has failed because of the complexity of the issue and the fact some front-end sacrifice is needed from the health care haves in order to help the health care have-nots be able to live. We don't do "sacrifice" in America, and the very possibility of it is enough to derail any health care reform plan worth having by turning the majority of the public against it. We guess what, you Scott Brown-supporting geniuses. There ain't gonna be another one. The magic elixir health care reform legislation that lowers premiums, costs nothing to implement, and requires no sacrifice does not exist and it'll be another generation before the next naive President and Congress are willing to destroy themselves by trying. Bottom line: we're stuck with the worst-run health care system in the world for many years to come, and sure as the sun rises in the east, said system will continue to get worse and worse and worse with each passing year.

Angry rants aside, the political reality is that this is where the country is at. They demand improved health care but think it should be free. They want the government to focus exclusively on the economy but won't accept a rising deficit to get there. They insist we need to create "jobs, jobs, jobs" and that we need to do it by running budget surpluses, voting down auto bailouts, and opposing economic stimulus plans. But as toxic as the political environment was on January 18, it became that much worse on January 19.

The only reason 1994 wasn't even more devastating for Democrats is that they mostly held their ground in the northeast. Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts means Republicans are winning places in 2010 that were out of their reach even in 1994. With that in mind, my long-standing prediction that Republicans would win 70 House seats and eight Senate seats now seems too timid. Right now, I'm looking at GOP gains of nearly 100 House seats and 11-12 Senate seats. Knowing that this is coming, Obama can be officially certified a lame-duck President 10 months before even Clinton's Presidency was effectively ended in November 1994. Like Clinton before him, Obama's only prospects of bouncing back is to govern like a lame duck and merely looking less crazy to voters than Mitch McConnell and John Boehner will when they attempt to ram through $3 trillion tax cuts (not a hypothetical....the GOP minority actually tried this in February 2009). Any chance of governing on the offense and passing legislation that could conceivably reverse this country's decline has passed.

Will Congress Change Party Hands Over and Over Every Few Years?

2010-01-10T08:15:00.001-08:00

Looking at the indisputable data pointing to a likely GOP takeover of the House this coming November, it got me thinking about two things. First, it was just four years ago that the Earth was shaking in favor of Democrats, who swept into power winning seats nobody would have imagined winnable for Democrats two years earlier. Second, at this point in 2004, the 95+% reelection rate of incumbents of both parties in the previous five Congressional elections was considered "scandalous". My how times have changed.

For the foreseeable future, I envision Congressional race volatility of historically unprecedented levels. A landslide GOP win in 2010 will complicate my prediction a little because the Republicans would have disproportionate influence in configuring district lines for the decade ahead following the 2010 census results and thus giving themselves a serious decadelong advantage. Even so, Republicans largely had the same advantage after 2000 when all the stars were aligned for them for the 2001 district reapportionment, yet in 2006 they still managed to lose what was thought to be an impenetrably Republican House....and then managed to lose an additional 20+ seats to Democrats in 2008.

Expect that every two years, control of Congress will be up for grabs as American voters have become increasingly impatient in their leadership expectations in permanently troubled times. The reason for this voter impatience in contrast to their deference to incumbents in the decade past: America is a nation in decline, most likely irreversible decline, and voters refuse to accept it.

The lack of easy answers available from politicians today that were advanced by incumbent politicians in flush times have not made them many friends, and the would-be easy answers that are proposed ("we can have universal health care and not add one penny to the deficit") are met with understandable cynicism. Yet in 2012 or 2014, when Republicans are likely to control the House and offer delirious and plutocratic solutions of their own which will fail to quench the populist rage sweeping the country, the Democrats will probably be poised to retake Congress again. And then the tables are likely to be turned again by 2016. Rinse and repeat.

Again, this volatility is poised to be endemic because, barring a wholesale transformation of our economic infrastructure back to something sustainable, America is poised to continue failing. The seeds for our decline were sown back when globalization was at its infancy, as we were never gonna be able to compete with the developing world when the playing field was leveled or at least more level. Nonetheless, creativity in the financial industry produced a mirage of continued American exceptionalism for another generation, artificially increasing American's expectations of continued vitality. The only problem: the empire was not real, constructed with cheap credit and bottomless consumerism, and as a consequence, was unsustainable.

Add to all of this our entanglement in multiple foreign policy quagmires and we have the mess that America faces in 2010, a mess poised to grow much worse with the coming demographic shift which will force even more hard choices and broken promises. Is it any wonder why so many voters are so angry and so fickle in their political leanings?

For Those Who Thought The Last Decade Was Bad....You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!

2010-01-02T15:54:00.001-08:00

For the past couple of weeks, as the 2000s approached their sunset, countless columns have bid the decade a sneering good riddance, looking back unfavorably on the bad news that has kept clubbing us over the head, from 9/11 to the multiple wars it triggered to the worst-since-the-Great-Depression economic collapse. Fair enough. It was a lousy decade, with promise after promise after promise conveyed to us by the "experts", common sense be damned, failed to materialize and America became the nation in decline that was inevitable to anyone who was paying attention to our economic and cultural trajectory since at least the Reagan years. But the mistake that so many are making is looking to the decade ahead with optimism. The almost certain reality is that the 2010s will make the 2000s seem like the good old days.

It's hard to gauge what's in store for us on the terrorism or foreign policy front. It's hard to see the situation in either Iraq or Afghanistan fully dissolving at any point in the decade ahead, but it's conceivable the worst is behind us. History suggests that periods free of military entanglements are usually pretty short-lived though, so even if we get those two wars behind us, it's a safe bet another headache will be right around the corner. And with terrorism, I don't think anybody is capable of coordinating our intelligence agencies in the way necessary to thwart attacks. The mindless agency turf wars will transcend whatever "reform" happens to be passed by fist-waving lawmakers demanding change. So will a major terrorist attack occur this decade? Hard to say, but I think the odds are better than even.

That brings us to the economy, where continued American decline is an almost certainty. The dirty little secret that few talk about but which the 2000s proved to us is that the American economy no longer produces anything of value. Our political leaders sold the American working class into endemic poverty a generation ago by expediting the global market forces that exported our production economy to the globe's lowest bidders. Much of the high-value service economy has more recently followed suit. Last year's bailout that saved, for the time being, the final throes of the American auto industry should have served as a terrifying wake-up call about just how much we've lost. Instead, it led to the same mindless cretins who helped engineer the decline to complain about "the government taking over the auto industry", an industry that would not exist in America in January 2010 had the bailout not occurred 12 months ago, thus leaving our national unemployment rate 3-5% higher than its current 10%.

America's economy since the 1980s when so much of our industrial base headed overseas has been based on finance and credit, neither of which was sustainable. The finance industry thrived with Ponzi schemes made possible by reduced levels of regulation and growing numbers of Americans thrust into the "investor class" vis a vis 401Ks, a class of financial amateurs who were easy to take advantage of by financial sharks seeking to turn a huge profit at their expense and leave the wreckage for someone else to clean up. They orchestrated two giant economic bubbles, in the tech industry a decade ago and in housing this decade. Most everybody acknowledges this, but what they don't acknowledge is that these artificial bubbles are the only source of economic growth that can be produced in a nation that produces less and less in the form of raw, tangible goods every year, choosing to let these industries head overseas and telling us America is somehow better for it.

Down on Main Street, the economic bubbles even at their peaks failed to trickle down in the way that a production-based economy did in the past. The only way the peasantry could maintain the rampant consumerism needed to fuel the economy was through credit, another way in which financial sharks were able to thrust their fangs into our exposed necks. And that's how we ended this decade. The excesses of the financial industry final took their toll and the credit card-financed consumer binge of the average American family was no longer sustainable. And after all that, we still don't make anything people want to buy and which may renew economic growth.

So where do we go from here? Barring a miraculous and unforeseen return to a production economy, we either continue our fast decline or we start blowing the next bubble. The next bubble is almost certain to come from "green technology", with the same not-ready-for-primetime investor class desperately seeking to refill their emptied 401Ks with the "next big thing", buying into irrationally exuberant rhetoric from every nickel-and-dime green energy upstart with fork-tongued corporate pitchmen. Many of these new companies will be offshoots of the same energy industry barons already fleecing us. But a financially desperate people seeking vitality any way they can get it will surely take the bait, enlarging an unsustainable green economy bubble that will leave us at the dawn of the next decade with hundreds of thousands of wind turbines sitting idle in Midwestern fields, or even sold for scrap at pennies on the dollar.

Now there may be real sources of economic growth in the decade ahead. I doubt anybody could have imagined 20 years ago how much mileage the economy would get from the Internet. But whatever impact the next big thing in technology, or even the Internet up to this point for that matter, it's unlikely it will translate to anything that benefits the American economy proportionate to the rest of the world. It may very well exacerbate the pace in which the rest of the world gains at our expense.

And on top of all this, the 2010s will be the decade where the wolf finally starts knocking on the door about our retiree entitlements. Baby Boomers will begin retiring by the tens of millions, rapidly draining the Social Security trust fund and bankrupting Medicare outright. This will require either extending retirement ages, cutting benefits, or dramatically raising payroll taxes, none of which will go over well and all of which will hurt yonger Americans. Even raising retirement ages will make it harder for younger Americans to penetrate the fading job market. There are incredibly few good options for the generation ahead, and the extent of resource redistribution to our parents and grandparents will make it even harder for America to find its footing in the global economy. Meanwhile, instead of preparing for the demographic time bomb ahead, our clueless political leaders are encouraging and even mandating "healthy lifestyles" that will dramatically magnify the already monstrous problem we face of being a nation of economically unproductive geriatrics.

So despite all the cheering crowds at Times Square, there is very little to look forward to at the dawn of this decade. Thankfully, you can always count on "Mark My Words!" to give it to you straight no matter how bad the news.

Climate Change: Does It Really Matter If It's Real Or Not?

2009-12-18T15:02:00.001-08:00

Nobody will ever mistake me for a scientist, but I am informed enough on the subject to recognize that if ice is melting, temperatures are rising. One would think the indisputable evidence of melting glaciers and mountaintop ice caps would be sufficient evidence to shut down debate on whether climate change is really occurring, but obviously nothing is that cut and dry when it comes to people whose paycheck depends upon the evidence being wrong.

And therein lies the problem. Combatting climate change will cost people, both powerful and unpowerful people, money. And as "concerned" as the majority may be with the possible consequences of climate change, paying money to stop or slow it is not an option for most people. If the price for saving the planet is an extra dollar a gallon for gas, then that's way too high of a price for most people to accept.

But of course, the price would be far more than an extra dollar a gallon for gas. Several industries and entire regions of the country would likely be priced out of existence in the Western nations if serious climate change legislation passed. The cost of energy would soar if cheap high-pollution sources such as coal and oil were disincentivized. As these prospects become even tangentially real for Americans, the lip service they paid to combatting global warming in the past has withered away and we're fast becoming a Jim Inhofes.

To be fair, it's hard to know what's real and the climate change alarmists like Al Gore have done the movement no long-term favors by preaching fire and brimstone even as the rate of global warming has stagnated for the past decade. Even before the Climategate would-be scandal, becoming a climate change skeptic was becoming easier. Furthermore, the predicted return on investment from painful carbon tax or cap-and-trade legislation in the form of emissions reductions do not look particularly impressive, and their predicted impact on reducing the growth of warming look even less impressive. And all the while, the world's fastest-growing polluters China and India refuse to play along. It seems like all pain and no gain to a nation that refuses pain and insists on gain.

The bottom line is that even if the heating trends of 1998 had continued uninterruptedly, selling people in this country on the idea of significant (or even modest) sacrifices in the name of saving the planet was never gonna happen. So long as there are no definitive consequences in sight for those enjoying the status quo (and this could just as easily apply to fast-bankrupting entitlements and the existing trainwreck of a health care system for that matter), Americans will be more than willing to risk Armageddon for future generations to preserve their own comfort. And the fact that the climate change consensus is breaking down at the very time when sacrifice for the cause is no longer merely a hypothetical is creating a perfect storm for the denialists to sell their message of inaction.

