A GOOD EVENING FOR THE DEMS. My own prognostication is that the Democrats will have, by the standards of their own low expectations as late as two months ago, a very good evening tomorrow. Unfortunately, the Democrats have let the narrative of their own momentum carry them away in the past month, and stories like the New York Times‘ Sunday package, which showed eight Senate seats leaning Democratic, certainly didn’t help matters any. Success or failure is always partly an expectations game, and while the Dems were certainly better at managing expectations than I have ever seen them be before — one sign for me that this time a comeback was really in the works and not just hype was the absence of, well, hype from the Democrats — their hunger and hope is such that they became less cautious than experience has taught them to be in the past.
Unlike the Bush babies and Reagan youth blogging here, I’ve learned to trust my gut on this stuff. The first time I was old enough to vote, Bill Clinton took out 41. The only politician I ever gave any money to — Chuck Schumer, to whom I donated $25 in, like, 1997 — did me the favor of deposing the execrable Al D’Amato in New York. I did not vote for Al Gore in 2000 (sorry), because I’d spent two years cleaning the toilet in the house I shared with some former staffers of his, and figured I’d already made my contribution to his political success. I swooned for Howard Dean in 2003, and was not a enthuiastic supporter of John Kerry in 2004. From 1999 to late 2003, I was a registered independent, so repelled by Bill Clinton’s indiscretions that I felt I no longer wanted to identify with the Dems. Dean brought me back into the party, but I still vote Republican at the local level in D.C., because I believe a one-party government run by Democrats is just as susceptible to corruption as one-party government run by Republicans.
The Democrats are retaking the House tomorrow. The senate was always going to be a long-shot. And they are retaking the Blue State governor’s mansions in New York and Massachusetts — a critical first step to national recovery.
