The Way Forward

[Tanker]

MT bursts in like Kramer on Seinfeld and looks around...

Did someone call me?

[Dirtweasle]

Video for MT

[bboyle]

Hey Dirt, I think this was the thread we were talking about the generic Congressional polls a couple of months ago. It's evened up again:

http://polltracker.talkingpointsmemo.com/contests/us-cong-generic-ballot?ref=fpblg

[Dirtweasle]

Senator Lamar Alexander yesterday -

I think the issue’s going to be, the President actually said last year, that health care is just a proxy for a larger debate about the role of government and Washington in the lives of Americans. He’s exactly right about that, and that’s what we’ll be debating, and that’s what the election will be about. 

Yup.

[Dirtweasle]

House Democrats head for a thumping at the polls
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
July 28, 2010

Democratic spin doctors have set out how their side is going to hold onto a majority in the House. They'll capture four at-risk Republican seats, hold half of the next 30 or so Democratic at-risk seats, and avoid significant losses on target seats lower on the list.

That's one plausible scenario.  ...

[...]

... most signs suggest Democrats will take a thumping this year too.

To see why, take a look at the generic ballot question -- which party's candidate will you vote for in elections to the House? The current realclearpolitics.com average shows Republicans ahead by 45 to 41 percent. Ten of this month's 15 opinion polls asking the question had Republicans ahead; Democrats led in four (twice by 1 percent), and one poll showed a tie.

Keep in mind that the generic ballot question historically has tended to underpredict Republican performance in off-year elections. Gallup has been asking the question since 1950 and has shown Republicans leading only in two cycles, 1994 and 2002, and then by less than the 7 and 5 points by which they won the popular vote for the House in those years.

So the Republicans' current lead in the generic ballot question suggests they may be on the brink of doing better than in any election since 1946, when they won a 245-188 margin in the House -- larger than any they've held ever since.

Another metric is daunting for Democrats. Polls in House races almost always show incumbents ahead of challengers, because incumbent members of Congress are usually much better known than their opponents. An incumbent running below 50 percent is considered potentially in trouble; an incumbent running behind a challenger is considered in deep doo-doo.  ...

[...]

... Today a lot more Democratic incumbents seem to be trailing Republican challengers in polls. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online has compiled a list of 13 Democratic incumbents trailing in polls released over the past seven weeks.

Some of these poll numbers are mind-boggling. Tom Perriello, a 727-vote winner in Virginia 5 in 2008, has been running two weeks of humorous ads showing what a hard worker he is. A poll shows him trailing Republican state Sen. Robert Hurt 58 to 35 percent.

In industrial Ohio 13, which Barack Obama carried 57 to 42, a poll shows incumbent Betty Sutton trailing free-spending Republican Tom Ganley 44 to 31 percent.

As Geraghty notes, we haven't seen polls released by many other Democrats on Republican target lists. Most are conducting polls; many have reason to release favorable results if they're available. This looks like a case where the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Two years ago, Obama was elected president with a historic 53 percent of the vote -- more than any other Democrat in history except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

These metrics -- the generic ballot results and polls in individual districts -- suggest that House Democrats are headed toward historic losses. Quite a swing in 18 months.

LINK

Still a long way off, but Barone is worth paying attention to on stuff like this.

[rleete]

They all need to be thrown out at a minimum.  Most of them should probably be behind bars.

[Dirtweasle]

Even though this segment from Reason Magazine is called Where Do Libertarians Belong? it is quite interesting and informative beyond what the title suggests.

 

[Dirtweasle]

Speaking to the topic captiond above, I think this guy is on the right track Gov. Christie on Saving Money & the Hard Decisions We Have to Make

This teacher complaining, they're getting four-to-five percent salary increases a year in a zero percent inflation world; they get free health benefits from the day they're hired--for their entire family--until the day they die. They believe they're entitled to this shelter from the recession when the people who are paying for that shelter are the people who have been laid off, who have lost their homes, had their hours cut back, and all we asked them to do was freeze their salary for one year and pay one-and-a-half percent of their salary for their health benefits. For the average teacher in New Jersey, you're talking about $750 a year for full-family health coverage. Now, I don't think that's a lot to ask, and I don't think we can continue anymore to be having the good people of New Jersey who have been laid off and all the rest--as much as I love teachers--you know, everyone's got to be part of the sacrifice. ...

[...]