What does it all mean? The global summit on climate change in Copenhagen this week could have just as well been a tiddlywinks tournament because no matter how serious the threat, nothing will be done. Not now....and not likely ever.

The Ghosts of Holiday Seasons Past

2009-12-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

I had so much fun last summer profiling and grading my past summers dating back to 1983 that I thought I'd profile Christmas and New Year's here in mid-December. I'll admit some of these run together for me a bit more than the summers do, but I think I have enough of a handle on each specific year to compare and contrast. Just as before, we'll start with 1983....

1983--We start with a barnburner here as December 1983 was one of the coldest months in history, not just for the Upper Midwest where I was born and raised but throughout much of the country. The temperature stayed far below zero the entire week leading up to Christmas and dipped to -25 and -30 (not wind chills, straight temperatures) for lows. I remember how deeply I had to bundle up to go outside as a six-year-old boy and I remember being snowed in and having to shovel out the front door on Christmas morning. The entire shtick of Christmas itself was a big deal for an eccentric lad like myself and I remember that year in particular how I eagerly awaiting the opening of my gifts. The only gift I remember, however, was the complete selection of the McDonald's pens featuring the animated McDonald's characters like Hamburglar and Grimace. Overall, one of the most memorable holiday seasons I've encountered. Grade: A

1984--I was in first grade this year and was just as excited about the entire concept of Christmas this year as I was the previous year, but for the life of me I can't remember any of the gifts I received. Most memorable about this Christmas break was New Year's. My parents were to have houseguests on New Year's Eve and I had to tag along with my dad that evening to pick up takeout from the now-defunct downtown Albert Lea restaurant The Parrot, despite my misgivings that I would miss an all-new episode of "Hardcastle and McCormick" scheduled that evening, its first on Monday night. My fears ended up coming to fruition as my dad would get pulled over for expired license tabs on the way there. And in classic Mark Hagen eccentricity, I recall shedding some tears at the break of midnight, telling my parents that I liked 1984 and didn't want to see it end. My dad, who lost his mother and took a 25% pay cut in 1984, had less difficulty seeing the year go away. Grade: B-

1985--Christmas fell on a Wednesday in 1985 and that creates (or at least created in the past) a perfect arrangement for a student in my part of the country because we get a 16-day Christmas break when that happens....as opposed to breaks as short as nine days with less favorable calendar conditions. So I definitely remember the long Christmas break and being able to watch new episodes of "MacGyver" and "The Fall Guy" broadcast during the extended break. 1985 was the biggest baseball and baseball card year of my life, but also the very early stages of my baseball card collection. I added a couple small items to the collection that Christmas, but other than that don't seem to remember much that I got for Christmas. The upside was that this was the last in a string of snowy winters where I got to play alot outside in the snow, and took advantage of it quite a bit this year, digging tunnels through the backyard drifts and such. Once again, I was sad to see 1985 go on New Year's, and this time with some justification as I endured a number of minor disappointments in January 1986. Grade: B+

1986--I was in third grade by Christmas 1986 and remember a general fuzzy feeling about the holidays this year even though I can't recall much in the way of specifics. I know it was the last year I believed in Santa Claus and also recall several new baseball card items that I received that year. But my most memorable gift was a small desktop-sized plastic pinball machine that I spent endless hours playing in the year ahead, so much so that one of the four cheap plastic legs broke off. Not too many specific memories from the 1986 holiday season, but just a generally good aura and being at a good place and time. Grade: B

1987--I have strikingly few memories from the 1987 holiday season. Before Christmas break, even started, I remember spending Sunday afternoons acquainting myself with Christmas film classics "It's a Wonderful Life", "Miracle on 34th Street", and the disappointing "Babes in Toyland", all broadcast on the local station. Beyond that though, I don't remember any specific Christmas presents outside of random sets of baseball cards. And the only thing I specifically recall about that year's Christmas break was being punished by my dad for something and forbidden to watch a "Sledge Hammer!" rerun on New Year's Eve. Not much to hang my hat on this year unfortunately. Grade: C

1988--A far more memorable holiday season that began with a drive up to some distant relatives in Pine Island, Minnesota, the weekend before Christmas. On Christmas Eve, I recall stopping for chocolate pudding at Trumble's restaurant in Albert Lea before heading home to watch the "Little House on the Prairie" Christmas special rerun on the local station. It was cheesy, but entertaining and very memorable. My most memorable Christmas gift was a set of the battery-powered Capsela toy, with motorized gears assembled inside plastic bubbles. I had tinkered with it in the fifth-grade classroom and had to have one of my own. Christmas and New Year's were both on a Sunday that year and I recall tuning in Saturday night on New Year's Eve 1988 for the final episode of "Simon and Simon" broadcast on CBS. Overall, definitely a more memorable holiday season than the year prior. Grade: B+

1989--One of my favorite holiday seasons. I was in sixth grade and obsessed with Nintendo, knowing I was poised to finally get a Nintendo of my own for Christmas that year. I got the Nintendo along with Super Mario Bros. 2, then my favorite game. 1989 was also the year the "MacGyver" Christmas episode first aired, an episode that remains the gold standard for brilliant TV Christmas episodes. I taped it during its original broadcast on December 18, 1989, and six days later on Christmas Eve, I watched the recorded episode again. Watching the "MacGyver" Christmas episode on Christmas Eve is a tradition I've held strong with for 20 years now...and I plan to do it again on December 24, 2009. Beyond that, I spent much of the Christmas break playing Nintendo at my own home (!!!) rather than just at friends and relatives' places. And of course there was also plenty of excitement ushering in the new decade as 1990 approached, and with 1990 poised to be one of the most transformative years of my life, more interesting times were ahead. Grade: A

1990--Times were tough for the Hagen household during Christmas 1990 with my dad having been unemployed for several months following the collapse of the meatpacking plant where he had worked for 26 years, all in the midst of a tough national recession. Thankfully he'd find another job the following month, but even so far as 1990 was a tight year, I still got a couple memorable gifts. My mom had gotten a very good deal on the Nintendo game Bubble Bobble which I had requested, and my dad was able to score a pair of cross-country skis at an auction. That was a reasonably snowy winter compared to the years before it, so I was able to test out the skis around the acreage quite a bit in the weeks ahead. Also memorable was my dad having won a free dinner at the Elks' Club, yet another now-defunct Albert Lea restaurant. On Friday evening, December 28, 1990, we made good on that free dinner and ate at the Elks for the only time in my life. I had two beef burritos that will still go down as the best Mexican food I've consumed. New Year's rolled in on a Tuesday that year and I remember hurrying home from my grandparents' place to watch the ball drop at home. Pretty good year all things considered. Grade: A-

1991--Certainly one of my most memorable holiday seasons of all-time, and generally one I remember fondly, albeit with one nagging downside. Christmas was on a Wednesday this year so I got another sweet 16-day day break, and since both parents were working and I didn't have to go to a babysitter anymore, the long break was perfect in that I got to spend long days at home by myself watching daytime TV and snooping around the house for my presents, some of which I eventually found. Those presents included a trivia game, the last set of baseball cards I would receive as a gift, and the requested Nintendo game Mega Man, the final Nintendo game I would ever get. But my two best gifts of the year included a Rand McNally atlas and a World Almanac. The specific importance of the almanac was that it included county-by-county election returns from the 1984 and 1988 Presidential elections. In other words, a legend was born that holiday season as I perused the county returns and began a lifelong obsession with regional politics. Occurring simultaneously was the early throes of the 1992 Democratic primaries where I attached myself feverishly to Iowa Senator Tom Harkin over challengers Bill Clinton, Jerry Brown, Bob Kerrey, Paul Tsongas, and Doug Wilder, despite what was then considered a longshot bit against then-popular GOP incumbent George H.W. Bush. As 1991 gave way to 1992, my obsession with primary politics hit fever pitch. But in regards to the aforementioned downside of Christmas break 1991, and it was a big one, "MacGyver" bowed out from its Monday time slot on December 30, 1991. The upside was that the series finale was still hanging out there for future broadcast in 1992 (along with a lost episode I didn't know about at the time), but the long-standing Monday tradition of "MacGyver" became a figment of the past with the end of 1991. I had known about the series pending demise more than a month prior, but it was still tough to let go. Grade: A-

1992--After the highly memorable 1991 Christmas break, 1992 was a far more subdued break. The family dog, 14-year-old Irish Setter Luke, had just died a couple weeks prior, so there was still a dark cloud hovering over that. On the upside, I had now scored all but three of the "MacGyver" reruns I needed to videotape on the USA cable network, so I was still having plenty of fun rewatching those. The 1992 election had just ended and even though the campaign buzz had wore off, my most memorable gift was the new 1993 Almanac which featured the county-by-county election returns. It was exciting to see Clinton's improved numbers compared to Mondale and Dukakis in counties in Minnesota and across the country. I got to spend New Year's Eve home alone watching "The Jewel of the Nile" prior to the annual standardbearer "Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve". And even though it hadn't struck yet, I was only a month away from a creative spurt that would trigger the birth of my yearslong Alex Burrows scriptwriting adventure. Grade: B

1993--Easily one of my least memorable holiday seasons, there are few things that I can identify from the 1993 holiday season when I was a high school sophomore. My dad was once again out of work and had been for several months so things were pretty depressed. I had no burning desire for any gifts anyway so it didn't matter much to me. About the only thing I do remember is having received an extensive introduction to modern country music by my cousin earlier that summer and having it slowly mestastize into an obsession by late 1993 and into 1994 as I dug out some of my mom's old Rosanne Cash and Dan Seals tapes to listen to when I had the place to myself. In general, one of the lamest holiday seasons on memory. Grade: D+

1994--I was generally in pretty good spirits over Christmas break 1994, during my junior year of high school. Being at the peak of my country music obsession in what was easily the genre's best year in history, I requested and got a number of CDs that year and also recall excitedly tuning into the top 100 songs of the year countdown broadcast over two weekends on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. Beyond that, I also recall racing the clock to complete "Teamwork", one of my favorite Alex Burrows adventure scripts before the turn of the new year. My parents were squabbling over something silly that Christmas break, but overall it was above-average year. It wasn't long after this, however, before my angst set in about the coming of senior year and the significant changes poised to occur in my life. Grade: B+

1995--I was a senior in high school during Christmas break 1995 and I was really starting to dread the uncertainty that lied ahead. With that said, Christmas was largely the last hurrah of easygoing times for me. I remember sticking around my grandma's house late on Christmas night to watch and tape the rerun of the 1985 "Fall Guy" Christmas episode. As for gifts, I was still in country music mode at this time and received requested CDs from BlackHawk (two from them) and Kim Richey, and all were very impressive. The second BlackHawk CD along with Richey remain among the five best CDs I own. In the days before New Year's, I went on a mini-road trip to explore some small towns in the Fairmont area, starting a tradition of visiting new nearby places in the week between Christmas and New Year's. Just like the year before, on New Year's Eve night I raced the clock to complete my latest Alex Burrows script before the arrival of 1996, and once again made the deadline by less than an hour. Overall, a pretty decent Christmas to end my high school years. Grade: A-

1996--The first ray of sunshine in my nightmarish year of 1996. I was a freshman in college and miserable beyond words with life, desperately in need of my 17-day reprieve to spend at home. 1996 was a brutally tough winter in Minnesota with new snow events every few days. I remember the thrill I felt leaving campus after my last final for the semester, driving on moderately icy roads home and sliding on the ice for the first time in my life, but still making it home safe and sound. My grandpa had just gone to the nursing home that year so we went to visit him there on Christmas Eve night. I didn't receive anything particularly special for Christmas that year and didn't do anything particularly memorable during break, but basic events like going out to Godfather's Pizza, listening to CDs, and playing out in the snow with my dog Pokey took on special meaning that Christmas given how much I had taken those things for granted prior to going off to college. My New Year's Eve trip was to the Northfield and Red Wing areas, this time on New Year's Eve day. As the break neared its end, my heart once again got heavy dreading the return to college. We got snowed in the Sunday before the end of break and had to wait till before dawn Monday morning (as in the day classes started) to drive back to campus. Despite the depressing final day, never in my life was a 17-day Christmas break more needed or more enjoyed than in 1996. Grade: A

