1. Early in the evening, searching for a place to settle on TV, I happened across ABC just as George Will was asked a question about the tea-partiers. His answer applied to this group the adjective, "Madisonian." I'm putting that in my Department of No Comment.
2. I do have something to say about Michele Bachmann's victory speech. Is she unable to read? Is everyone who works for her as dumb as she is? You could barely spot the non sequiturs through the incoherence.
3. I would have traded Harry Reid for Russ Feingold. That would put Sharron Angle in the Senate but that is how much I think of Feingold, who, in his classy concession/farewell, quoted a famous local boy: "But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free/I've got nothing but affection for those who've sailed with me."
4. Feingold's successor appears to have no qualifications other than his wealth. At least the people of California didn't fall for that. They had two candidates who fit the description, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, and both crashed and burned. Whitman spent more than $140 million of her own money, mostly on TV ads that persuaded Californians they didn't like her. Fiorina's nonconcession concession speech was at the other end of the spectrum from Feingold's. Though by the time she spoke every network had called the race for Boxer, Fiorina claimed to be locked in a "dead heat tie." She lost by almost 700,000 votes.
5. It will be hard to wrest the House away from the Republicans. Jon Chait explains but it is basically the problem I described, here, about the way in which Democrats in these parts are under represented in the House of Representatives. It's not just in the Twin Cities. Across the country, Democratic voters are crowded together in entirely urban districts in which Republicans are nearly extinct. That leaves way too much of "everywhere else" open to the blandishments of the GOP.
6. The results of the retention election for the state Supreme Court in Iowa were as depressing as most everything else. You will remember that in 2009 the 7-member court held, unanimously, that the state's constitution requires that homosexuals not be barred from marrying each other. Three of the justices faced a retention election Tuesday and all were defeated.
7. Tony Sutton, chairman of the state Republican party here in Minnesota, says "something doesn't smell right" about the outcome of our governor's race, in which DFLer Mark Dayton appears to have defeated Crazy Tom Emmer by around 9,000 votes. The Republicans won control of both the state house and the state senate, and, in the eighth congressional district, which is usually a Democratic bastion, a Republican stunned DFLer Jim Oberstar, an 18-term incumbent. So, naturally, Emmer was cheated.
Three things, Tony, you might have considered before lobbing wild claims into the public sphere:
I. No Republican won a statewide race. Auditor, attorney general, secretary of state, governor--DFLers won them all. Do you think there was cheating in all those races but not in the legislative ones? And not in the 8th district congressional race?
II. In the legislative races, voters generally had to choose between a DFLer and a Republican. That was true in the 8th district as well. In the gubernatorial race, however, the choice was between Dayton (a DFLer), Emmer (a Republican), and Tom Horner (the Independence Party candidate and former Republican insider who got more than ten per cent of the vote). Very different dynamic.
III. Tony's argument draws the wrong conclusion from the observed evidence. That Emmer lost on the same night that Republicans captured the state legislature and the 8th district congressional seat does not prove there was fraud in the governor's race. It proves that Emmer was a really terrible candidate.
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