A Silver Lining? Celebrating Some GOP Losses!

by Dick Mac

Yesterday's election is being called a referendum on President Obama's performance so far.

According to that notion, the American people do not share Obama's vision of the future (whatever that vision be), or his methodology for getting there (which seems to include completely ignoring his base).

There have been two Democratic presidents who faced a similar mid-term critique: Harry Truman lost his congressional Democratic majority in 1946 when Americans elected Republican majorities in both houses, in the middle of his first term. The mid-term election during Bill Clinton's first term (1994) also saw the Republicans take control of both houses. In both cases, the sitting Democratic president won re-election to a second term.

Having lost only the House and not the Senate may prove a disadvantage for Obama in 2012!

In better news: many teabaggers were defeated, including Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada, and Carl Paladino in New York. All three ran on such extreme platforms that they simply could not find a majority during a very pro-Republican election cycle.

The biggest teabagger race is for Senator from Alaska, where Republican Lisa Murkowski lost renomination for her own seat to teabagger Joe Miller. Murkowski ran a write-in campaign and at last count was leading Miller! It will be days before one side or the other can fix that election, but a Republican running a write-in campaign against another Republican and leading at any point in vote-counting, especially after the election finishes, is a remarkable story in and of itself. Good luck to Murkowski, because one less teabagger in Washington is one more ray of hope for he United States of America.

My favorite Republican loss is the race for Senator from Connecticut. Linda McMahon spent fifty million dollars ($50,000,000) to get 500,000 votes. That's about a hundred bucks a vote. Wow! A hundred bucks a vote to lose!

[Correction. The original post mistakenly referred to the Connecticut election as a race for Governor. It was a race for Senator.]