... That interplay that you just saw was about me trying to convince people that they need to take a freeze, but, in the end, they didn't. The state teachers union said--they had a rally in Trenton against me. 35,000 people came from the teachers. You know what that rally was? The "me first" rally. "Pay me my raise first. Pay me my free health benefits first. Pay me my pension first. And everybody else in New Jersey, get to the back of the line." Well, you know what? I'm not going to sit by and allow that to go unnoticed, so we'll shine a bright light on it, and we'll see how the people react. 

[Dirtweasle]

National Journal's "Hot Line" is reporting -

A prominent Democratic pollster is circulating a survey that shows George W. Bush is 6 points more popular than President Obama in “Frontline” districts — seats held by Democrats that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sees as most vulnerable to Republican takeover. That Bush is more popular than Obama in Democratic-held seats is cause for outright fear.

I hear those "Miss me yet?" T-Shirts are selling like hot cakes too.

[Hakko]

I hear those "Miss me yet?" T-Shirts are selling like hot cakes too.

On Nantucket no less.

[Dirtweasle]

I have no clue if this fellow has any aspirations to run in 2012, but I really am starting to like this big della from Jersey.

New Jersey Governor Christie is a rising national star. By taking on his state's bloated budget, he embodies the New Austerity. Will voters hate him for it?

... When he moved into the New Jersey governor's office on Jan. 19, Christie faced a budget crisis of almost Greek proportions: Projected revenues for the coming fiscal year were nearly $11 billion short of what it would cost to fully fund every authorized program. Since then he has impounded more than $2 billion in unspent funds, fought off legislators' attempts to raise taxes, pushed through a budget that slashes spending, pressured schoolteachers to pay for their health-care benefits, and taken a first crack at fixing one of the nation's most underfunded pension systems. ...

[...]

... The progress is real, says Richard Keevey, who was budget director for Democratic Governor James Florio and Republican Governor Thomas Kean. "The problem he inherited is very large, and his approach to the problem has been the right approach," says Keevey, who was impressed enough to accept a seat on the governor's council of economic advisers. ...

[...]

... What earned Christie national fame wasn't the magnitude of the cuts but the way in which he picked a fight with public-employee unions. When he announced this spring that he was skipping the pension fund contribution, he made it a symbolic act, too, vowing not to put more money into the system until the legislature agreed to reforms necessary for long-term solvency. Christie also pressured teachers, who don't work for him, to agree to contribute 1.5 percent of their pay toward their health-care benefits. He warned them that if they didn't go along, he would campaign against passage of school budgets in their districts. Most teachers refused to contribute, Christie did as he had promised, and voters rejected a record 59 percent of school budgets. At the end of June, the Democratic-controlled state senate and assembly passed Christie's budget almost unchanged from his proposal. ...

[...]

... Christie's most astute move was to curtail future local spending by cramping the primary means of funding it. After seeking a strict limit in the state constitution on increases in local property taxes, he settled for a law that held property tax hikes to 2 percent annually with few exceptions. The cap gives mayors and councils an incentive to support changes in civil-service rules sought by Christie that make it easier to lay off or cut employee pay.

The sequencing was masterful: Christie says he probably would not have the mayors' support for those cost-saving measures if he hadn't first gotten lawmakers to pass his cap. Next up is pension reform. "I'm working on all of these things at once because they're all interconnected," Christie says.  ... 

Seems to me he's confronting the same issue(s) that we have nationally. 

[Egbert]

I've been catching some of his speeches.
He's been calling his shots and been very no nonsense, laying it straight out.

The latest was a press conference he had this week regarding getting denied $400M in a federal education program.

A 1000+ page application and 1 questions was answered wrong, the question was regarding changes in the 2008-2009 budget. The single sheet answer that was inserted was for the changes to the 2010-2011 budget.

The clerical error was caught several weeks ahead of time and the correct answer supplied to the Federal examiner by NJ.

They were denied on the basis of the single corrected answer.

He came out and clearly laid out the case, took responsibility then reported for all to see that this was one reason why big government is bad. All it would have taken to approve would have been a request for a request for a new sheet to insert into the application but the Feds decided instead to waste all that time, money and opportunity to simply flat out deny the application.

To be honest, it looked to me like the instruction was in to find a fault and exploit it in order to try and damage his plan and budget.
 

[Egbert]

I like the editorial from WSJ.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703369704575461503431290986.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_opinion

[Dirtweasle]

Yup, good piece.   One problem is the apologists like CAIR and a few of the other groups alligned with the Muslim Brotherhood suck up all the oxygen in a room.   Their version of jihadi apologetics becomes the baseline.   The true moderates, the guys that should be the spokes models for their faith, folks like Anwar Ibrahim, heck even our own Doc Meeks and some others, are relegated to obscurity.