Virginia and New Jersey Watch.
The bait and switch tactics on the Hill, Harry Reid over the top for the public option without 60 votes for cloture, then Nancy Pelosi over the top for the "consumer option" without the votes for anything at all, will continue until Election Day, Tuesday, November 3. The results will come in and then we will get serious about healthcare reform. The governorships in Virginia and New Jersey look now to be the most telling against the Harry Reid strategy of committing the Democrats to a public option -- and against Mrs. Pelosi's long treasured public option mandate. The Virginia race looks out of sight, and I am told the GOP has turned its money to New Jersey. The New Jersey race is tense, and could be leaning to Christie, but no one of the party pros from Jersey is cocky, breathing easy, looking away from the playing field. I am told that the 23rd New York is not determinative. Virginia and New Jersey are what Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are watching.
What's the Worse that Can Happen?
"Try to make them forget August," is the Democratic majority standing order. The worse that can happen is that August looks like a fist-fight compared to the nukes that will go off when the Democrats try to take back the prescription drug cash in Medicare and then try to mandate money for abortion in the reform. The senior voters do not bluff. The pro-lifers use nukes as an opening gambit. I am told late this evening that the Democratic strategy of letting the Senate go first on the vote in order to strengthen the hand of the public option posse in the House has failed badly. The latest Pelosi/Reid genius is to let the House go first and try quilt something that looks rational for the Senate to match. If this does not make sense, you are right, it does not make sense. Mrs.Pelosi doesn't have even close to the votes she needs to pass anything coherent, with or without calling the public option a "consumer option." Why the rush? Because of Election Day. The Democrats are reading the same polls the Republicans are reading for Virginia and New Jersey. Looks like doom with 100 hours to go till the voting starts. The helter-skelter thinking is that a show of liberal backbone in the House bill will translate into liberal votes at the polling stations in New Jersey. It is abstract. New Jersey, Corzine vs. Christie (right), is a heavily Democratic state that is disgusted with Goldman Sachs, and the best way to express the disgustedness is to vote out Corzine. It isn't rational. We shall see. The Hill Democrats are voting with their feet. Ready to flee to the exits.
John, if they can ignore however many hundred thousand tea partiers marching on DC in September, and if they can ignore the fact that they don't have enough votes for cloture, why would they suddenly sit up and pay attention to an 11/3 election that might very well end up a split (Virginia -R, NJ -D). You know that saying "I don't have to have a house fall on me to get the hint ...."? Well, Pelosi and Reid are the types that DO have to have a house fall on them. In fact, I won't feel safe until I see Pelosi's feet sticking out from under the corner of said house, with munchkins all around me laughing. Continuing with the Zardoz metaphor, Reid can be the guy saying "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN" .... Whatever.... I hope you're right, but I don't really understand why the 11/3 elections will make them change their tune, unless the Dems absolutely get taken to the woodshed in both states.
Camden, Newark, Jersey City, are NJ, now. Corzine will win. The forevermore agenda /philosophy / machine, is suburbs as ATM.
Romanesque is the fall of NJ. Take, bribe and corrupt, until it burns. Pretend that business flight, senior citizen flight, flight of everything that sustains, does not exist... Pretend that NJ's greatest commodity is more than a semi-tolerable commute to NYC, for NYC elite liberals, who have spoiled there own nest, and need refuge.
NJ as whole, completely in the hands of the folks that brought us Asbury Park. From the Crown Jewel of almost the entire east coast, to utter ruination in less than a decade. And we seem to love it.
Oh, you pessimists! :)
I choose to be optimistic while the opportunity exists. NJ is close and I noticed on the sample ballot that Dagget's name is buried far to the right and down 3-4 lines. That means a few will give up trying to find his name and, I hope/guess, will vote for Christie. Secondly, some think Dagget polls better than he will show. People swagger with the pollsters about being a renegade voter and then succumb to the party model inside the booth. Let's hope. If so, Christie will win.
That said, Dem's in Camden and Newark will be dragging corpses and winos in to vote.
It would be so sweet if NJ and VA went Republican or at least not-Demo. I'm enjoying it while I can.
And, Peter---the big shot Dem's in DC can't overtly give cred's to the teaparties, town hall meetings. You don't surely expect them to prostrate themselves and say "you got me. forget healthcare and big spending." They must at the very least posture for their base. Nancy and Harry don't have the physiognomy (always wanted to use that word) of confident leaders. In a gun fight with the Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood), the "tell" is in. They are scared.
