A Pilgrim’s Digression

This should warm the hearts of liberals all across the land: candidate for Governor of Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, the much-hated orchestrator of President Bush’s 2004 Ohio victory, trails his Democratic challenger Ted Strickland by 20 points in a Columbus Dispatch Poll.

According to David Broder, when the poll results were made known to him, “the best that Blackwell could say was that his own internal surveys showed him trailing by only 11 points.” The President seems to have become the proverbial White Elephant of election year 2006.

More from Broder’s column today:

I had dinner one night with a group of Ohio Republicans, all with many years of experience in state politics and none directly engaged in this year’s gubernatorial race. One of them said, “I’m afraid this could be another 1982,” a year when recession pushed unemployment to 15 percent and cost the Republicans the governorship. Another said, “I’d settle right now for another 1982. I’m afraid it will be another 1974,” the year of the Watergate election, when Democrats swept everything in sight.

Broder says that the problem for Republican candidates, particularly incumbent congressmen, is that they have nothing to show for these many years of Republican rule. Nothing to satisfy their base, and certainly nothing to satisfy Independents and liberals. What can they point to? Iraq? Health care reform? Tax reform? Immigration reform?

Furthermore, nothing seems to be changing the overall sour mood of the electorate. For example, Republicans received no credit for the death of the terrorist Moussaoui, a few months ago. That was a one or two day “good news” story, but neither the President nor his party received an appreciable PR boost from it.

Republicans are becoming so desperate for a success story, they are even taking credit for thwarting the recent plot to blow up ten airliners in route from London to New York. Hillary Clinton’s Republican challenger in New York has said that “National Security Agency wiretaps were vital in stopping” the bomb plot.

Oh really?  According to the same Fact Check article, Tony Snow has said that the President was not even informed of the plot until August 4th, just about a week before the British made their arrests.  This was a British investigation, and a British success.

Anyway, it’s doubtful that Clinton’s challenger is going to get any traction out of his claim.  All indicators are that the American electorate is ready for a change.

The old seaman’s tale says that rapidly departing rats foretell a ship’s doom.  And so the Washington Post also reports today that lobbying firms on K Street are recruiting Democrats “in response to rising prospects that the opposition party will wrest control of at least one chamber of Congress from Republicans in the November elections.”

It just so happens I drove to work today, and the traffic on K street was particularly heavy.  Whether these were lobbyists desperately fleeing from their Republican customers, I don’t know.  It was still a little dark at 6 AM, so I could have merely been witnessing the hasty flight of conservative cable news pundits and radio talk show hosts as they attempted to reach their cellar lairs.

November is still over three months away, and there are factors in the Republicans favor as well.  Democrats seem to be riding a tide of voter angst, rather than creating positive reasons for voters to turn out for Democrats.  Also, voters tend to be cautious about tossing out a ruling party in war time.  Witness Bush’s victory in 2004.

However, Democrats may be correct that they don’t need to present a detailed, positive plan for change, least of all in Iraq, when the news is so uniformly bad for Republicans.  On the issue of a turnover of power in war time, the war on Iraq has gone on so long, with so little success, that Republicans may reap no benefit from voters’ traditional reluctance to change horses mid-stream.

I remember from the Political Science classes I took in school, I was taught that it is highly unusual for one party to control all branches of Government.  Voters don’t like a one party system.  Thus when a Republican President holds office, Congress usually goes to the opposition party, and vice versa.

That may be outdated, traditional wisdom from the eighties, but it may still hold true this election year.  I will be surprised, and a little unnerved if Republicans retain control of the Legislative Branch this year.  If Republicans win again, it speaks to a malaise deeper than any alleged voter fraud on the part of a Kenneth Blackwell.

If Republicans win again, we need to start asking hard questions about why the electorate is voting Republican across the board when Republicans have demonstrated their incompetence to govern, over and over and over again.

If something doesn’t make sense, and one party rule does not make sense in a democracy, then either there is something inherently corrupt about our system of government, or else something is broken within the media that is feeding the electorate news and opinion, and we need to get to the bottom of it.