1997--I will forever remember the 1997 Christmas break as the year I got my wisdom teeth removed. Needless to say, it kept me from fully enjoying Christmas because my appointment for oral surgery was bright and early on December 26. The surgery wasn't too bad and I thankfully was able to go under for it. The painkillers limited the hurt to only a couple of hours after the surgery, but I was pretty much a shut-in for the days after as I tended to my wounds with saltwater. Thankfully, the best Christmas present I ever received kept me occupied during that downtime...and best of all the present was free of charge. Completely by accident, my mom stumbled upon the Minnesota Blue Book published by the Secretary of State which featured precinct-by-precinct election returns from the 1996 election. For most of the remaining week, I crunched numbers like a madman for every town and township in Minnesota, making graphs and charts and the whole nine yards. While the almanacs I had received in years past that featured county election returns got my lifelong passion for localized politics started, this blue book really took it to the next level. I took a less-than-memorable New Year's Eve drive to hit some new small towns in a county to my west that year, but by far the best part of the 1997 Christmas break was receiving the Blue Book. Grade: A-

1998--Here's another lost Christmas in many ways as I have few memories. My grandpa had died only one month prior so there was officially no Christmas connection to my dad's side of the family. I was a junior in college and was strongly contemplating returning to my post office job from the summer before, if only to see if my little girlfriend from the year before had done the same. However, my uncle who works at the post office said they don't extend casual carrier contracts for only a couple weeks, so that idea was quickly nixed. Nonetheless, I was eagerly awaiting that coming summer in hopes of reconnecting with the girl whom I ultimately never would. The highlight of this year's Christmas break was my New Year's Eve trip to the Wabasha area, a beautiful area along the Mississippi River Valley that I had never been to before which looks particularly impressive in the dead of winter with cascading icebergs of snowmelt hang from the bluffs with bald eagles soaring above the warm river water. Other than that, not much noteworthy happened. Grade: B-

1999--The Y2K year. Christmas break started disastrously when I came home from my senior year of college to discover both of my parents home in bed with the flu. Miraculously, I avoided it as I spent my downtime reconnecting with printouts of episode guides from 80s action shows. It was the last Christmas spent at the house my grandparents lived in my entire childhood as they moved to a small apartment across the street only a few months later. I received the latest Minnesota Blue Book detailing the election results from the 1998 midterm election that Christmas. While it wasn't nearly as much fun as the 1996 Presidential and Senate election Blue Book, it was still a hoot to crunch the numbers for the Jesse Ventura gubernatorial election year as well as the four statewide offices up for reelection in the 1998 midterm. The later days of the break were more fun as anticipation of Y2K set in and I took a fun little road trip on December 31, 1999, to the Okoboji area in northwestern Iowa. There was a special energy in the air watching Dick Clark that year with the dawn of a new millennium on the horizon, wondering if any computer failures would cripple the world economy. I was surprised that there were hardly any wrinkles at all with the turn of 2000, and would soon return for my final five months of college, completely uncertain about my future but not nearly as worried about it as I was at that point in 1995 with the end of high school looming. Grade: B+

2000--Out of work with nothing solid in sight, Christmas 2000 was a very uncertain for me and considering how memorable the rest of the year had been up to that, it wasn't particularly distinctive in most ways. For the first year of what has now become a tradition, my family went to visit my uncle on Christmas Eve night, making it the only Christmas we would have on my dad's side. On Christmas day, the family crowded into my grandparents' tiny apartment, and it would be the only year of that failed experiment. The winter of 2000 was a brutal and snowy one, and it holds the distinction of being the coldest Christmas of all-time in southern Minnesota, sinking to -25 on Christmas morning. I was still buzzing from the great Gore vs. Bush election for which the outcome had only been determined a few weeks earlier, and with election returns now available online, I no longer had to wait for the World Almanac to study the county-by-county returns nationwide and the precinct-by-precint returns in Minnesota, which I had been obsessing over for much of December. I had a job interview at the Minnesota Capitol for a Bill Writer position for the upcoming legislative session, but I was highly underqualified and didn't get the job. My New Year's Eve trip was not one of my better ones, taking me to the heavily Republican southwestern exurbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul near Chaska and Waconia. Overall, a decent Christmas but not among my favorites. Grade: B-

2001--My situation was ever more precarious this holiday season as I was still out of work and as interviewing were coming fewer and further between in the midst of the 2001 recession. I had another unsuccessful interview at the State Capitol that year, and it was my first interview since July. Thankfully, I would finally be employed two months later. But despite my dire situation, it was an enjoyable and memorable Christmas, with the future looking bright with my online lovergirl Dana. 2001 was arguably the peak of my Minnesota road trip obsession, so receiving the requested "Small Town Minnesota A to Z" book was a special treat, as was the requested CD by country singer Phil Vassar, which is also among the favorite CDs in my collection. My New Year's Eve trip was a fun one as well, taking me to Winona County where I explored a bounty of new towns in Minnesota's scenic southeastern corner. Overall, given the circumstances, I couldn't have asked for a much better holiday season. Grade: A-

2002--I was hit with gut punch after gut punch in late 2002, as I was still smarting from the dissolution of the would-be romance with Dana and was glum about another opportunity that had just fallen apart. Meanwhile, the Paul Wellstone death was still raw, along with the disastrous 2002 midterm election outcome that followed it. Furthermore, my grandpa was in the final stages of cancer and was two weeks away from dying. On the bright side, I was employed at the small-town newspaper and had been for nine months now. While not an ideal employment situation it was better than the two Christmases previous in that respect. Still, talk about a dark set of circumstances keeping me melancholy for most of the holidays. My southeast Minnesota New Year's Eve trip was nice but not particularly memorable. And the same Wednesday Christmas which made for long Christmas breaks when I was in school meant the opposite this year....having to rush out the weekly newspaper a day ahead of schedule for both Christmas and New Year's, and then driving back and forth for only one day off on both holidays. Grade: D

2003--The only Christmas season of mine that was worse than 2002 was 2003, for some of the same reasons that 2002 was a stinker, only even more dramatic. Charli, the girl who at least thus far has been the love of my life had planned a weeklong visit to Minnesota during New Year's week, but things fell apart when her dad found out and put the ki-bosh on the trip 24 hours before she was supposed to board the plane on December 27, 2003, easily one of the worst days of my life. What would have almost certainly been the best New Year's of my life turned into a sad, depressing nightmare of sitting in my apartment alone watching Dick Clark. The other memorable event of the 2003 holiday season was the late December thaw that all but erased a month's worth of heavy early snowfall. The temperatures rose into the mid-50s the day after Christmas, when I took my New Year's Eve trip a little early on unseasonably muddy roads, and stayed there for a few more days. The 2004 Presidential primaries were on the horizon and helped distract me some from the disaster that was unfolding, but not enough to keep this from being my worst holiday season ever. Grade: F

2004--Another invisible holiday season and one of my least memorable of all-time. Still smarting from yet another Democratic loss in the previous month's Presidential election, I continued to evaluate the election data and compile my usual charts and graphs based on those, depressing as many of them were. My most memorable moment of the season was a shopping trip to Mankato that took place on a Sunday two weeks before Christmas and where I ate dinner at Red Lobster. It was my last Christmas working at the newspaper as I would get fired only a few months later. My New Year's Eve trip took place on Dec. 31 again this year and it was a sunny day where I explored some of the small towns just south of the Cities in Dakota County for the first time. However, the most notable absence of the entire season came on New Year's Eve night. Dick Clark had just had a stroke a few weeks earlier and was unable to do the countdown as the ball dropped in Times Square that year. A New Year's without Dick Clark is like a Fourth of July without fireworks, wrapping up a wildly disappointing year with one more disappointment. Grade: D+

2005--I was still unemployed during the 2005 holiday seasons, but my interviews were starting come faster and more frequently, ultimately culminating in me scoring my current job in mid-January 2006 just as finances were starting to become very tight. The Christmas season itself was marginal, but I'll always remember it for being the first Christmas of the DVD player and my receipt of DVD sets of "MacGyver" and "T.J. Hooker". It was fun reliving those 23-year-old "T.J. Hooker" episodes every evening before bed, but I had even more fun searching those "MacGyver" DVD sets for the scenes that were deleted for cable in my videotaped reruns back in 1992. In some cases, I remembered where the scene that was deleted was but in others I had completely forgotten. It was as close as I would ever come to seeing new MacGyver episodes and by itself made the 2005 holiday season much better than its three predecessors. Furthermore, even though he was still suffering side effects from the 2004 stroke, Dick Clark returned to usher in the new year, another sign that things were about to get better. Grade: B+

2006--My dad was being a horse's ass this Christmas which left a sour taste in everybody's mouth. My car was dripping antifreeze but it was impossible to figure out where the source of the leak was, causing a fair amount of trepidation and squandering alot of money to get it fixed only to discover the leak dripped on. At this point, TV DVD sets were my primary Christmas gift and this year I got the final season of "MacGyver" along with season one of a childhood favorite "Sledge Hammer!", which was a blast to revisit for the first time in 20 years. My New Year's Eve trip took me to the Waterloo, Iowa, area and back to my college campus in northeastern Iowa. I also began dating a girl in Des Moines that holiday season who I remain friends with and who later set me up with a roommate who would become easily my most serious girlfriend since moving to Des Moines. It was sadly the final Christmas I would have with my dog Pokey who would die only seven weeks later in February 2007. Overall, a modest holiday season that generated plenty of mixed feelings. Grade: B-

2007--The only high point of this holiday season was my receipt of three different TV DVD sets for "Miami Vice" and both seasons of the 1980s noir-ish crime drama "Crime Story", which was a hoot to revisit after 20 years. It was lucky I received these DVD sets for Christmas because I was about to have alot more free time on my hands as the hard drive on my computer crashed just before New Year's. The timing was bad too as the Iowa caucuses were approaching and I was unable to track the results on the computer until I fixed my computer, which took close a week before it was completed (hard to imagine how I got by without that computer all those years before college). I recall watching alot of cable news during that time, including the night of the caucus itself in which I shamefully caucused for the now discredited John Edwards. That alone hangs a dark cloud over the 2007 holiday season as a "what was I thinking?" moment. Also, my heart wasn't in a New Year's Eve road trip that year, making it the only year I've missed a New Year's Eve trip since I started the tradition in 1995. Grade: C

2008--Last Christmas was another fairly uneventful one that almost ended my 20-year tradition of watching the MacGyver Christmas special on Christmas Eve because I didn't get home until it was time to go to my uncle's, meaning I barely squeezed the MacGyver episode in before midnight Christmas Day. Beyond that, icy roads kept me from doing my New Year's Eve trip to the Winona area until January 2009. Meanwhile, my mom's achille's tendon was flared up and her leg was in a cast for three months and Christmas was right in the middle of this tenure. I had just hit it off with a girl who was quickly becoming very unreliable that holiday season, leaving disappointments there as well. I'm finding little to hang my hat on in terms of good memories of the 2008 holiday season. Grade: D

So how will 2009 unfold? Hard to say but I finally have my small tree up in my apartment and with the large blanket of fresh snow and bitter air hovering over the Upper Midwest, I now have Christmas spirit with 11 days to go till the big day. Anybody else have specific memorable Christmas and New Year's experiences from year's past?

