Columnist.
One of the constant refrains of the so-called mainstream media is that tea party candidates are blithering incompetents and weird wackos. They may do well this year, the refrain goes, but when voters come to their senses, the Republican Party will pay a big price for embracing them.
Seven months ago, Speaker Nancy Pelosi spent a busy week rounding up votes to pass the Senate version of the Democrats' health care legislation. It wasn't easy. She had to get Democrats who had voted no in November to switch to yes in March. And she had to get Democrats who had refused to vote for the bill in November without an anti-abortion amendment to vote for a bill in March that lacked that language.
I've been in campaign meetings. Sometimes the atmosphere is grim. Your side is down, and you're looking to turn things around. The pollster goes down the list of issues tested. Health care? Nope. They hate your stand on that. The economy? Thumbs down. Foreign policy? Nobody cares anymore. Then, finally, something that works. An assistant at the polling shop throws in a question about campaign contributions by foreigners. Turns out most voters don't like them. They don't think it's an important issue, but, hey, nothing else works. So let's go with it. This or something like it seems to have taken place at Team Obama Central sometime in the past few weeks.
It's an ornate office in Indiana's beautifully maintained mid-19th century Capitol, but the 49th governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, is not dressed to match the setting. He's just returned from spending the night in Princeton, Ind., staying at a constituent's house -- as he often does around the state -- and he's dressed in a work shirt and jeans.
It's pretty clear that Democrats are less enthusiastic about voting this year than Republicans. The latest evidence comes from Gallup, which reports that Republicans' 3 percent edge in congressional voting among registered voters increases to 13 and 18 points when you include just those likely and very likely to actually vote.
It happened late Wednesday night, so it didn't get much coverage: Speaker Nancy Pelosi cast the deciding vote when the House voted, 210-209, to adjourn. That's significant because, by custom, the speaker ordinarily doesn't vote except on issues of special importance. And because Pelosi, who has shown impressive ability to deliver Democratic majorities on one tough roll call after another for four years, was scrambling to prevail on what is ordinarily a routine vote.
Get an outline map showing the 50 states, and take a look at the latest poll averages in pollster.com in each race for senator and governor. Color in the percentage (rounded off; no need for tenths) by which either the Republican or Democratic candidate is leading (I use blue for Republicans, red for Democrats) in each state. The results are revealing, even breathtaking.
On Sept. 27, 1994, 367 Republican House members and candidates stood on the steps of the Capitol and endorsed what they called the Contract With America. On Sept. 23 last week, 12 Republican House members stood in a hardware store in Sterling, Va., and issued a Pledge to America.
In Washington, I'm often asked how many seats Republicans will pick up in the House and whether they'll win a majority in the Senate. But I'm seldom asked anything about the 37 races for governor that will be decided next month (except for Georgia, which will have a runoff if no candidate tops 50 percent).
My subject today is the civil war raging in one of our great political parties, as highlighted in recent primary elections. No, I'm not talking about the split between the tea partiers and the Republican establishment (is there a Republican establishment anymore?). I'm talking about the split between two of the core groups of the Democratic Party, as witnessed in the Sept. 14 primaries in heavily Democratic New York (63 percent for Barack Obama in 2008), Maryland (62 percent Obama) and the District of Columbia (92 percent Obama).
Two sets of numbers tell you a lot about an important difference between election year 2008 and election year 2010. In 2008, 37 million Americans voted in Democratic presidential primaries and just under 21 million voted in Republican presidential primaries. One reason for the difference was that the Republican nomination was decided earlier. But even counting only the early contests, Democratic turnout was 26 million and Republican turnout was 17 million.
"There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases." That sounds like a stern headmistress dressing down some sophomores who have been misbehaving. But it's actually from a letter sent Thursday from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans -- the chief lobbyist for private health insurance companies.
When you spot the word "triage" in a political news story, you know someone is in trouble. Triage is the procedure by which medical personnel screening people injured in combat or disasters separate those who can be saved from those who can't. The first group is given immediate surgery in hopes of recovery. The second is given painkillers to make the end bearable.
Imagine that you have a product whose price tag for decades rises faster than inflation. But people keep buying it because they're told that it will make them wealthier in the long run. Then, suddenly, they find it doesn't. Prices fall sharply, bankruptcies ensue, great institutions disappear.
Some of the most important things in history are things that didn't happen -- even though just about everyone thought they would. Recent example: Scads of liberals gleefully predicted that the financial crisis and deep recession would destroy Americans' faith in markets and increase their confidence in big government. Many conservatives gloomily feared they were right.
In this tumultuous political year, the latest sharp surprises come from the far reaches of the Anglosphere -- Alaska and Australia. These were lands to which Capt. James Cook voyaged even as the seaboard Atlantic colonists were rebelling against king and Parliament in London. Cook's charts of the southern coast of Australia are still in use, and he sailed from there to Hawaii and then through the Bering Strait to the ice-choked Arctic Sea. You can see splendid murals of his voyages in the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage.
Every 10 years, it's time for reapportionment and redistricting. The framers of the Constitution created the first regularly scheduled national census and required, for the first time that I am aware, that representation in a legislature be apportioned according to population.
Like many Democrats over the past 40 years, Barack Obama has hoped that his association with unpopular liberal positions on cultural issues would be outweighed by pushing economic policies intended to benefit the ordinary person.
When I drive from downtown Washington to Reagan National Airport, I often encounter delays on the George Washington Parkway due to construction of a small bridge over an inlet of the Potomac.
Writers have noted that Dan Rostenkowski, longtime chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, went to "Club Fed" (as he called it) on minor corruption charges. They have written at length that Ted Stevens, senator from Alaska for 40 years, brought a lot of pork-barrel projects to his state and was convicted on corruption charges -- a conviction overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct.
