Forgetting The "One-Party Elephant"

I’m sure you’ve heard by now, along with me, what is destined to be one of the final, dying gasps of the Palin-McBush campaign as they approach what should be electoral obliteration in about a week (though I’m not assuming anything, I hasten to add). And that is the cry to “beware of one-party rule,” or words to that effect (echoed by, among other people, Kevin Ferris yesterday in the Inquirer, and Jonathan Martin here).

And as long as I’ve brought up Ferris’ weekly literary exercise in freeper fiction, please allow me to highlight the following mess in particular…

…(Joe Biden)…went out of his way Sunday to scare voters, saying an international crisis is inevitable solely as a test to an inexperienced President Obama. Worse, and oddly enough, Biden also suggested that Obama wouldn't handle the issue well.

Give me a break; here is the exact quote from Biden (as Obama said, maybe it was a bit of a flourish in elocution, but Biden’s fundamental point is correct)…

"Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America.

"Remember I said it standing here, if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.

"I promise you it will occur. As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it's going happen. I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate."

Where in that excerpt does it indicate that Barack Obama would not handle a crisis “well,” as Ferris puts it?

However, what I really wanted to highlight in Ferris’ noxious punditry is the following…

"Pennsylvania is not out of the game for us," Cindy McCain said in an interview after an appearance at the National Constitution Center on Monday morning. "We're very much in it and very competitive."

Reasons for that, Cindy McCain said, are worries about the economy and one-party rule in Washington.

I’ll respond to the beer heiress and her prognostication about our beloved commonwealth a little later, but for now I just want to take a little trip back in time about, oh, four years ago or so, and recall the following:

This tells us how Dubya “gambled heavily and won big” in the 2002 mid-term congressional election, in which “Mr. Bush criss-crossed the country as the campaign hotted up, visiting candidates in key battles where advisers believed his presence could make a vital difference. Paying visits to three, four, even five states in a single day was not uncommon. In all, he visited a total of 25 states on the campaign trail.”

The story also noted that Dubya, who apparently is not fond of travel (I’m sure Clinton “hit the road” more than Dubya as president, but I don’t have any stats on that at the moment), became “grouchy and bad-tempered in the final five days of the campaign,” according to the Independent.

Awwww, poor President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History (I mean, what else is a figurehead supposed to do in an election year?).

But not to worry; because “gambling Dubya” managed to pull it off that year and in '04 (barring electoral fraud in Ohio, of course, which is a subject of at least one whole other post), Nancy Gibbs and John F. Dickerson of Time Magazine gushed that, “For sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality to match his design, for gambling his fortunes—and ours—on his faith in the power of leadership, George W. Bush is TIME's 2004 Person of the Year.”

And call me crazy, but even though the Repugs managed to consolidate their holds on the Senate and the House that year, I don’t recall reading about “the dangers of one-party rule” anywhere, or words to that effect (with this post noting presciently that, "The one consolation that people are clinging to is that (Dubya) will fuck things up so badly in the next four years that the Democrats will move back into favour. That's if we still have a world." – hey, the bad word didn’t come from me, it’s a quote, OK?).

So what happened after that? Well, the Dems take over Congress in 2006, of course, with the predictable tepid response from our dear corporate media cousins, as noted by Media Matters here (what could be more boring than a Venn diagram?).

And it’s not as if the Repugs weren’t warned; as Frank Rich noted so correctly here in his New York Times column yesterday, the entire George Felix Allen “Macaca” incident in Virginia that year was a warning that the red meat, cultural conservative, values voter demagoguery had had its day (fortunately for the Dems, though, the Palin-McBush team never got the memo, which I believe has a lot to do with its current slide into electoral oblivion).

And getting back to the former Ms. Hensley’s PA prediction, I give you this from the aforementioned Frank Rich column…

The constant tide of anthropological articles and television reports set in blue-collar diners, bars and bowling alleys have hyped this racial theory of the race. So did the rampant misreading of primary-season exit polls. On cable TV and the Sunday network shows, there was endless chewing over the internal numbers in the Clinton victories. It was doomsday news for Obama, for instance, that some 12 percent of white Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania said race was a factor in their choice and three-quarters of them voted for Clinton. Ipso facto — and despite the absence of any credible empirical evidence — these Clinton voters would either stay home or flock to McCain in November.

The McCain campaign is so dumb that it bought into the press’s confirmation of its own prejudices. Even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 1.2 million in Pennsylvania (more than double the 2004 gap), even though Obama leads by double digits in almost every recent Pennsylvania poll and even though no national Republican ticket has won there since 1988, McCain started pouring his dwindling resources into the state this month. When the Democratic Representative John Murtha described his own western Pennsylvania district as a “racist area,” McCain feigned outrage and put down even more chips on the race card, calling the region the “most patriotic, most God-loving” part of America.

Well, there are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country. But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds age doing more damage to McCain than race to Obama.

I look at it this way; the last time we had one-party rule under the Repugs, a terminally ill woman in a persistent vegetative state was paraded before the nation, almost the entire leadership of the majority party was embroiled in a lobbying scandal led by a man currently serving a four-year prison term, and our government floundered in a virtually helpless state as practically the entire Ninth Ward of the city of New Orleans was destroyed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (and that’s just for starters, to say nothing of the Iraq War, of course).

Assuming all good things next Tuesday, the Democrats would have to go a long way to amass a more abject record of futility than that.