Health Care Bill Going Over a Cliff

2009-11-24T14:54:00.000-08:00

While I confess that health care reform legislation has made it further than I would have anticipated, it nonetheless seems an almost certain failure at this phase, with at least four Democrats committed to killing it in a Senate cloture vote and Republicans united in opposition to ANY health care reform. So do they now pick themselves up and start over again? Highly unlikely. Aside from the fact that an election year is coming and lawmakers always play defense on election years, the complexities of comprehensively reforming health care give lawmakers few realistic alternatives. While I lament the latest failure to reform health care and the continuation of America's de facto execution policy of the growing ranks of uninsured, I won't cry too many tears about the death of this mess of a reform bill (be it the Senate or the House bill...both suck beyond comprehension) which, if enacted, would be wildly unpopular and ineffective in reducing costs.

So what specifically is wrong with the two variations of the bill. Where to start....

1) The taxes start in 2010 but the benefits don't start until 2013 or 2014. That means Americans have three years of financial incentive for disliking this legislation before one person sees any benefit. Perhaps this would occur with any health care bill, but if Uncle Sam is gonna tax people for three years in advance of a new program, the program had better damn well deliver. Most people are unlikely to see any benefits from this one.

2) The existing health care system's unsustainable economic model will persist even after passage. The two best ways to reduce health care costs would be to salary doctors rather than pay them per procedure, and to ration care, particularly end-of-life care. Neither one of these is politically possible. Congressional leaders got the seal of approval from the AMA because they carefully avoided language about salarying doctors, a practice which has made Minnesota's Mayo Clinic the most cost-efficient medical facility in the country, but which most doctors fiercely oppose. Similarly, just the talk of shifting "cost rations" from the insurance companies who currently practice them on working-age Americans to geriatrics on Medicare invokes language of "death panels" run by the government to euthenize grandma.

3) Along those same lines, those privileged enough to receive reliable health care coverage for themselves are unwilling to make a single sacrifice to help out somebody else. And given the economics of health insurance, which requires either enlarging the risk pool or reducing coverage in order to cover more people, most of the haves will need to sacrifice some to empower the have-nots. We don't do that in America.

4) Rather than shifting the risk pool up the age ladder and requiring more financial contributions from the older Americans responsible for the vast majority of health care costs, the bill contains language that will push even more of the cost responsibility on young people. A stipulation to getting AARP support for this bill was language mandating that seniors pay more than twice the premium that able-bodied young people pay. Bottom line: young people will pay higher premiums for health insurance they don't use while older people will pay less for health insurance they use all the time. Sound like a realistic formula to cost sustainability?

5) The Democrats are lying to us about costs.....and everybody knows it. As gullible as we often are, even Americans aren't buying into the insane cost prognosis of this bill that pretends the deficit will SHRINK if only we create a new health care entitlement that covers scores of millions of high-risk people. Every time a Democratic politician tells us this health care bill will save us money, he or she is taking us for fools. And nobody enjoys being taken for fools. Even if costs stay within projected levels, and they very rarely do, the budgetary sleight-of-hand that allows for 10 years worth of taxes to pay for five years worth of benefits will not apply in subsequent decades, where this plan will run up huge deficits. Americans know it....and the Democratic lawmakers trying to con them know it as well.

6) The public option will either be too big or not big enough to work as advertised. The "public option" is an intriguing concept but I struggle to envision any scenario where it could either force insurance companies to become more competitive or to be an effective insurance option for the millions who lack it. Republicans allege that private insurers will dump millions of high-risk customers into the public option, simultaneously hyperinflating costs and forcing people out of their private plans. Not so fast, respond public option supporters. The public option will be very limited in scope and only 4-6 million people will qualify, thus making it impossible for insurance companies to dump high-cost customers into the public option. Unfortunately, supporters can't have it both ways. If only a small number of people qualify for the public option, there will be no legitimate measure of competition against private insurance companies since the 290+ million that don't qualify for the public option will still have to work within the exploding cost structure of the private health insurance industry.

Despite all these glaring downsides, I'm tempted to agree with most Congressional Democrats that either the Senate or the House reform bill is still better than nothing, but the more I study specifics, the less inclined I am to even given this bill a lukewarm endorsement. Ideal health care reform would either be a Canadian or British-style single payer system or a heavily regulated private system like that of Germany or Switzerland. But the reforms needed to engineer the formation of either system would be politically impossible in America, so instead we are left with lawmakers trying to operate both a private AND public health care system, neither of which can contain costs. Seems like the worst-case scenario. On top of already dysfunctional private health care system with costs spiraling out of control, we're asking taxpayers to continue propping that up and simultaneously fund a public health care system operating in tandem with it. How on Earth could this possibly work?

Do these highly unpersuasive pieces of health care reform legislation currently being debated mean our lawmakers are idiots? Not necessarily. Regardless of all the ignorant knuckleheads out there saying "why can't we just do this and this and forget about doing this?", health care policy is like a series of dominoes where if one falls it impacts everything. Lawmakers knew going in that the only truly effective ways of reforming health care would be politically impossible, so they devised a bill that they figured would be the best arrangement given what is politically possible. They have fallen short by my measure, but nobody should convince themselves that if this plan is deep-sixed, a more viable reform plan will emerge. This is it, folks. It's taken a year for lawmakers to get to where we are now. If better solutions existed and were politically doable, we would be debating them on the Senate floor now.

As for Republicans, what are the alternative plans of the party that stands to benefit politically from the Democratic majority's incompetence? Well, they'd love to see an expansion of health savings accounts, which allows uninsured Wal-Mart part-timers to invest as much of their disposable income as possible in company-sponsored accounts, pretending that the $200 in the pot at the end of a year is the same thing as health insurance. They also want to end medical malpractice by enacting "tort reform"....where the scores of millions of uninsured Americans not only continue to remain uninsured with no viable options, but when the ER doctor leaves a can of Altoids in their chest cavity, they are restricted from suing for pain and suffering that resulted from the malpractice.

In other words, any meaningful health care reform has to happen at this brief snapshot in time when Democrats control every level of government with supermajorities. When Republicans are rewarded for their obstructionism at the polls next year, any hope of fixing the worst-run health care system in the world goes along with it.....at least until a generation from now when the next batch of naive "reformers" tries to take on this cause again. As I've said before, until the ranks of the uninsured hits 51%, reform is very unlikely. The trouble is, we'll be there before we know it if current trendlines continue.

Looking Back At Minnesota Governor's Races

2009-11-04T16:23:00.000-08:00

Last week I profiled 20 years worth of Minnesota Senator's races. Gubernatorial races tend to be less exciting to those who don't live in a certain state, but there have still been some doozies in the recent past. Minnesota in particular has had some crazy ones, with four of the last five being memorable. Here are some highlights:

1990--This was the first gubernatorial race I remember. I was 13 years old and not fully tuned in since it wasn't a Presidential race, but the high drama of this particular race made it impossible to be ignored. Two-term incumbent Democrat Rudy Perpich, a colorful Iron Ranger (being colorful is a prerequisite to living on the Iron Range, I think) who defied traditional ideological characterization was seeking a third term and found himself holding onto a modest lead against conservative challenger Jon Grunseth, the Republican nominee who had beaten moderate Arne Carlson in the primary. From out of nowhere in the final couple weeks of the campaign, Grunseth found himself facing allegations of child molestation involving two teenage girls hanging out in the Grunseth family's backyard pool. With less than a week to go before the election, Grunseth adamantly denied the molestation charges but nonetheless dropped out of the race, elevating State Auditor Carlson to the GOP nomination. At that point, the election began to hinge around, of all things, abortion. Perpich was a pro-life Democrat while Carlson was a pro-choice Republican. Given the state's sinking economic condition, metro area voters who never fully connected with Perpich in the first place found Carlson an acceptable alternative to Perpich and to the more conservative Grunseth. As a consequence, Carlson's five-day campaign resulted in a win, with an unusual county map that was mostly blue outstate but red even in the heart of the metro area (Hennepin and Ramsey Counties). Arguably the two biggest upsets of November 6, 1990, were both in Minnesota, with Paul Wellstone and Arne Carlson narrowly prevailing over the incumbent Rudys (Boschwitz and Perpich).

1994--Far less drama this year. The drama that did occur all came in the endorsement process where the sincere but politically weak State Senator John Marty prevailed in a crowded Democratic endorsement and subsequent primary. On the GOP side, the hard-core pro-life activists that rejected the moderate Arne Carlson for Jon Grunseth four years later rejected Carlson once again this year, endorsing the hard-right Allen Quist and giving the incumbent Governor a black eye. Getting a black eye from the party helped Carlson's cause in the end though as he beat Quist handily in the September primary and then faced a weak campaign against the lightly funded DFL challenger Marty whose "no PAC money" campaign pledge almost completely shut him off the airwaves until the final week of the campaign. It was the first Minnesota gubernatorial race of my life where the outcome was predictable....a Carlson reelection landslide. Come election night, Carlson won by a 2-1 margin and carried 84 of Minnesota's 87 counties (Marty won only in northeastern Minnesota's St. Louis, Lake, and Carlton Counties) and, most impressively, managed to carry all three of Minnesota's biggest cities....St. Paul, Duluth, and even Minneapolis. Never again in my lifetime do I expect to see any Republican win in any of these cities. It was the only Republican landslide I've witnessed in Minnesota in the two decades I've been paying attention to political contests.

1998--The wackiness was back big-time in Minnesota in the 1998 race. St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman switched from a Democrat to a Republican specifically to run for this race and had little trouble getting the nomination. The Democratic side had its usual deluge of contenders, with Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman getting the party endorsement but Attorney General Skip Humphrey riding the coattails of his name to win the September primary despite his bleak and uninspiring performances in previous high-profile statewide races. Coyly and shrewdly smirking in the background was center-left Reform Party candidate Jesse Ventura, the former pro wrestler who was Mayor of a Minneapolis suburb and had a local radio show that raised his profile in the state and helping him register in the low double-digits in the polls. Humphrey had small leads heading into October until the dynamic of the race was turned on its head by the televised debates. Humphrey and Coleman went after each other, predictably, while Ventura capably and intelligently answered all the questions and managed to seem like a witty breath of fresh air compared to the stuffy major party standard-bearers. Still, Ventura continued to have a hard time getting enough people to take him seriously even though his poll numbers were ascendant. The weekend before the election, Ventura's clever ads were filling the airwaves and I just sensed something in the air that suggested a Ventura victory had suddenly become a real possibility even though the polls still officially showed Humphrey and Coleman duking it out in the 35-40% range with Jesse in the low 20s. The rest, as they say, is history as Ventura "shocked the world" pulling in 37% of the vote, clearly at the expense of Humphrey whose numbers cratered to 28% on election night and whose victories were limited to the Iron Range and northwestern Minnesota farm counties that are not even in Minnesota media markets. Definitely one of those "only in Minnesota" elections, but the most priceless result of the night was seeing Coleman coming in THIRD place in St. Paul, the city for which he was the sitting mayor.

2002--Another unpredictable stunner of a race featuring two very hard-fought endorsement battles in both parties. All candidates agreed to abide by the endorsement this year rather than proceed to a primary, leaving the Republicans with House Majority Leader Tim Pawlenty and the Democrats with Senate Leader Roger Moe, two parties who both conspired in the legislature to punt the state's dire budget issues to the following year using one-time gimmicks as a way of simultaneously one-upping Governor Ventura and avoiding tougher budgetary decisions that would harm their own candidacies. A high-profile Independence Party candidacy from former southern Minnesota Democratic Congressman Tim Penny was extremely competitive throughout the summer and early fall, with Penny branding himself as the sensible centrist not as rigidly ideological and thus better positioned to handle budget issues than Moe or Pawlenty. For months, the polls were pretty evenly divided among the three candidates, with Penny narrowly leading in most. All the winning candidate was likely to need was 35%, and that's exactly what Democrat Moe was counting on, running a dreary and almost invisible campaign that ignored southern Minnesota and hoped to get to 35% simply with the DFL base of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and his own political base in northern Minnesota. The three-way deadlock finally budged a little in early October when Pawlenty's campaign was found guilty of illegally using campaign donations in its advertisements and a judge decreed the campaign could run no more TV ads, a decree that would have effectively ended his campaign. But the decree was overruled just in time for the candidate debates, where Pawlenty played the role of Ventura four years later, the charismatic guy sitting in between the uninspiring middle-aged stiffs Moe and Penny. Polling those last two weeks reflected the race's altered dynamics as Penny's support crumbled while Pawlenty's surged. Moe was static in the mid-30s, his campaign strategy of ekeing out 33.3% +1 having collapsed now that Penny was no longer competitive. Pawlenty apparently got a little more momentum from the Wellstone Memorial in those closing days of the campaign and, unlike the Senate race, the outcome here seemed certain, with the least responsible of the three candidates poised to take over the reins of state government amidst a then record $4 billion deficit. That outcome played out as expected on election night with Pawlenty winning 44% of the vote, a healthy eight-point margin over Moe, and Penny rolling in at a dismal 16%, pretty much forfeiting all of the suburban-based Ventura coalition of four years ago to Pawlenty.

