From the National Journal's political bloviator, Chuck Todd:
"There's plenty of evidence to suggest that President Bush may have been the deciding factor that killed the GOP's momentum in some key Senate races over the last week. One Republican consultant is convinced that Bush's last-minute visit to Missouri on behalf of ousted GOP Sen. Jim Talent did the incumbent in. According to the network exit polls, Democrat Claire McCaskill crushed Talent among those late-breaking voters who decided in the final three days (a full 11 percent of the electorate). Bush also made a last-minute trip to Montana, where anecdotal evidence indicates the president's rally for Republican Conrad Burns stopped the incumbent's momentum in Billings."
With that, and Bush's ringing support Rumsfeld right before the election, Bush handed the Senate to the Democrats.
What does Bush say about Rove:
"I obviously was working harder in the campaign than he was," said Bush.
With a huge deficit, a projected withdrawal from Iraq, there will be a recession in 18 months. In two years, the Republicans will blame the Democrats for the failure in Iraq, and a declining economy and we will be back.
The Republicans won't be able to run on the same platform that they have. We won't be as unpopular with the rest of the world anymore. We'll beable to gain some more hope overseas.
You have a base of Republicans, fractured and demoralized as they are, who will still be motivated by the same message. I doubt that most independents in the middle will trust them again. This domination by Republicans has been that bad.
For a break in the momentum of bad policies, this election is a very good thing. It had been a long time since conservatism and Republicans have been handed a loss. They had become very arrogant, and some criminal and totalitarianist elements had crept in.
The question is, what will Americans think 2, and 10 years from now? Part of that is luck, but part of it is, what will the Dems do?
If doing nothing improves the situation (and it may) then the Dems will probably stay. We are so fucked up now, that simply stopping digging should improve things.
But at some point, some kind of dirfection is needed. Historically, the Dems are rarely good at that, and will only look good where they face Republicans who are affirmative fuckups, eg people like the corrupt religious righties led by the flaky frat brother GW Bush. What an amazing lot of assholes!!
Will the Republicans come back? Maybe. They might come back sooner if they have people's confidence. They won't get my confidence until they start leveling with people, and lose the religious freaks who think you can balance the books with prayer.
Vietnam was a much more gradual sinking ordeal. Eisenhower might have put us into it, but the wave didn't break until LBJ was in office. That's when people noticed it wasn't going right. Therefore, there could be a way of spreading out the blame.
There is nothing like that with Iraq. Bush both got us in and fucked it up. To compare it to Vietnam, Bush would be Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. I don't care how Republicans try to do it, in coming years, people are not going to forget it.
You might argue that Democrats voted to allow Bush to invade, but in the first years after 9/11, they were still motivated to be united behind Bush.
But if people can argue for Bush, of all draft-dodging assholes, that Kerry's record is phony, you can bet your ass they will argue that the Dems fucked Bush by not giving him a blank check, etc etc.
People will believe or not depending on whether their church is marking their ballot for them, or not.
You know, in comparing them, I had no consideration of blame, but rather, how can this be done, or at least salvaged? It'd be nice if we could conduct foreign policy like that, you know, just send the Marines in to go get the bad guys. Oops, the whole FUCKING COUNTRY is bad guys!! My bad
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