If you don't have nothing nice to say...

It's a little out of date now, but given the (mostly justified) pounding various people gave CNN's election coverage, I wanted to point out one thing the net got right. Ken Mehlman came on around nine o'clock Pacific time to try and spin the dumbass notion that the networks had prematurely called the Maryland Senate race and that Michael Steele was within striking distance of Ben Cardin. The GOP had already managed to get the Washington Post to retract their projection, and Mehlman was going on in his oily way about the "historic" come-from-behind victory that Steele was going to pull off (proving that, I guess, a black man can win in Maryland if he pretends to be a Democrat).

Jack Cafferty was, of course, woefully unprepared to counter Mehlman's on-air spinning. But, after a commercial break, Wolf Blitzer revisited the issue, put up CNN's county-by-county analysis of Maryland on the screen and declared that the net would stand by its earlier call. Steele lost to Ben Cardin by 11 points.

CNN. Not scintillating. But in this case, the C really did stand for the presense of something like cajones.


Afterthought: Isn't it kind of weird that the ubiquitous Kevin Zeese ran as both the Green and the Libertarian candidate? Those aren't exactly complementary platforms.

Predictive genius!

Ok, ok, so I miscalled RI and underestimated the Dems' House pickups by probably about 50% (with 10 seats still undecided). At least I didn't make the worst predictions of the race. Or of the decade.

And a big YEESSSSS!!!! to apparently being right about Jim Webb in Virginia. It is time to unleash the radical liberal agenda.

Hussies for Ford.

This is a nice -- and I think accurate -- analysis from Garance Franke-Ruta on what exactly the infamous "call me ad" did to Harold Ford, possibly the only Dem Senate contender who's going to decisively lose today. It's all about class, and class-based gender insecurities. Corker's campaign is implying that voting for Ford is the sort of thing a low-class woman, easily led by an attractive, smooth-talking man, would do. And (extrapolating a little), the sort of thing that might get her in trouble, hint hint. It's an especially resonant theme given the Ford family's colorful history in the state, and given the implicit link that middle class southern poplulations (and everywhere to lesser or greater extent) make between propriety in gender-relations and socioeconomic status.

Not that the Tennessee GOP is really above race- and gay-baiting when it comes to Harold Ford. But what's going on in the "call me" is maybe a little more subtle.

Quote of the (last couple of) day(s).

Roger L. Simon on the Saddam Verdict:

What a moment in history this is. Who knows how the future will regard the American actions in Iraq? Anyone who thinks he can understand it now is a pompous fool.


I just can't help it. I crack up every time Roger Simon describes somebody else as a pompous fool.

I do like the quote on Ramsay Clark though.

Last minute polls.

TAPPED has them (plus lots of good piss and angst) for the Senate. The good news: Montana doesn't look close anymore (Burns is toast) and Ford is only down three in TN. The bad news: Confederate George has pulled ahead of Jim Webb in Virginia, and Lincoln Chaffee has really narrowed the gap with Sheldon Whitehouse in RI (my prediction: he'll only switch if the Dems plus Lieberman can control the Senate with his vote.)

Nail-biting time. Stare-at-percentages time. But since the Senate is the only set of predictions I got anything close to right in 2004, here are my Senate picks:

McCaskill over Talent in MO
Tester over Burns in MN
Mendendez over Keane in NJ
Cardin over Steele in MD
Chafee over Whitehouse in RI
Webb over Allen in VA
Lieberman over Lamont in CT
Brown over DeWine in OH (yay!)

...and

Ford over Corker in TN. (Yes, yes, I know. I want to believe so I do.)

That makes Dem pickups in PA (good news, and not even worth "predicting", although in my view Santorum isn't even in the top tier of awful Republicans and Casey is the worst kind of troublemaking Dem), VA, MT, OH, TN, MO. The lone GOP upset is Chaffee holding RI. Dems take the Senate.

For the House, I have a gloomier (and less informed) prediction of a 14-16 seat gain based on voter reversion to partisan loyalties when faced with names of candidates they've never heard of in the voting booth. As much as I love the sound of "Speaker Pelosi", I think it's genuinely up in the air.

So there it is. Bite, bite, gnaw, gnaw. Oh, one more prediction: Joe Lieberman will be even more obnoxious in the new term than he's been in the past. But he'll still vote the right way most of the time. Probably more than Casey.

Republicans can get a little nuts sometimes...

...fortunately, as the Instapundit reminds us, Hugh Hewitt is around to be the voice of reason.

Bwa ha ha...

...ha ha ha ha hee hee ha ha mwa mwa snort snort. Hee hee hee. Guh.


...But wait, there's more:

Small point: but it's interesting, to me, nonetheless: the Democrats have nominated four people in the last two presidential campaigns: Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry and John "Shiny Pony" Edwards. These men were supposed to represent Democratic values more than any others. So far, fifty-percent of them have been defenestrated by their own party. Lieberman was attacked by the base of the Democratic Party to the extent that he lost the nomination of his own party. His offense? He behaved like exactly the same man he was in 2000 and for his entire career, i.e. his sin was for being Joe Lieberman. And now John Kerry was roundly disaparaged by many of the leaders of his own party for...being John Kerry.


I'm not exactly sure what this says, but I think it says something.


Good lord. Kerry is not being "defenestrated" by his party. He's not about to be primaried. He has maintained probably the highest post-defeat profile of a Democratic presidential contender in living memory. Yeah, that's due mainly to his being a sitting senator, but compare Kerry's profile to, say, Paul Martin's in the months following the Liberal loss in Canada. No comparison.

So Kerry is currently (graciously) enduring damage control, something Republicans should pretty familiar with these days. I'd love to see Jonah try and make a credible case that Kerry has even been treated worse than, say, the tax-hikin' George H.W. Bush was treated by conservatives after the 1992 election. Or, um, how about the way Goldwater and his acolytes were treated by the Republican machine after the 1964 election? So what does that tell us about conservatives?