As the bitter attacks upon one another by the candidates still standing for the Republican presidential nomination continue to intensify, it’s difficult to imagine that whoever ultimately prevails will be able to unify the party in the general elections this fall. Certainly not Mitt Romney, who in spite of his party establishment bona fides, or perhaps because of them, continues to be an object of scorn for all of the the yahoos and anarchists who make up a significant bloc of the party faithful. Not Little Ricky Santorum, whose extreme Christian neofascism repels everyone in the party but the yahoos and anarchists. Not Ron Paul, who is a fringe, cult candidate at best, a weird old man whose ideas are appealing, but whose presentation is too much of a contrast to the cool, hip shtick that President Obama presents, rendering Paul as something of a Dennis Kucinich of the Republican party, who plays all the right notes, but just can’t seem to breathe life into the music.
And certainly not angry, racist, arrogant, anti-intellectual, grandiose, authoritarian, bi-polar, half-man/half-pig mutant hybrid zoophilic microcephalic psychopath and sneering, preening, opportunistic, divisive, self-aggrandizing, all pie-in-the-sky and no follow-through, manic-depressive, ethically-challenged, spendthrift, open-marriage advocate, perennially unfaithful serial husband and all-around überhypocrite Newt Gingrich — because, like all of the bad judgments you make after you’ve had that one drink too many, tomorrow morning waits patiently for you to properly regret them. Which, after a convention in which Gingrich emerges triumphant, many if not most Republicans will awaken on Labor Day and say, “Mother of babbling Jesus, we nominated who?” This will be followed by the nightmare of watching the entire party get sucked down the drain by Newt’s widely-expected public implosion in the waning days of the campaign — something which, now that the details of his advanced mental illness are widely known, we will be greatly anticipating.
So, unless this whole, ugly, interminable primary process fails to produce a clear favorite — and the convention, after multiple ballots, throws the nomination wide open, and someone like Jeb Bush, say, steps up as the anybody-but-Romney-Gingrich-Santorum-Paul candidate — whichever of the four current contenders winds up with the brass ring will be facing as much opposition from his fellow Republicans as from Democrats and independents.
This is no small problem for the Republicans, not just because they won’t have the juice to unseat President Obama this fall, which is the only real plank in the Republican Party platform this year, but also because of something that has gotten short shrift in all of the discussions in which the TV talking heads engage — the coattail effect.
A weak or divisive candidate at the top of the ticket can have repercussions all the way down to local offices, something of which both parties have traditionally been well aware, but which the Republicans seem to have forgotten about this year in their drive to fire up their whack-job base. The Republican majority in the Congress is not so great that it’s beyond the danger of being turned around this fall, and we can’t think of any of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates who have the coattail chops to drag that majority along behind them.
Nancy Pelosi knows this. In her dream to recapture the House speakership, Pelosi has mounted what she’s calling her “Drive for 25″, to win the 25 seats that the Democrats need in order to recapture the majority. And while Pelosi has been going so far as to say that the Democrats might gain as many as 35 seats — something most analysts view as a pipe dream — there’s reason to believe that her efforts to become speaker again just might bear fruit.
Although as it stands right now, the Democrats are poised to gain anywhere from 5 to 12 seats this fall — quite a bit less than what the Democrats need for a majority — there’s some reason for optimism. Redistricting in some large states, like California (Pelosi’s home state), New York, Illinois, and Florida, have given Democrats an edge (the recent setback at the hands of the Supreme Court in the case of Texas notwithstanding), and a number of Republican Congressmen have announced their retirements. In California alone, three Republicans are retiring, and, thanks to redistricting, several others are facing much tougher reelection battles, as their new districts reflect much more on the blue scale of the spectrum than they did before.
Most analysts agree that the Democrats will make inroads against the Republicans in Congress this fall, but absent the kind of support President Obama was able to generate in 2008, they consider it unlikely that the Democrats will recapture the House.
On the other hand, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that what the Democrats can’t achieve because of the top of their ticket, the Republicans can hand to them with the top of theirs. For all of the reasons we stated above, the four candidates remaining in the race for the nomination present only the following options to Republicans in the way of a nominee: bad, dreadful, unfortunate and catastrophic. That would be Romney, Santorum, Paul, and Gingrich, respectively.
So if the Democrats are starting out with 5 to 12, and pick up, say, another 10 or so nationwide because of retirements and redistricting, that puts them at around 15 to 22 new seats, anywhere from 10 to 3 shy of what they need to push them over the top. Romney at the top of the ticket just might make up the difference. Santorum would be good for another dozen new Democratic seats, at least, which definitely puts them over the top. Paul would definitely bring in those 35 seats that Pelosi is dreaming about.
As for Gingrich, well, we may be going out on a limb here, but once the national electorate has taken their full measure of this man (actually, only half-man), we think that the Democrats could gain as many as 100 to 150 seats in Congress, 12 Senate seats, 10 governorships, and 20 to 25 state legislatures. And if Newt has his October mental breakdown, as we predict he will, those numbers could easily double.
Seriously, though, there’s no question that Nancy Pelosi’s “Drive for 25″ will at least be helped by the fact that none of the Republican candidates have thus far shown an ability to unite the party in a way that will trickle down to a wider electoral victory for Republicans.
This is one of the reasons why next week’s Florida primary is so important. Unlike Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — small, homogeneous principalities whose electorates reflect a narrow, almost myopic worldview at wide variance with the nation as a whole — Florida is large, diverse, and the closest we have seen in this race thus far to something that approaches a reflection of national attitudes. A decisive win here by one of these candidates might just change the calculus in a big way. But again, that all depends upon which candidate it is. If Gingrich wins big in Florida, for example, the fate of the Republican Party will be sealed, and it will be something along the lines of a Quentin Tarantino film.
Here at OMT, we wish Nancy luck in her quest, of course. But what we give with our right hand, we take away with our left. Because we feel very strongly that should the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, and retain or even extend their control of the Senate, the time is long overdue for new leadership in the Democratic Party. And that means that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid must go. The Democratic Party needs strong leadership that is an equal match to the Republicans, who are capable of thwarting Republican intransigence and beating them over the head with it before shoving it up their ass. Who can play the game by the rules that the Republicans have been playing by, and that means not coming to a gun fight with a knife.
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have been monuments of the deeply-ingrained weakness that Americans have come to loathe about the Democratic Party, and which is the primary reason for the failure of the Democrats to get their message out to the very people who would most benefit by the Democratic vision of America’s future.
It’s time for fresh faces in the Democratic caucus, people who not only share the vision of opportunity for all, which has long been the hallmark of the Democratic Party, but who also have the strength, the guile, the focus, and the singularity of purpose to achieve that vision, and to send forth the word that this is a party that is committed to ensuring that everyone has an equal shot at a new American Dream.
President Obama can’t do it alone, as we have seen. If he should have the great good fortune of a second term with his own party back in control of the Congress, then let that Congress give us new leadership that is up to the task of bringing America back from the abyss.
