Election Preview

Certainly the Republicans' Halloween nightmare was the idea of Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. But that appears to be on its way to fruition. If the polls are to be believed, the country will awake on November 8 to find the Democrats in control of the house. According to the New York Times analysis, there are 17 races that are too close to call. If the Democrats win three of them, they have the majority.

The Senate is much dicier. It's all coming down to four states: New Jersey, Virginia, Missouri and Tennessee. The Democrats need to win three of these to take the Senate (that's provided solid leads against Republican incumbents in places like Montana, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Ohio don't get blown, which is entirely possible. The Democrats are like the Chicago Cubs of politics). I feel pretty comfortable about New Jersey, which hasn't elected a Republican senator in over thirty years. Robert Menendez has widened his lead in the polls to about five points over the Republican challenger, Tom Kean, Jr., who seems to be running only because his father was governor. Smart move making your son a junior, Tom Senior.

In Virginia, the incumbent is George Allen, a California-born man who has a fetish for the Confederacy. At one time he was considered a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, but now is fighting for his political life following gaffes such as calling his opponent's dark-skinned operative "Macaca," and other displays of dubious intelligence. The opponent is James Webb, who once was a Republican (and Reagan's Secretary of the Navy). You can tell the GOP is desperate, because they have poured over Webb's novels and found racy bits.

Tennessee is a state I'm most concerned about. The seat has no incumbent. The Democrat is Harold Ford, an African-American congressman from Memphis. A controversy erupted when the Republican National Committee ran an ad that mentioned Ford once attended a party at the Playboy Mansion, and then insinuated he likes white women, raising the specter of jungle fever to frighten the constituents who pine for the good old days of Emmett Till. To his credit, the Republican candidate Bob Corker repudiated the ad.

In Missouri, the candidates are Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Jim Talent, but the main focus is on actor Michael J. Fox and radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh. Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, cut an ad for McCaskill, urging people to vote for her if they cared about embryonic stell-cem usage, which could provide cures for diseases like Parkison. Limbaugh attacked Fox, claiming he was faking the shaking that Parkinson's causes. I'm sure this was a very calculated move on Limbaugh's part, as the right-wing specializes in bomb-throwing without any factual basis. Turns out Fox was not faking, and had taken his medicine--in fact, the medicine makes him shake, but without it he can not speak. Hopefully this will turn out to backfire for the right wing.