2006--The narrative of the 2006 race was less complicated than the two previous races since this year's Independence Party candidate was not a major factor, even though he did ultimately swing the election. Tim Pawlenty enjoyed approval ratings right near the 50% range and most Republicans were comfortable that he'd have an easy reelection against the abrasive Attorney General and Democratic nominee Mike Hatch. But as the election neared, it was pretty clear that 2006 was going to be a strong Democratic year and Hatch was either tied or narrowly ahead of Pawlenty in the polls. Most Republicans remained confident that Pawlenty's charisma advantage would prevail while Hatch's mean streak would be publicly exposed before the election. Turns out they were right, at least on Hatch, as an embarrassing gaffe by Hatch's running mate over ethanol-based E-85 ultimately led Hatch to call an interrogating reporter a "Republican whore" over the phone....with only four days to go before the election. Meanwhile, a good number of left-leaning voters were seeing something they liked in eloquent Independence Party candidate Peter Hutchinson, and it's a good bet that a significant number of would-be Hatch voters ultimately defected to Hutchinson. Any other year than the 2006 Democratic landslide, Pawlenty would have had an easy re-election, but he still barely eked it out, beating Hatch by a mere 22,000 votes mostly on the strength of his numbers in the suburbs while Hatch's strength was mainly confined to Roger Moe's Minneapolis, St. Paul, and northern Minnesota coalition. Still, Hutchinson scored 6% of the vote, pulling in his best numbers in heavily Democratic urban precincts and almost assuredly costing Hatch the election.

2010 is poised to be another wild Minnesota gubernatorial race with more than a dozen candidates vying for the statehouse being vacated by Pawlenty. If recent history is any indication, it should be another wild ride. I don't anticipate 2010 to be a good year for Democrats, but Pawlenty's derelict stewardship of the state probably won't put the Republicans in much better standing. For that reason, I could envision a strong showing or even an outright victory for the Independence Party is they nominate another compelling candidate in the mold of Hutchinson.

Election Nostalgia

2009-10-29T21:37:00.000-07:00

No matter how tuned out I am from politics during the summer months of nonelection years, there's nothing like October to get me back in the mood. Just as was with the case at this time in 2005, autumn's arrival has brought back election year nostalgia hot and heavy and I will spend the weekend reviewing my videotape of election night 2000, indisputably the most exciting U.S. election of all-time. I'm even a little excited about next Tuesday's limited election contests in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, not because I'm confident of my side's success, just because I'm jonesing to crunch some new election returns after an election-free 51 weeks.

Next year's midterms look like a shellacking in the making, particularly in the South where I expect nearly every Democrat outside of a majority-black district to be unseated. So rather than look forward, I prefer to look back, in this thread at previous Senate contests in my home state of Minnesota going back to the first one I remember in 1988.

1988--Two-term Republican incumbent Dave Durenberger was going for a third term against Democrat Skip Humphrey, son of the former Vice-President and the sitting Attorney General. Durenberger, a very moderate Republican and generally affable guy, had always been in good standing with Minnesota voters until a minor corruption scandal in the waning days of his final term. Even the Humphrey name, at that time still political royalty, wasn't enough, particularly with the usual blah campaign that the junior Humphrey ran. Durenberger ended up winning by a better-than-expected 15 points even as Dukakis was winning Minnesota by nine points. I was only in fifth grade at the time and wasn't paying particularly close attention to the details of the Senate race, but accepted it as a foregone conclusion in the final weeks of the race that Durenberger would handily win...which he did.

1990--Another "popular" Republican incumbent....but a much different outcome. Only a few months earlier, slimy two-term Republican Rudy Boschwitz was rated as the safest incumbent in the nation. The Democrats had difficulty finding a credible challenger and ended up selecting a flamboyantly liberal activist and college professor named Paul Wellstone, who Democrats privately feared would be so weak that he would hurt other Democrats down the ticket. But sometime around Labor Day, something happened. The penniless Wellstone campaign was starting to generate some buzz with its colorful candidate and his humorous and offbeat TV ads. Boschwitz was caught flat-footed and reacted with a panic, making a megagaffe a week before the election when it sent out a letter to Jewish supporters citing Wellstone as an "improper Jew" because he married a Christian woman. Meanwhile, the energy surrounding Wellstone was explosive and contagious. I was in seventh grade and barely tuned in, so it wasn't until the final couple of days of the campaign that I began to seriously entertain the idea that Wellstone could win....but he did exactly that, winning by three points (and victorious in 27 of Minnesota's 87 counties). It was not only the most exciting Minnesota Senate race of my lifetime, it was one of the biggest upsets in American political history.

1994--The retirement of scandal-plagued Republican Dave Durenberger, with an approval rating around 25%, left an open seat that should have produced a very viable pickup opportunity for Democrats, but it was 1994....the worst year for Democrats in at least a half century, and Minnesota was no exception. Making matters worse, the Democrats nominated a lousy candidate in Minneapolis legislator Ann Wynia, a cantankerous older lady who managed to be boring and bitchy at the same time, which is not an easy task. Thankfully for her, the Republican candidate, one-term suburban Congressman Rod Grams, was also quite weak and the race turned out to be entirely uninspiring. In traditional cycles, a race featuring two weak candidates would mean an advantage for Democrats, but in the GOP landslide of 1994, Grams pulled off a fairly decisive five-point win, holding Wynia down to nine county victories and becoming the most conservative Senator Minnesota has sent to Washington in my lifetime.

1996--Now this was more like it. Ever since his surprise defeat in 1990, former Senator Rudy Boschwitz had been salivating at the prospect of a rematch with Democrat Paul Wellstone. Wellstone's outspoken liberalism left him theoretically vulnerable, but thankfully the same piss-poor Boschwitz candidacy of 1990 returned in 1996 with cartoonish (literally) ads trashing Wellstone that seemed incredibly unserious. It became easier as the fall pressed on for Minnesotans to see Wellstone as the rational adult in this race, and Boschwitz compounded his problems with another ninth-inning gaffe, this time blindly accusing Wellstone of burning the American flag when he was younger without any evidence and looking like a complete ass when Wellstone unequivocally denied it. Come election day, Clinton's 20-point landslide reelection in Minnesota carried some coattails and probably helped inflate Wellstone's winning margin of nine points (scoring victories in 43 counties), but there was no way Wellstone was gonna lose this race.

2000--I had just finished college and was without a job, so I had plenty of time to obsess about this reasonably intriguing race, which featured a long list of Democrats vying to face off against imminently vulnerable one-term Republican incumbent Rod Grams. Thanks to his personal fortune buying up all kinds of TV ads, sitting State Auditor and 1982 Senate candidate Mark Dayton won the September primary. He only had about seven weeks to wage his general election campaign against Grams, but was a favorite the entire campaign, running up double-digit leads in the majority of polls against the staunchly conservative Grams, who had pushed forward policies that were unpopular by a variety of different demographic groups. Were it not for Grams' glaring weaknesses, Dayton's own campaign weaknesses would have been far more noticeable, but in the end Dayton prevailed fairly handily, winning by six points and scoring 38 county victories. Two factors contributed to a smaller-than-expected margin: Al Gore's weak two-point victory at the top of the ballot and a well-spoken Independence Party candidate named James Gibson who pulled in a better-than-expected 8% of the vote, mostly at Dayton's expense.

2002--It was arguably the marquee Senate race of the nation and Minnesota airwaves were saturated with ads already in March, a full eight months before the election. Paul Wellstone vs. Norm Coleman. And what a race it was shaping up to be, with Wellstone weaker than I expected through much of the campaign, tied in most polls and suffering from the nationwide surge in Republicanism in the months after 9/11. Still, Wellstone held strong and began to open up a modest lead by October. I had never been as excited (or nervous) about a Senate race as I had this one. Of course, that's when tragedy happened that infamous gloomy Friday 11 days before the election when Wellstone's plane crashed in the northern Minnesota wilderness. Former Vice-President Walter Mondale admirably stepped up to the plate to fill in for Wellstone, but the raucous memorial service turned off independents and killed the sympathy vote. I knew the next day that Coleman would probably benefit from the memorial service/political rally even though polls continued to show Mondale with a microscopic lead. As I feared, election night was a living hell as not only Coleman pulled off a two-point victory, but Republicans crushed Democrats all the way down the ballot. A total shellacking, particularly in the suburban counties, and at the time I had concerns we saw the first stage of a permanent realignment of Minnesota into the GOP column. Usually I stay up all night on election nights, but that night I crashed at about 2 a.m. in a deep funk.

2006--I knew unpopular one-term incumbent Mark Dayton made the right decision to retire from his seat and allow another candidate to be the Democratic Party's emissary, but I would have never realized in February 2005 when Dayton announced his retirement just how perfect that decision would be as it opened the door for Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar to be the Democratic candidate. Klobuchar was a very polished candidate, but her opponent also seemed to be a worthy adversary, at least at first. Republican Congressman Mark Kennedy's resume and political geography suggested an epic Old Minnesota vs. New Minnesota dogfight that, as a political scientist, gave me goose bumps to contemplate. But the race didn't play out at all like I expected. With the help of a strong Democratic tide nationally along with her own political skills, Klobuchar ran a pitch-perfect campaign while Kennedy too often looked like a bumbling fool. Never in my wildest dreams, however, could I have imagined the 21-point shellacking Klobuchar served to Kennedy in November 2006, winning 79 of Minnesota's 87 counties. It was the first genuine Democratic landslide in a statewide race that I got to observe, and it was a pleasure to witness.

2008--Here was a race that was always exciting to observe from a political scientist perspective but nonetheless one I had a hard time getting particularly excited about for one big reason. I simply couldn't imagine a scenario where comedian Al Franken could topple one-term incumbent Norm Coleman, as statistically weak as Coleman was. How could the stoic Scandinavians of Minnesotans ever take Franken seriously, I continued to ask myself. So imagine my surprise as summer passed by and Franken was in contention, thanks to two factors. First, Coleman was saturating the airwaves with some of the sleaziest ads I've ever seen and managed to make Franken look like the adult, which was no easy task. Second, an independent candidate with high name recognition was pulling in double-digit support from voters disgusted with both Franken and Coleman, but at least in theory seemed to be taking more from Coleman. We all know how the tick-tight race unfolded complete with the monthslong recount and an ultimate margin of victory for Franken of only a couple hundred votes. The outcome was favorable, and I'm starting to think Franken could end up being a pretty good Senator.

There is no Minnesota Senate race in 2010, which I'm grateful for given the political climate that looks to be coming. But there is a Governor's race next year. In my next post, I'll take a look back at the Minnesota gubernatorial contests of my lifetime.

The New TV Season....and a Bunch of Old TV Seasons

2009-09-25T21:10:00.000-07:00

Any regular reader of this blog knows I'm a television aficianado and have been since I was a little boy. This past week was "premiere week" on network television, but I must saw there's little to get excited about this year. I'd rate it as the weakest fall season since 2000. I'm gonna watch the new show I've looked forward to most this weekend, ABC's "Flash Forward", give "The Forgotten" a fair hearing, and check out next week's "Trauma" on NBC which reportedly has some great pyrotechnics. But I just can't get excited about any of the long list of new medical dramas on the schedules this fall. Thankfully, things sound better for midseason with some promising new entries on tap along with returning favorites "24" and "Lost", both of which are likely (and mercifully) heading into their final seasons.

