You’re quite right, my bad.

The general election thing hasn’t even started, they have many tricks up their sleeve. It might turn out to be another Dukakis story, for all we know. For most people “lets scary rapists walk the streets” easily beats “has consistently voted for Bush’s policies”.

Oh, and on “Democrat/Democratic”; I think Geoff is from Australia, where there is a party that calls itself the “Democrat Party”; in the U.S. the party calls itself the “Democratic Party” so when an American says “Democrat Party” he sounds like an asshole. But as an Australian Geoff surely meant no harm.

It just means Obama isn’t going to win Mississippi. But no-one ever expected any recent Dem presidential
candidate to take the deep South. The question for November is whether McCain can win much other than the deep South …

Childers supports expanding SCHIP and getting out Iraq. A good victory for Democrats but if anything it seems to indicate that Obama might have a tougher time than expected in the fall.

Posted by someguy

What can that possibly mean?

As I explained elsewhere, there are always those who take advantage of discursive charity, especially in political discussions. (Leibniz: “People would argue about the multiplication table if there were enough money in it”). In those cases, discursive charity must be supplemented by the discursive lead pipe to the face.

(Discursive! Not real! No actual violence is being proposed!)

High turnout is usually good for Dems. But I don’t think that’s essential this year: all that’s needed is to point out that McCain has consistently voted for Bush’s policies, and that McCain’s economic policy, foreign policy, and especially Iraq policy is nothing but the continuation, and even intensification, of Bush’s.
Tie McCain to Bush and you win easily.

The benefit of campaigning in more states and boosting turnout is more likely to show up in larger House and Senate gains – which will help with getting legislation through.

There are a relatively large number of GOP retirements, and problems with recruitment. And I have my 1997 UK déjà vu all over again.

Admittedly, you do have the issue that the presidential election is a set of state elections, and Obama’s strategy hinges on a large increase in turnout, and an electoral map that’s relatively unfamiliar to Democrats. But if that turns out to be a gamble too far, you’re still likely to end up with McCain facing an incredibly hostile Congress, and 2009-10 spent working out who got the mandate to govern.

Democratic president

1. There were a bunch of unusually close special election in 2005 that could arguably be called a sign of the Democratic victory in 2006: OH-2 (Jean Schmidt’s suquaker victory), Oh-18 (Bob Ney’s seat flipping from R to D), TX-22 (Tom DeLay’s seat flippping from R to D), TX-23 (another R to D), etc.

2. The New Deal did not extend the Great Depression.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/261143

3. The Great Society programs were intended to reduce poverty, they were never funded at levels required to eliminate poverty. Nonetheless, poverty rates declined from 19.5% in 1963 (the start of the Great Society) to 12.1% in 1969 )the end of the Great Society proper, although many Great Society programs and social programs in general continued thereafter).

Poverty rates held and even declined slightly through the 1970’s, and only began to increase in the 1980’s with the Reagan budget cuts.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov2.html

The wikipedia entry for “cloture rule” suggests that the issue is that while rule changes are passed by a simple majority, debate on rule changes is itself subject to cloture with a requirement of “2/3 of those present and voting”. This all gets quite self-referential and arcane …

“So in this case, there is no procedure anymore. For the Democrats to obey niceties about continuing bodies when the Republicans have shown themselves willing to break them at any time is a sucker game. If they can break the filibuster, they should.”

I respect that view, but I disagree. The winner-takes-all view tends to be dangerous: one interpretation of the last 7 years of US politics is that by ramming through their own agenda with no regard for compromise or cosideration of constructive criticism, the Republican party has driven itself over a cliff and killed its chances for a generation. While there’s nothing to be gained by trying to compromise with Republicans like Inhofe, Stevens, or McConnell, there are still a few reasonable people like Collins, Snowe, and maybe Hagel that it’s worth trying to work with. Playing fast and loose with the rules doesn’t go over well with the voters in the long run, even when the rules are flawed.

I don’t like the rules of US politics much: I prefer a parliamentary system where the voters can throw the bums out all at once (and often even before their time is up). But ripping up the whole US constitution isn’t an option, so any proposed change has to be evaluated in the context of a fairly elaborate system. It’s hard to get things done, but that’s the way the system is designed to be.

One interesting theory I’ve heard is that if Obama gets the White House, he might be able to use his donor list of 1.5M+ names as a tool to buttress the top-down power of the Presidency with grass-roots bottom-up pressure on individual senators and representatives. If effective, that approach might be quite revolutionary in its effects. The game can change a lot without any change in the rules.

Heh, me too. And this discussion reminds me that I’ve been sort of reading The Emperor of Ocean Park—I should go outside and do that.

In any case, I’m with Lemuel here; though ordinarily I’m a big fan of procedural justice, part of procedural justice is the informal norms of how the branches should work together, and the Republicans have been wiping their ass with those norms since 1993. (I could mention the various blue-slip shenanigans under Clinton and Bush, including how the treatment of blue slips magically changed with the change in Administrations; or the GOP’s unprecedented number of filibusters since the Democrats took over the Senate; or the refusal to confirm any—not the most radical, any—of Clinton’s appointees for many judicial vacancies, or cutting the ABA out of the judicial nomination process; but what I’d point to is the exceptionless refusal of any Republican member of Congress to vote for important Clinton bills in 1993. That was unprecedented obstructionism; having lost the election, the GOP decided not to let the winner govern.)

So in this case, there is no procedure anymore. For the Democrats to obey niceties about continuing bodies when the Republicans have shown themselves willing to break them at any time is a sucker game. If they can break the filibuster, they should.

And Richard, I think the example of 1993 shows that this is too optimistic: “the party not occupying the White House doesn’t have any coherent leadership to hold it together and set an opposition agenda.” Voting “no” on everything doesn’t take an agenda, and the Republicans have shown themselves willing to do it before, even after electoral defeats. We shouldn’t count on them seeing reason.

Me neither, just a layman trying to survive the Bush era by spending way too much time reading blogs :-)