Saddle up the pony

It seems a number of Senate Democratic candidates thought they could ride the Clinton pony to Congress, but alas they ended up at the glue factory. The biggest losers of this election cycle may very well be the Clintons. Democratic candidates were banking on the Clintons' star appeal to put them over the top, as such Bill and Hillary were very much in demand throughout the country, stumping for gubernatorial and congressional candidates from coast to coast, only to watch most of them go down on Tuesday night. They went 17 for 48 (0,354), according to Politico, with most of those victories coming in Blue states, where the candidates were relatively safe. The folks at Fox news must have really been chortling over this one.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama sat in the White House, conspicuous in his absence on the campaign trail. But, it didn't need to be that way. The Obama team was ready and willing to help out embattled candidates but the call never came until too late. By that point, the narrative had already been set by the Republicans, who went out of their way to paint him as a "failed president."

Amazing when you think about it. Here is a guy who has demonstrated he can get out the vote, yet Red State Republicans who desperately needed the minority vote in their states, particularly in the South, saw him as a liability and tried "to walk a tightrope between keeping some distance from the president and trying to turn out his base." Look at Mary Landrieu's last ditch appeal to Louisiana black voters. I suppose she thought she could pull a "Thad Cochran" and get the black votes she needed to avoid a runoff, which now she is most likely to lose, as it is hard to believe that Rob Maness's supporters will vote for her over Cassidy. Make that 53-47 Republicans in the Senate.

The Demcorats thought they had all the support they needed in the Clintons, as Hillary had already been anointed the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2016 by the press, and we all know what a great campaigner Bill is. It must have been pretty humbling for Bill to see so many of his chosen candidates fall, particularly Allison, who proudly proclaimed herself a "Clinton Democrat."

Alas, this election was about Barack Obama, as the Republicans made it so abundantly clear, and Democrats played right into the GOP's hands by keeping him in the stable, when they should have been riding him from the start.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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