Even though I'm lukewarm about this fall's lineup, I continue to praise the medium of television for its relatively impressive body of work this past decade. This season may well turn out to be as ho-hum as it looks now, but it'll still be a far cry better than the bleak 1990s when endless clones of "Seinfeld" filled the airwaves and "Dateline" gobbled up four primetime hours per week. Granted, NBC's "Jay Leno Show" gimmick this season is a scary harbinger of what primetime TV MAY look like a few years down the road, but the difference between Jay Leno today and Dateline 10 years ago is that in the current primetime lineup not occupied by Jay Leno, NBC is making good television (even if I don't personally like all of the shows, they are quality productions). By contrast, in 1999, the hours not occupied by Dateline were by and large just as unimpressive as was Dateline.

I've been following primetime network television since before I started elementary school, so indulge me as I take a trip down memory lane and profile past seasons...

1981

Main Themes--NBC was as down and out as a network could get in the early 1980s and never worse than this season when they didn't have a single show in the top-25 (and this when there were only 75 shows on three networks). They lost tons of money on recent high-profile failures and after Carter pulled out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the network was on the verge of financial ruin, saved only by the revenue earned by their late-night lineup of Johnny Carson and David Letterman. Beyond NBC's woes, the very early 80s was one of those rare times when primetime TV was diverse, offering a wide breadth of genre TV without any specific genre owning the airwaves, although primetime soaps were really starting to catch fire. CBS ruled the world with ABC in a distant second.

Successful New Shows....The Fall Guy, Simon and Simon, Gimme a Break, Falcon Crest, Private Benjamin, Father Murphy

Flops....Mr. Merlin, The Phoenix, Chicago Story, and NBC's unsuccessful foray into primetime soaps, Flamingo Road........*a little before my time in terms of remembering much about these unsuccessful shows

Midseason Successes....Cagney and Lacey, T.J. Hooker

1982

Main Themes....the networks had a fair amount of success with their large batch of new series in 1982, and NBC was patient with a number of critically acclaimed but slow-starting series that would eventually pay off for them, although not so much this year, save for "The A-Team" which gave the network its first real hit in years when it premiered midseason. In terms of trends, the action show was in ascendancy, the success of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in the box office spawned three unsuccessful small screen adventure series, and the primetime soaps were all really starting to catch fire. Again, CBS completely dominated the ratings race and ABC followed well behind but still light years ahead of hapless NBC.

Successful New Shows...Family Ties, Cheers, St. Elsewhere, Knight Rider, Remington Steele, Newhart, Matt Houston, Ripley's Believe it or Not!, Silver Spoons

Flops...The Powers of Matthew Star, Voyagers!, Tucker's Witch, Star of the Family, Gavilan, critically acclaimed but viewer ignored Square Pegs, and all three of the "Raiders" ripoffs including Tales of the Gold Monkey, Bring 'Em Back Alive, and especially The Quest, the first show of the season to be cancelled.

Midseason Successes....The A-Team, Mama's Family, and The Mississippi

1983

Main Themes--Moving into the year where I was really starting to dig TV, much of the new fall shows were poorly received, especially on NBC where all 10 new shows flopped. Fortunately for the networks, again especially NBC, many of their midseason replacements did prove successful and salvaged the season. With the escalating success of action shows like "The A-Team", "Magnum, P.I." and "The Fall Guy", the lineups of all three networks were being overrun by flamboyant crimefighters by midseason, and the majority of the hours not featuring car crashes and explosions were primetime soaps. The sitcom was becoming an endangered species on the primetime lineup. CBS owned the season again but was starting to become a little stale, while ABC was even more stale in a distant second, and NBC, while still coming in third, really started to find its footing late in the season.

Successful New Fall Shows were few--Hardcastle and McCormick, Webster, Hotel, Scarecrow and Mrs. King

Flops were far more common with some major howlers this year--Boone, Trauma Center, Whiz Kids, Emerald Point NAS, The Yellow Rose, Lottery, Jennifer Slept Here, Cutter to Houston, For Love and Honor, Just Our Luck, Mr. Smith (about a monkey with an IQ of 202), Manimal (about a detective that could turn into different kinds of animals), and the first to go, ABC's It's Not Easy, gone after four episodes.

Midseason Successes--Night Court, Riptide, TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes, Kate and Allie, Airwolf, Mike Hammer

1984

Main Themes--Crimefighters ruled the day with over-the-top and increasingly violent action shows occupying about 40% of the primetime lineup with the primetime soaps (Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing) at their peak of popularity. Most of the top-rated action shows got fat and lazy this year and began to hemorrhage viewers, but newcomer "Miami Vice" on NBC added new zest to the genre despite its slow start in the ratings stuck in a show-killing Friday night timeslot. Even more consequential was "The Cosby Show", also on NBC, which shot to near the top of the ratings list and helped usher in what would soon become a new era of sitcom dominance on network TV. These were two of many success stories among 1984's fall shows. Old and tired CBS found itself in a virtual tie with the insurgent NBC for first place this season, while a slate of programming mistakes pushed ABC to a distant third.

Successful New Shows--The Cosby Show, Miami Vice, Murder She Wrote, Hunter, Who's the Boss?, Highway to Heaven, Punky Brewster

Flops--Call to Glory, Jessie, It's Your Move!, Glitter, Partners in Crime, Hot Pursuit, Hawaiian Heat, Paper Dolls (proving the primetime soap audience had reached its saturation point), and the first of the year to be cancelled after two lame episodes, ABC's People Do the Craziest Things (a bloopers show scheduled up against The Cosby Show and Magnum, P.I.)

Midseason Successes--Moonlighting, Mr. Belvedere, Crazy Like a Fox

1985

Main Themes--This was my favorite TV season of all time. Not only did my all-time favorite series "MacGyver" make its debut, it was the last hurrah for the action show golden age, with nearly half of the primetime schedule occupied by flamboyant crimefighters, including the final throes of the lighthearted old guard ("Fall Guy", "Knight Rider") and the introduction of harder-edged newcomers ("The Equalizer", "Spenser: For Hire"). The genre got lazy the season before but had something of a creative renaissance this season, albeit too late to save most of the shows from plunging ratings. The primetime soaps also lost some steam this season. Gaining at their expense was the revived sitcom. Sitcoms were still small players on the 1985 schedule, but their fortunes (and ratings) were rising dramatically as the season advanced. NBC blew away the competition this year and were way out in front with a bullet. CBS fell to a distant second, and ABC pulled up the rear with another weak season.

Successful New Shows--MacGyver, The Golden Girls, Growing Pains, 227, The Equalizer, Spenser: For Hire, Amazing Stories, The Twilight Zone

Flops--The George Burns Comedy Week, Lime Street, Misfits of Science, Hell Town, Our Family Honor, the megaviolent Lady Blue, "Cosby" ripoff Charlie and Company, "Miami Vice" ripoffs Hollywood Beat and The Insiders, and the season's first to go, the angsty middle-aged soap opera Hometown, cancelled by CBS before the end of October.

Midseason Successes--Perfect Strangers, Valerie (later known as The Hogan Family), The Disney Sunday Movie, Stingray

1986

Main Themes--Action shows and primetime soaps were going down and sitcoms were moving up. Generally this was not a trend I welcomed even though there were some pretty good comedies on the air in the mid-to-late 80s. Another pretty impressive year in terms of generating new hit shows (or shows that would become big hits in subsequent seasons). NBC was again way out on top, with CBS a distant second, and ABC sinking to new depths in third. And although it was predictably in fourth place in its infancy, the Fox network was born by midseason.

Successful New Shows--L.A. Law, Designing Women, Matlock, ALF, Amen, Head of the Class, My Sister Sam, Crime Story, Sledge Hammer!

Flops--Kay O'Brien, The Wizard, Together We Stand, Easy Street, Jack and Mike, Downtown, Heart of the City, The Ellen Burstyn Show, the trainwreck Lucille Ball revival Life with Lucy, and the first to go by mid-October, the CBS urban sitcom Better Days

Midseason Successes--Married...with Children, 21 Jump Street, Houston Knights

1987

Main Themes--The networks weren't quite ready to give up on hourlong crime dramas and launched one final batch of new ones this fall, going against the grain of the insurgent sitcoms. While a few of them were modestly successful, sitcoms dominated the top of the ratings list even more this season while the bottom fell out on the primetime soaps. NBC dominated even more this year than the past two seasons while a cratering CBS barely bested a still-low ABC for second place. Fox was still new and untested and in a distant fourth.

Successful New Shows--Full House, A Different World, thirtysomething, My Two Dads, Wiseguy, Jake and the Fatman, Tour of Duty, Beauty and the Beast

Flops--Buck James, Dolly, J.J. Starbuck, The Law and Harry McGraw, Frank's Place, The Oldest Rookie, I Married Dora, Private Eye, Leg Work, and the biggest flop of the year, ABC's Once a Hero, cancelled after only three airings.

Midseason Successes--The Wonder Years, In the Heat of the Night, China Beach, Just the Ten of Us

1988

Main Themes--This season got off to a late start with the summer of 1988 writers' strike delaying the premieres of new shows by at least a month, but the networks held surprisingly strong when the new shows did premiere and avoided losing more viewers to cable as had been the case in the previous couple of seasons. Sitcoms had by this time gained serious traction and were about to consume the vast majority of the primetime schedule, with crime dramas waning and news shows sprouting their wings. This was the last TV season for many years to come that I look back on as generally impressive as TV was about to head into a long drought in terms of my preferred programming. NBC dominated, ABC finally found its footing and shot into a reasonable second-place, while the bottom fell out of CBS' aging lineup of dinosaur programs, ultimately sinking it even lower this year than ABC was in any of its mid-80s downer years. Fox was still a blip on the screen overall but starting to establish a few modest hits.

Successful New Shows--Roseanne, Murphy Brown, Empty Nest, Dear John, Unsolved Mysteries, Paradise, America's Most Wanted, Midnight Caller

Flops--Almost Grown, TV 101, Knightwatch, Annie McGuire, Something is Out There, Murphy's Law, Tattinger's, Raising Miranda, Baby Boom, and the horrific new Dick Van Dyke sitcom The Van Dyke Show, which was the first official cancellation.

Midseason Successes--Quantum Leap, Coach, Anything but Love, Father Dowling Mysteries, Cops

1989

Main Themes--The networks unleashed a widely panned batch of new series this year and a large number of them were early casualties. However, they were seen as redeeming themselves with a number of well-received midseason entries including "The Simpsons", "Twin Peaks", and over the summer, "Seinfeld". While several of these series were fresh and exciting, it was nonetheless discouraging to see the dwindling economics of network television and the inability to continue producing the action-packed hourlong series I was reared on. Furthermore, the sitcom wave continued at warp speed and even though the newer sitcom entries were largely pale imitators of existing sitcom hits, the comedy insurgency on network television was only getting started. This was the first TV season where I began to lose some hope for the medium's short-term and long-term prospects. NBC still won the season but was slipping some, ABC was a strong second, CBS a distant and desperate third, with Fox still last but trending upward.

Successful New Shows--Doogie Howser M.D., Life Goes On, The Young Riders, Major Dad, Family Matters, Rescue 911

Flops--Free Spirit, Homeroom, Sister Kate, The Famous Teddy Z, Chicken Soup, Wolf, Island Son, The Nutt House, Top of the Hill, Peaceable Kingdom, Hardball, Living Dolls, and the first to be cancelled, The People Next Door, a sitcom about a cartoonist whose animated figures came to life.

