I'm Still Upbeat About November!

by Pa Rock 
Citizen Journalist


Now that the primary season is essentially over, the political pundits (who apparently live on their own planet where there is a distinct lack of oxygen) are all braying about a Republican sweep of Congress this November.

Horse pucky, I say, it ain't a-gonna happen!

I read the scribblings of one journalist today who sort of echoed my feelings about the November general election.  He (or she, I can't remember who it was) said that there are two ways of looking at the upcoming election.  The thirty-thousand-foot view, where one peers down from the heavens, is all doom and gloom for the Democrats because the voting public is demonstrably mad at the party in power, the Democrats, and that should mean that they will get swept from office by a flood of Biblical proportions.  But, the same writer noted that the picture is distinctly different when seen from a state-by-state vantage point.  There, while voters may be unhappy with Congress in general, they often don't let that anger carry over to their own senators and representatives.  It is the other guys senators and representatives who really piss them off.  Those folks hate Nancy Pelosi, but unless they are registered voters in her San Francisco district, tough shit!

Yes, the Democrats may (and probably will) suffer losses in both houses of Congress, but it will be a trickle, not an arc-floater!

It will take a change of forty seats from Democrat to Republican for the party of George Bush, Karl Rove, and vacuous Sarah Palin to gain control of the House of Representatives - and, in the unlikely event that would happen - and it won't - two years of orange Speaker of the House John Boehner and his dastardly shenanigans would do more to re-elect President Obama than any tactic the Democratic Party could concoct.

Ten is the magic number of seat changes that it would take to make the United States Senate into a Republican majority operation.  That isn't happening either.  Even if it was going to be close, yesterday's gift to the Democrats by the lunatic teabaggers of Delaware just made it statistically impossible.  Christine O'Donnell doesn't stand a gnat's chance in a typhoon of winning that Senate seat, and everybody knows it - including several prominent Republicans - including Karl Freaking Rove!

Taking control of the Senate would require Republicans to take ten seats away from Democrats while protecting all that they currently hold.  They won't win in Alaska, where another Palin-backed teabagger is on the GOP ballot after having defeated the sitting Republican.  They won't win in Kentucky where Rand Paul, also a teabagger, has the GOP nomination for the Senate seat currently held by Republican Jim Bunning.  And, despite what Rasmussen says, they won't win in Missouri either where Robin Carnahan is fixing to turn Ol' Roy Blunt into a full-time lobbyist.

No, 2010 won't be a glorious year for Democrats, but it's not going to be the disaster that so many journalists are predicting.  And as for 2012, well, I'm already smiling from ear-to-ear about that one!