Here's my prediction for Tuesday (for what it's worth): JimJinNJ is right, nobody knows how it will actually pan out. Everybody is posturing at this point (which is the same as saying that everybody's lying). Polling is being used to influence elections. What you're hearing on the radio so close to Election Day cannot be trusted.
One thing I'm quite certain of is that most people are seriously concerned about what is happening to our country. Unlike any other president in memory, Barrack Hussein Obama has succeeded in inflaming conspiracy theories and making them mainstream. Voters are desperate to show that they are in opposition to the direction the country appears to be taking.
Twice already they have been dissed and dismissed. Both the 9/12 March on Washington and the Town Hall confrontations were brushed off by the state-controlled media – as were the ‘tea parties’.
Lou too is right; the Dems will attempt to mitigate any fallout from these elections by using the same tactics they always use. Either way, it’ll be a story for about a week and then something else (possibly more favorable to the Dems) will come along.
Here goes: In NY’s 23rd, Hoffmann will win. In NJ, Daggett will split the opposition vote and Corzine will squeak through (with a little help from his friends). Virginia will be an out and out win for the Republicans.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
Peter, shame on you : ) Those picks are like somebody taking all 4 #1 seeds all the way through in the March NCAA brackets.
Just to make it interesting, I'm going to predict that Christie will make it so close that it will be down to the tens of votes, he'll initially be declared a winner, and the MSM will make a huge stink for the next 3 months about counting all the hanging chads in order to distract attention away from the 1,990-page legislative Hindenburg currently coming in for a landing (Hey, wasn't that in New Jersey? I tied the whole thing together ... if I'm right. If I'm wrong, not the first time.)
When I first saw the photo of Nancy Pelosi on your home page load onto my computer I thought it was a close-up of the surface of Phobos. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for Photoshopping it before posting ... very thoughtful of you, John.
JB:
You dismiss out of hand one of the most interesting Congressional special elections in years, NY 23, as not "determinative." What the heck does that mean? Determinative of what? The course of the 2010 Congressionals? The 2012 Presidential? The future of the GOP? Eternal Life? No kiddin' -- but the same can be said of the races in New Jersey and Virginia that you do not summarily consign to irrelevance or freakdom.
Perhaps the future of the GOP is the real key here, to judge by the latest installment of your "Last Days of the Republicans" blog on the Daily Beast. John, you are usually so measured and balanced in what you have to say, but you seem to come unhinged when you inveigh against the right-wing Republican base, the Tea Party types and Townhallers, social conservatives, conservative talk radio (careful here, John, someday the Obama Thought Police may surprise you), etc., who you claim are responsible for the GOP's current parlous state.
Frankly, I sometimes wonder if this vitriolic, rather elitist blog over your name is actually the production of an evil twin to whom you must somehow permit periodic access to your word processor. Consider the models your latest blog unaccountably proposes for rebuilding today's GOP -- Ike, who never made any significant dent in Democratic control of the Congress, being the essence of "me, too" Republicanism; and Nixon, Ford, and both Bushes, who led the GOP to various levels of electoral hell at various times and for various reasons, none of which had much to do with being either "too conservative" or insufficiently "moderate." Throw in Bob Dole and John McCain, and I rest my case.
Which brings me back to NY 23. John, don't waste your tears on Dede Scozzafava, whose talking-head challenging last name is Italian that, I think, can be rendered in English as "busted bean." Given her loudly stated far-left policy positions and her free spending, high taxing, duck-to-water ways in the corrupt Albany cesspool, poor little Dede Busted-Bean is no more a real Republican than Arlen Specter was, and therefore not a victim of some ideological witch-hunt. Rather, Ms. Busted-Bean is precisely the sort of so-called Republican, even more liberal than the traditional Rockefeller RINO, that the GOP must reject precisely in order to appeal to the real center of American politics, which is to the Reagan Right, a tide increasingly running across America today in reaction to the left-wing extremism, arrogance, and incompetence of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress. Against this background, the outcome in NY 23 may well not be determinative, but it may surely be indicative of the sort of consensus the GOP can and must build to win in 2010 and 2012, thus to have the honor and privilege of saving America.
Maybe the rule should be, "What happens on the Daily Beast, stays on the Daily Beast."
What good has ever come from that stink tank, anyway?