Midseason Successes--The Simpsons, Seinfeld, America's Funniest Home Videos, Wings, Twin Peaks

1990

Main Themes--A season hailed as fresh and innovative at the outset didn't turn out to be my cup of tea, nor the cup of tea of viewers for that matter as network TV audiences dipped dramatically downward this year, more so than any previous season. Sitcoms were taking over more and more hours of primetime, and the insipid new genre of "reality crime shows" was insurgent. Meanwhile, the crime drama/action show was fast becoming an endangered species with only a handful of the genre's 80's-era mainstays still on the air and few viable replacements for them. Despite some huge holes in their lineup, CBS came out of nowhere to shock the world with a revival and won a season that more or less turned out to be a three-way tie, with ABC narrowly behind, and a sinking NBC right behind them. Fox thought this was gonna be their year after some significant growth the previous year and some bold programming moves, but they actually stalled this season and remained a distant fourth.

Successful New Shows--The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Law and Order, America's Funniest People, Beverly Hills 90210, Evening Shade, Parker Lewis, Top Cops

Flops--Hull High, Lifestories, The Fanelli Boys, WIOU, Lenny, Over My Dead Body, Going Places, The Family Man, Babes, TV versions of Uncle Buck, Ferris Bueller, and Parenthood, the environmental police on E.A.R.T.H. Force (the first of the year to be cancelled), and one of TV's biggest howlers of all-time, Cop Rock, a crime drama/musical.

Midseason Successes--Dinosaurs, Northern Exposure, Blossom, Sisters

1991

Main Themes--It was the last chapter of a TV era with a long list of classic series entering their final seasons, including The Cosby Show, MacGyver, The Golden Girls, Night Court, Growing Pains, Who's the Boss?, and Perfect Strangers. For all intents and purposes, this was the last TV season for many years I had any genuine and overarching interest in as my old favorites went by the wayside while a new wave of lame sitcoms and even lamer reality crime shows (most ripoffs of Cops) cannibalized the airwaves, along with the ultimate spawn of Satan, the faux news series Dateline NBC which would bow midseason. It was also the last season I paid close attention to the network standings, with CBS having another strong year and finishing first place, a still-strong ABC in second, a fast-dying NBC in third, and a stagnant Fox finding little traction in last place. Strangely, even with only a few breakthrough hits, overall ratings for the networks actually saw a slight uptick this season.

Successful New Shows--Home Improvement, Step by Step, The Commish, Nurses, Reasonable Doubts, Homefront

Flops--Man of the People, Pacific Station, Eerie Indiana, The Adventures of Mark and Brian, Sibs, Good and Evil, The Royal Family, Teech, Pros and Cons, Drexell's Class, Princesses, Flesh 'N' Blood, The Torkelsons, an updated Carol Burnett Show, and the first of the year to be cancelled, the CBS crime drama Palace Guard.

Midseason Successes--Civil Wars, Room for Two

1992

Main Themes--A pretty dreary state of affairs and the least exciting new season of my lifetime up to that point. While the reality crime show wave was past its peak, a disgusting glut of tabloidy news shows were replacing them, and sitcom mediocrity reigned supreme. The few new action shows and crime dramas that saw the light of day were fairly uninspired and scheduled for timeslots set in quicksand. Thankfully I had the Presidential election of 1992 to fill my downtime hours because the fall TV schedule surely wasn't getting the job done.

Successful New Shows--Mad About You, Melrose Place, Hangin' with Mr. Cooper, Hearts Afire, Love and War, Picket Fences, Martin

Flops--Great Scott, Laurie Hill, The Hat Squad, Delta, The Heights, Camp Wilder, The Round Table, Frannie's Turn, Angel Street, Crossroads, Here and Now, the medieval-themed Covington Cross, and Fox's Woops!, a COMEDY about the few survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Seriously!

Midseason Successes--Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Walker, Texas Ranger, Eye to Eye with Connie Chung

1993

Main Themes--Another generally dreadful new season with only a few bright spots easily overshadowed by a relentless barrage of increasingly inane sitcoms and an even more merciless onslaught of tacky newsmagazines occupying key primetime hours previously available for crime dramas and action shows. Perhaps a slight better effort than the season before, however, and much more effective in the creation of new hit shows.

Successful New Shows--The X-Files, NYPD Blue, The Nanny, Grace Under Fire, Frasier, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, seaQuest DSV, Boy Meets World, Living Single, Dave's World, The John Larroquette Show

Flops--Daddy Dearest, Phenom, The Second Half, Thea, Joe's Life, Moon Over Miami, Missing Persons, The Sinbad Show, Against the Grain, The Paula Poundstone Show, Harts of the West, The Mommies, George, one-episode wonder South of Sunset, and the season's first well-deserved casualty, The Trouble with Larry, a howler (no pun intended) of a sitcom about a young man returning to his family after spending his childhood raised by wolves.

Midseason Successes--Homicide: Life on the Street, Diagnosis Murder, The Critic

1994

Main Themes--I'll give the networks a little more effort for trying this year and producing a fall schedule with more hourlong shows than sitcoms. Still, most weren't my speed and my personal disconnect with primetime TV continued. It wouldn't be until years later that I would discover Fox's "New York Undercover", which in retrospect would have been reason enough for me to get excited about this season had I been able to watch it at the time. Sitcoms hit a bit of a speed bump by this season, but the wretched primetime news shows were at or near their peak in terms of primetime hours they occupied.

Successful New Shows--ER, Friends, Chicago Hope, New York Undercover, Party of Five, Touched by an Angel, Due South, My So-Called Life

Flops--Earth 2, On Our Own, Fortune Hunter, Wild Oats, Blue Skies, Me and the Boys, The Boys Are Back, Daddy's Girl, Models Inc., McKenna, M.A.N.T.I.S., The Five Mrs. Buchanans, and the unimaginably awful Cosby Mysteries.

Midseason Succeses--Ellen, NewsRadio, Cybill, The Marshal

1995

Main Themes--Yet another crummy year with the same general trendlines as the year before with wave upon wave of "hip, urban sitcoms" emulating Friends and Seinfeld, ever-proliferating newsmagazines (Dateline in particular), and new hourlong shows that were typically X-Files wannabes. The one genuine bright spot was the uber-dark spook drama "American Gothic" on CBS, far and away the best new series of the fall. Of course, it was cancelled by January. But lack of success was a common theme here as there were VERY few breakthrough hits.

Successful New Shows--The Drew Carey Show, JAG, The Single Guy, Caroline in the City

Flops--Space: Above and Beyond, Can't Hurry Love, Hudson Street, John Grisham's The Client, Central Park West, Courthouse, Charlie Grace, The Monroes, New York News, The Home Court, critically acclaimed but viewer-ignored Murder One, and the Andrew Dice Clay family sitcom Bless This House.

Midseason Successes--Nash Bridges, Third Rock from the Sun, High Incident, Sliders

1996

Main Themes--A few signs of improvement here with the best batch of new shows in several years, but most of them slotted in Saturday night or some other kamikaze time slot. The fundamentals were still troubling though....endless lookalike sitcoms all set on the west side of Manhattan, and Dateline and 20/20 broadcast multiple nights a week. It wasn't yet to the point where the worst was behind us, but this was at least the first baby step in the right direction.

Successful New Shows--Everybody Loves Raymond, Spin City, The Pretender, Profiler, Promised Land, Suddenly Susan, Cosby, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Early Edition, Millennium

Flops--Ink, Mr. Rhodes, Something So Right, Townies, Dark Skies, Common Law, Relativity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, critically acclaimed but cancelled after two airings EZ Streets, and not to be outdone and cancelled after only one broadcast, the vulgar Public Morals. Also worthy of this list was just about every entry on the fledgling UPN and WB networks, with a specific dunce cap to Homeboys in Outer Space

Midseason Successes--King of the Hill, The Practice, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Just Shoot Me!

1997

Main Themes--Not a bad season compared to where we had been. Granted most of my favorites never made it to a second season, but at least I was able to tune in my TV most nights of the week and find something watchable. For that matter, the fall schedule produced very few breakthrough hits of any kind. We weren't yet to the point where copycat sitcoms and Stone Phillips' mug on Dateline NBC exited stage door right as those shows continued to hijack the vast majority of primetime hours. The endurance of sitcom dominance in primetime TV, at this point a decade old, is nonetheless pretty impressive in the context of primetime trends, which usually run their course in about two or three years before audiences burn out and crave something different.

Successful New Shows--Ally McBeal, Dharma and Greg, The Wonderful World of Disney, Working

Flops--Jenny, Timecop, George and Leo, Brooklyn South, Hiller and Diller, Michael Hayes, Dellaventura, The Tony Danza Show, Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel, Nothing Sacred, Cracker, 413 Hope Street, Union Square, You Wish, Meego, The Gregory Hines Show, Players, C-16, Total Security

Midseason Successes--Dawson's Creek is about it

1998

Main Themes--Things descended back into the early-to-mid 90s funk with a weak batch of new shows saved from being the worst TV season of my lifetime almost exclusively by the hilariously dark short-lived Michael Madsen crime drama "Vengeance Unlimited". Overall, little progress in driving a stake through the heart of the sitcoms and newsmagazines and replacing them with intelligent dramas and action shows.

Successful New Shows--That 70s Show, The King of Queens, Will and Grace, Sports Night, The Hughleys, Jesse, Charmed

Flops--Holding the Baby, The Brian Benben Show, L.A. Doctors, Conrad Bloom, The Secret Lives of Men, Maggie Winters, Vengeance Unlimited, Two of a Kind, Brimstone, Fantasy Island, Wind on Water, and the horrific Buddy Faro.

Midseason Successes--The Family Guy, Becker, Providence, Futurama, Whose Line is it Anyway

1999

Main Themes--I said in the previous season that "Vengeance Unlimited" saved it from being the worst TV season of my lifetime. Unfortunately, there was no "Vengeance Unlimited" this season, and it WAS the worst TV season of my lifetime with few new shows that interested me, and the last hurrah of sitcom and newsmagazine dominance apparently wearing as thin with viewers, finally, as it was with me. Fortunately, better times were soon to come as TV was soon to get interesting again.

Successful New Shows--Who Wants to be a Millionaire, The West Wing, Third Watch, Law and Order: Special Victim's Unit, Judging Amy, Once and Again, Family Law

Flops--Snoops, The Ladies Man, The Mike O'Malley Show, Oh Grow Up, Work with Me, Action, Stark Raving Mad, Daddio, Now and Again, Harsh Realm, Ryan Caulfield: Year One, Cold Feet, and the sometimes amusing Freaks and Geeks

Midseason Successes--Malcolm in the Middle, My Wife and Kids, Titus, Norm, and over the summer of 2000, Survivor

2000

Main Themes--One final shitty season of mostly ho-hum new shows, but with a high-profile newcomer named "CSI" that, while overrated even in its prime, set the stage for a tectonic shift in network television. CSI made crime dramas, and ultimately action shows, cool again, and subsequent seasons in the decade ahead would bear that out. Even the less admirable trendlines, reality TV and game shows, the product of the successes of "Survivor" and "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" and the imitators they would soon spawn, were still by and large a welcome relief from a decade of tiresome sitcom and newsmagazine dominance. The beginning of this season was boring business as usual, but by season's end it was clear times were a-changin'...and for the better.

Successful New Shows--CSI, Yes Dear, Boston Public, Dark Angel, The District, Gilmore Girls

Flops--Tucker, Deadline, DAG, The Geena Davis Show, Bette, The Street, The Trouble with Normal, Madigan Men, Cursed, the sometimes impressive remake of The Fugitive, and the dreadful flop The Michael Richards Show.

Midseason Successes--Temptation Island, Fear Factor, The Weakest Link

2001

Main Themes--That was fast! Usually it's a slow process moving towards respectability after one has been down for so long, but after a decade of stinky TV lineups, the networks redeemed themselves with a strong batch of newcomers that included some high-profile new action shows, with "Alias" and "24" being the cream of the crop and the WB's "Smallville" also vastly exceeding expectations. Even some of the less successful new attempts like "UC Undercover" were impressive. The timing for the action show's comeback, however, was unfortunate as audiences recovering from the September 11 attacks probably weren't in the mood for the level of violence being broadcast. Still, plenty of new hits this year so the networks apparently got away with it. The best TV season in about 15 years.

