Skip to main content

There Will Be Blood

By



There's a panic in the air as the midterms quickly approach.  It is now just two months before that fateful day in November where voters get to throw the bums out of Congress and their states as well.  The only problem is that the retention rate is usually pretty high, and very rarely do we see the upheaval we imagine.

Social media is leveling the field to a certain degree.  It no longer takes a huge war chest to be competitive in a campaign.  But, some persons still get out there the old-fashioned way, going door to door as Beto is doing in Texas.  He has Ted Cruz sweating bullets, calling on no less than Donald Trump himself to get him over the finish line in what has become a very close race.  David Hogg wants Texans to remember what Trump said about Ted during the 2016 campaign.  You might call it a billboard outside Lubbock, Texas.

Across the country, many Congressional races are unusually close.  The fact that Ted has to defend himself means that conservative PACs can't spend as heavily unseating vulnerable Democrats like Heidi Heitkamp or Bill Nelson.  This is an election where Republicans should gain seats in the Senate, given the Democrats have to defend so many seats.  Seeing Ted having to battle an upstart like Beto O'Rourke, who has firmly aligned himself with labor, is not what Texas conservatives expected.

Beto has helped to take some of the heat off Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who the Republicans have been trying to turn into the poster girl of the new Democratic Left.  The Conservative PACs had been making Nancy Pelosi into the Wicked Witch of the West, but have been so overwhelmed by all these new "Democratic Socialists" that they don't know which way to turn.

Fear is the prime motivating factor for conservatives, but how much of a base does Trump have left at this point?  His favorite poll, Rasmussen, only shows that 35% of Americans strongly approve of his performance.  Other polls have that number at less than 30 per cent.  That might be enough to hold onto reliably Republican seats, but when it comes to close races, that might prove to be a tipping point in favor of Democrats.

The midterms are generally seen as a referendum on the President's performance and typically the party in power loses seats.  Fact is many of these elections are won at the local level, particularly US Representative seats.  It doesn't matter too much where you stand on Trump or Pelosi, local voters want a person who represents them.  Cortez will win her reliably Democratic district despite her "socialist" roots, just as Duncan Hunter will probably hold onto his reliably Republican California seat despite the corruption charges being leveled against him.  What's interesting is that there are far less "safe seats" this time around for Republicans than in any previous election.

The special elections illustrated that point very well with close races in Georgia, Ohio and Arizona, and Conor Lamb pulling off a stunning upset in a conservative district of Pennsylvania.  At the state level, Democrats scored some big turnovers in the assemblies, most notably in Virginia.  For once, Democrats appear to be tailoring their candidates to their specific districts, rather than conceding conservative districts to Republicans.

Trump and his allies would like us to think there will be riots in the street if the Democrats win the House in November.  This is probably the first time a President ever threatened violence as a means of scaring persons into voting for his party.  This appears to be the only card he has left in trying to strong arm Evangelical leaders into getting their parishioners out to vote.  This is wrong on so many levels.  Not only does it represent a clear breach of the separation of church and state, but pastors should be above this petty call to violence.  They are acting like this is ancient Rome, although Trump resembles Nero moreso than he does a Christian warrior.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  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...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''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
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more