Let’s be clear about this, since we’re all girls together here, and there’s nobody listening: yesterday’s election results were a disaster for Our Only President. I don’t mean that the populace at large has rejected his policies. That’s crap. The populace at large doesn’t know what his policies are, and when the do know, they like ’em just fine. Nor is the contrary story of what happened accurate, that the fact that the individual voters based their preferences on local issues rather than national trends means that this isn’t<\/i> a disaster for Our Only President. No. Individual voters based their preferences on local issues rather than national trends, and that means this was an utter disaster for Our Only President.\n
Now, when I say it was a disaster—obviously, he’s still a favorite to win re-election in three years, if the economy picks up at all. But he is trying to get some policies in place, and he has to work with people to do that, and if Senators Baucus and Nelson and Landrieu and Nelson and Collins and Snowe and so on and the Blue Dogs in the House, curse them, feel that Our Only President was weakened by the election results, then he was<\/i> weakened by them, and that’s the end of that.\n
But look: the Governor of New Jersey is an unpopular scumbag. He is also a pretty good Democrat who supported the President in a bunch of ways. His opponent ran, essentially, on the platform that the Governor was an unpopular scumbag, that the voters associated his name with failure and corruption, and that whatever he was, it wasn’t that. This was, unsurprisingly, a successful campaign, as Gov. Corzine was reduced to saying that although he was, in fact, an unpopular scumbag, the other guy was a scumbag too, really, and, um, look, isn’t that Our Only President? And in the end, the people who were probably willing enough to vote for the unpopular scumbag on the D line never made it to the polls.\n
Why is this a disaster for Our Only President? Look, the main leverage that the President has in negotiating with unpopular scumbags in the Congress is that he can get them re-elected. That he will stand on the stage with them at rallies in the week before the election and they will look less unpopular and less scummy (or baggy, depending). In particular, if he can get a bunch of people who like Barack Obama more than they like anything else in politics out to the goddamned polls on the first Tuesday in November, that’s gold for an unpopular scumbag with a D by his name.\n
But he can’t.\n
Or at any rate, he couldn’t yesterday. And I don’t see any reason to think that he will be able to next year, unless Things Change, and unfortunately, the main Things that would have to Change involve passing legislation through the defenses of some Senators and Representatives who have just seen how little he will be able to give them. Which means, if things were working normally, that our Senate Leader would have to trade more actual stuff to get their support. Only, just as a coincidence, our Senate Leader is an unpopular scumbag himself.\n
Or, perhaps, I’m just cranky, because if Our Only President had put his ass on the line in Maine, he would have one victory to show off, and a lot of people would be free from a particularly nasty and unnecessary bit of vicious discrimination. But hey! Come to Connecticut. Where our unpopular scumbag of a Senator is very likely to win, even if Our Only President was weakened yesterday, and where two lovers can get married today.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger is grouchy this morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18913,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12510\/revisions\/18913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}