Successful New Shows--24, Alias, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Crossing Jordan, The Guardian, Scrubs, According to Jim, Smallville, The Amazing Race, The Bernie Mac Show, The Agency

Flops--The Education of Max Bickford, What About Joan, Philly, Undeclared, Wolf Lake, Inside Schwartz, Thieves, Pasadena, The Ellen Show, Danny, Citizen Baines, the megaviolent but consistently entertaining UC Undercover, the howler of a Jason Alexander sitcom vehicle Bob Patterson

Midseason Successes--The Bachelor, The George Lopez Show, and over the summer, American Idol

2002

Main Themes--Not quite as good as the year before, but still an impressive batch of new shows that included an abundance of new crime dramas and action shows, most with at least a modest level of success that helped the last them full season ("Boomtown", "Fastlane", "John Doe"). Sitcoms were still a factor on the primetime schedule but about to plunge to levels not seen since their mid-80s nadir. Meanwhile, the merciful saturation of tabloidy newsmagazines was exiting stage left, replaced by often tacky reality shows, but at least several of them had impressive production values a la Survivor and The Amazing Race. And the once-mighty Who Wants to be a Millionaire franchise which ABC greedily exploited four nights a week at its 2000 peak, was now gone from primetime for keeps. Network TV continued to move in the right direction.

Successful New Shows--Without a Trace, American Dreams, CSI: Miami, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, Boomtown, Still Standing, Hack, Less than Perfect

Flops--Life with Bonnie, Presidio Med, Push Nevada, Good Morning Miami, That Was Then, Robbery Homicide Division, Firefly, In-Laws, Hidden Hills

Successful Midseason Shows--Joe Millionaire, Star Search

2003

Main Themes--Another decent season even though nearly all of my new favorites got cancelled before season's end, including Threat Matrix, The Handler, and Line of Fire. This was perhaps the peak of reality TV mania and they all seemed to outperform the season's slate of hourlong dramas and adventure shows, which was frustrating, but still better than seasons in decades past when most well-made shows never got a chance to get cancelled because they were never made in the first place. The networks were at least trying at this point, and had a number of hits, several of them worthy.

Successful New Shows--Cold Case, Two and a Half Men, NCIS, Arrested Development, Las Vegas, Joan of Arcadia, The OC, Hope and Faith

Flops--10-8, The Lyon's Den, Skin, I'm with Her, Whoopi, The Tracy Morgan Show, Karen Sisco, The Brotherhood of Poland New Hampshire, A Minute with Stan Hooper, Threat Matrix, Miss Match, Luis

Midseason Successes--Extreme Makeover, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, The Apprentice

2004

Main Themes--With a couple of high profile exceptions that turned out to be the biggest hits of the year, I wasn't as impressed with this season's batch of new shows as I had been with recent seasons, but the general direction was still the right one with a diverse abundance of hourlong dramas and crimefighter shows, a diminished sitcom presence which helped keep the ones that were on the air from seeming stale, and a barrage of reality shows, most of which had at least a modicum of entertainment value and were acceptable insofar as their low budgets helped the networks afford to make quality shows in the slots not occupied by reality shows.

Successful New Shows--Lost, Desperate Housewives, Boston Legal, House, Wife Swap, CSI: New York, Veronica Mars

Flops--The Benefactor, Listen Up!, LAX, North Shore, Hawaii, Medical Investigation, Clubhouse, Life as We Know It, Complete Savages, Dr. Vegas, Quintuplets, Method and Red, Center of the Universe, Committed, and the post-Friends epic fail Joey

Midseason Successes--Grey's Anatomy, NUMB3Rs, Medium, The Office, American Dad

2005

Main Themes--This was the season of "Lost" imitators....some good ("Invasion"), some mediocre ("Threshold"). Still, better for a batch of new series to be imitators of "Lost" than "Friends" as was the case 10 years earlier. In general, another above-average crop of newcomers with none more compelling than the new Fox action thriller "Prison Break", which would have made this a fun TV season even if it was the only good show on the air. This was the fifth consecutive year where there were more good things to say about network TV than bad. I knew I was living on borrowed time before things go crummy again, but amazingly, TV has yet to plunge back to where it was 10 years ago qualitywise.

Successful New Shows--Prison Break, How I Met Your Mother, My Name is Earl, Criminal Minds, Bones, Supernatural, Ghost Whisperer, Close to Home, Everybody Hates Chris

Flops--Out of Practice, Kitchen Confidential, Surface, Four Kings, Commander in Chief, Freddie, E-Ring, Apprentice: Martha Stewart, Hot Properties, Head Cases, Threshold, Inconceivable, and a remake of the 1974 cult favorite Night Stalker

Midseason Successes--The New Adventures of Old Christine, The Unit, Deal or No Deal

2006

Main Themes--While there was little that blew me away this year (or anybody else either it seems) it was nonetheless an above average crop of new shows, several of which were taken before their time ("Vanished", "Smith"). Part of the problem was that the networks spread themselves far too thin with serialized shows after the successes of shows like Lost and 24, but viewers were unwilling to commit to that many series that required mandatory weekly viewing. For a medium never known for being too ambitious, TV got that way in 2006. For my taste, not a bad problem to have, particularly compared to the laziness of TV in the 90s or the worrisome existing institution that is the nightly "Jay Leno Show".

Successful New Shows--Heroes, Brothers and Sisters, Friday Night Lights, 30 Rock, Ugly Betty, Jericho, Shark

Flops--Vanished, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Smith, Kidnapped, The Class, Help Me Help You, Standoff, The Nine, Justice, Six Degrees, Happy Hour

Successful Midseason Shows--Rules of Engagement, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

2007

Main Themes--The season cut short right in the middle by the writer's strike. There were once again a fair number of shows worth checking out but only a couple that made the cut, with others that were dealt a blow by the writers' strike and likely lost the kind of momentum needed to survive into a second season (the vampire thriller "Moonlight" comes to mind). Given as many high-profile failures the previous TV season generated, and with a pending writer's strike to boot, I'm surprised the networks made as worthy of an effort as they did with this fall's new entries.

Successful New Shows--The Big Bang Theory, Samantha Who?, Private Practice, Life, Chuck, Pushing Daisies

Flops--Journeyman, Cavemen, Carpoolers, Cane, Kid Nation, Kitchen Nightmares, Bionic Woman, Big Shots, Nashville, Women's Murder Club, the very underrated New Orleans police action-drama K-Ville, and one of the biggest howlers of my lifetime, Viva Laughlin, cancelled after two episodes.

Midseason Successes--Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Eli Stone, Flashpoint

2008

Main Themes--The last year I'll profile. While there were still a few ambitious projects like Christian Slater's "My Own Worst Enemy" and the fantasy-adventure "Crusoe", most failed to live up to expectations in both my eyes and in the majority of viewers as most of the new shows were failures. NBC has to be given a hand for their efforts with as many big-budget action series on their lineup this year, but overall this struck me as the season where things started to trend the other direction and mediocrity would again be celebrated by viewers far more than ambition.

Successful New Shows--The Mentalist, Fringe, Gary Unmarried

Flops--Worst Week, My Own Worst Enemy, Life on Mars, Knight Rider, Kath and Kim, The Ex-List, Crusoe, Do Not Disturb, Opportunity Knocks

Midseason Successes--Castle, Dollhouse, Parks and Recreation

So there you have it. The last 28 primetime fall schedules and corresponding analysis. Hopefully it is as fun to read as it was for me to write.

Prediction: Not One Damn Thing Will Happen With Health Care This Year or Next

2009-09-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

Despite their relentless right-on-the-cusp-of-a-deal rhetoric, I think hapless Congressional leaders of both parties, along with the Obama administration, are now at the point that they see the writing on the wall. There will be no health care reform in 2009 or in 2010. Obama's "public option" proposal, while highly imperfect, was the closest we were gonna come to a compromise position that would expand coverage to millions more people. And it's dead.

Now comes the big, sloppy trillion-dollar kiss to the insurance industry known as the "Baucus bill" that has rightfully enraged the left, given more ammunition to the obstructionist right, and given the Blue Dogs a brief window to winkingly "ponder, consider, and review" the latest proposal before they reject that as well. Any health care reform package that was capable of passage (I'm increasingly skeptical such an animal could ever exist in the modern political climate) would have to thread a perfect needle. If the Obama proposal fell short of that goal by several yards, the "centrist" Baucus plan falls short by several miles.

The absolute dealbreaker of the Baucus plan is the premise that uninsured middle-income households will be required to forfeit 13% of their income to receive a government-mandated insurance premium from the very health insurance barons whose bootheels Congress promised to take off the necks of Americans, not add more weight to. The unsustainable economics of the existing health insurance industry would not only fail to be reined in, but it would increase by millions the number of people being smacked around by them. To call this Baucus proposal a steaming pile of shit would be a grave insult to fecal matter, yet it's now being hailed as the last best hope for health care reform even as everybody is trash-talking it except the scaredy-pants Blue Dogs, most of whom never intended to vote for health care reform in the first place.

On the outside chance that it begins to look like any version of health care reform, and the Baucus bill in particular, is on the cusp of Senate passage, expect it to play out the same way the immigration reform bill did two years ago. Talk radio will whip up a frenzied audience to call their Congresspersons expressing their outrage....and every nervous Senator will ultimately fold and vote "no" no matter what they had been planning to vote only a couple of weeks earlier. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas might be voicing hollow support for health care reform in Senate subcommittees now, but whatever slim chance there was of her ultimately supporting it will vanish as soon as her telephone starts buzzing with ferocious opposition. Lincoln is the highest-profile fairweather friend on any version of health care reform, but there are at least a dozen like her in the Senate. And the immigration reform analogy is a political firecracker compared to the hydrogen bomb of government mandating thousands of dollars in yearly premiums from middle-income uninsured households to the coffers of insurance companies.

And I think at this point everybody in the process realizes it's a nonstarter. It's possible some of the 500+ amendments in the pipeline could make the bill less awful than it is now, but it's unlikely to matter at the end of the day. This is a Congress that equivocated last year at this time on TARP even as the economy was on the cusp of lapsing into an inevitable depression. If even that grim prospect was not enough to bring about consensus, they certainly won't be moved by the comparatively tepid prospect of providing health insurance to Joe Sixpack.

The next question becomes what the political fallout will be. Some argue that inaction makes the Democratic Party look incompetent and unable to govern, so therefore the worst thing that could happen would be for health care reform to die entirely. Others argue that foist a bad and unpopular reform bill on the public would incite rage upon so many people that passage would be a worst-case scenario for Democrats going into 2010. They're both right. Legislation this epic and controversial has no immediate upside for the party in power. If it passes, the Democrats are screwed. And if it doesn't pass, they're screwed.

It's very telling that large majorities of Americans believe Republicans are dealing in bad faith on health care reform, knowing that not a single Congressional Republican (including Olympia Snowe) has any intention of voting for health care reform legislation commandeered by the Democratic majority and President Obama....and that nothing that Obama and the Dems could do would get the GOP to play ball when the stated agenda even of "moderates" like Chuck Grassley is "killing health care reform". Yet even knowing this, and while still favoring a generic version of "health care reform" by overwhelming margins, American voters are telling pollsters with increasing frequency that they plan to vote Republican in the 2010 midterm elections.

Chalk it up to the schizophrenic and ultimately clueless nature of the American electorate. They'll be outraged if health care is reformed. They'll be outraged if it's not. They'll punish the party in power for passing the reform they claimed overwhelming support for last year. And they'll reward the party out of power for denying that reform. Things will continue to spiral out of control and make ultimate change that much more politically impossible for anybody in the future.

Welcome to Washington, Mr. Obama. What was that you were saying last year about entitlement reform? Think you can still make that happen even as Social Security and Medicare veer off a financial cliff?