re: #108 harlequinade

I want to ask a serious question.

This is, I’d say, a center right board - and the republicans probably out number the democrats. So - every day we see the bad crazy, and the dog whistling etc.

Who/how are you going to vote in the mid-terms? Because, if the republicans _do_ romp to victory in November, it’s those people who will say “See, we were right” and ramp this up all the way to 2012.

And _THEN_ who will you vote for?

The question is not whether the Republicans will romp to victory, but whether the Democrats will romp to defeat.

When McCain ran in 2008, he really didn’t have a chance. Nothing he said mattered, and none of his options could have tipped the balance the other way. With the economy in the dumps and Bush as president, the party that had primary responsibility for the mess was doomed.

Now, the shoe is kind of on the other foot. Two years in, the Democrats have tried their try and it didn’t work, and the only thing they can think of is to suggest 2 trillion of some sort of spending, never mind on what, instead of a mere 1 trillion.

When Gray Davis was governor of CA, the final insult was that he couldn’t even arrange to keep CA supplied with electricity. His misgovernment had unwittingly set the rules in such a way that there were incentives for power failures, and no incentive for utilities to invest in the sober work of supplying the state with electricity for the future.

Couple that with “whole word” reading misinstruction, and the natural and inevitable dive in CA’s educational standing, and people were bound to cast about for somebody, anybody, ELSE.

The Republicans are in such a muddle that they have nothing much to offer, that the public wants, except a breather from the other guys. And that’s what this upcoming election is likely to be about. Republican gains in this context will be self-limiting, because the moment the R’s have some of the levers of federal power in their hands, they become responsible for the result.

The result won’t be anything to write home about, so they won’t be able to score any further gains merely on the basis of not being dems.