Right Wing Nut House

I’ll be liveblogging results along with every other blogger in Christendom. But rather than have you, my beloved readers, troll through the internet looking for different insights, I will do that for you.

I will be keeping an eye on a few blogs:

Hot Air - Allah always has the best roundups
Captains Quarters - Ed and a few others are in DC blogging for CNN
Wizbang - Alex McClure et al are some of the best on the web.
Polipundit - He’s still a great analyst even without the old gang.
Kim Priestap - Kim is smart, savvy, and sexy. ‘Nuff said.
Pollster.com - They should have some interesting info on exit polls.

Coverage here will start at 6:00PM central time with updates every half hour or so.

If there’s a site you want me to keep an eye on, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.

Join me today from Noon - 2:00PM Central Time for The Rick Moran Show on Wideawakes Radio.

Join me at noon central today for a look at what’s going on around the country on this election day. I hope to have reports from my fellow WAR radio hosts as they give us the lay of the land from where they live. We’ll also look at the races I think the GOP needs to win in order to keep control of the House.

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Almost every major political analyst, both Republican and Democratic, is predicting a Democratic takeover of the House as a result of the election today.

A sample (+15 Dem needed for Democratic control):

Stuart Rothenberg (D): +30-36 seats Dem
Larry Sabato (D): +29 seats Dem
Charlie Cook (D): +20-35 seats Dem
Evans-Novak (R): +19 seats Dem
Richard Baehr (R) - The American Thinker: +15-20 Dems
Blogging Ceasar (R): +25 seats Dem

My own projection is for a Democratic gain of at least 18 but not more than 23 seats in the House and 3 seats in the Senate. I base this estimate largely on the work of others but have added a few wrinkles of my own including weighting races according to the winning percentage of Bush in the district (more than 54% gives the Republican a 5 point edge), the incumbency factor (a candidate running for a third term or better garners 2 extra points in the polls), and another 2 points for a GOTV advantage (which is well in line with the numbers here).

In short, any GOP candidate within 9 or 10 points could pull out a victory given the right circumstances.

While the Iraq War has played a major role in this campaign, the fact is that the GOP started out this race basically 4 seats down. Scandals and malfeasance in dead red reliably Republican districts made this election and uphill climb from the beginning for the GOP. Couple that fact with numerous open seats where the GOP failed to recruit 1st tier candidates to run against superior Democratic challengers and you had a disaster in the making almost before the election had gotten underway.

Is all hope lost for GOP retention of the House? One fairly reliable barometer in the past, Tradesports.Com is trading GOP chances to retain control of the House below 20 this morning. And that contract has been dropping like a rock for the last week despite the polling news over the weekend about a narrowing of the generic ballot race.

Nevertheless, here a a couple of things to cling to if it is hope you are looking for:

1. House polls are usually incredibly inaccurate.
2, All of the analysts above point to some kind of a GOP surge over the last week.
3. The unknown impact of the Kerry “joke” on tight races (The Pew Poll suggests a larger than expected impact nationwide. How that plays out locally is a hard to gauge.)
4. Absentee and early voting suggesting some surprises today.

Not much to cheer about, I’m afraid. The only piece of good news I can give is that I think Democrats are nippin’ at the Kool Aid if they think that there’s some kind of “wave” that will bring them 30 or 40 seats. If there was such a wave it has dissipated as a result of both the Kerry joke and reluctant Republicans finally deciding over the last week to hold their noses, go the the polls, and vote for the GOP.

Notwithstanding all of this, I believe there is sliver of a chance for the GOP to maintain House control. Here are 13 House races to watch tonight. In order for the GOP to maintain control of the lower house, they will have to win all 13 of these seats (or pray for some major upsets elsewhere).

These are 13 races universally considered almost certain Dem pick-ups or toss-ups. If the Republicans can take all 13, they could limit their losses to 12-14 seats and thus, keep control of the House. If they lose more than 1 or 2, Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker of the House next January.

I chose these 13 seats based on their winnability for the GOP (see methodology above). But I must tell you that this scenario has less than a 1 in 5 chance of playing out successfully. I believe it much more likely that the GOP wins 4-9 of these seats with an outside chance at 10.

1. OHIO 18

Joy Padgett is running a good race in the District Bob Ney disgraced with his guilty plea associated with the Abramoff scandal. Strong Dem challenger Zack Space has a huge lead in the polls but given this is a very red district (Bush 57% in 2004) and some late help from the RNC, local newspapers believe Padgett is closing.

2. New York 20

Incumbent John Sweeney had been locked in a tight race with Dem challenger Kirsten Giillibrand when late last week, a police report was released from December, 2005 that purported to show a domestic violence incident. Sweeney and his wife appeared together to say that the way the report was spun was untrue. They gave the State Police permission to release the entire report but the damage had already been done. Even in this red district (Bush 54%) Sweeney is a likely goner. Incumbency and GOTV efforts may save him but it is a longshot.

3. TX 22

Tom DeLay’s seat requires GOP voters to write in the name of Shelley Sekula-Gibbs - not once but twice. That’s because there are two races on the ballot; one to fill out the unexpired DeLay term and one for the next Congress.

The fact that Bush received 64% of the vote in this district means that a helluva lot more Republicans than Democrats are going to be showing up at the polls today. Whether most of them can write in her name is the big question mark. National party has sunk about $1.3 million into this race to educate people how to vote. They may just pull it off.

Expect this one to go on for weeks as Dems challenge ballots where Sekula-Gibbs name is misspelled, or reversed, or there’s no hyphen, or…(fill in the blank).

NOTE: Thanks to a commenter, I’m told that voters only have to write in Sekula-Gibbs name once. She is on the ballot to fill out the remainder of DeLay’s term.

4. Florida 16

Tom Foley’s old seat has also been the object of the national party’s largess. That’s because Foley is still on the ballot. Another million bucks spent here to educate voters that a vote for Foley is actually a vote for his GOP replacement Joe Negron. GOP helped here by lackluster Dem challenger Tim Mahoney and expected strong GOTV effort in a district Bush got 54% of the vote.

5. North Carolina 11

Eight termer Charlie Taylor is in the fight of his political life with former pro quarterback Heath Shuler. The 11th is sandy soil, scrub pine country and Shuler has run a good race in the largely rural areas. These are fiercely independent folks who regularly elect Democrats (despite the fact that Bush got 57% of the vote). Taylor has a history of closing strong and this could be one of the few GOP bright spots tonight.

6. Indiana 2

This is the first of 3 Indiana districts that are in play today. In this reddest of red states, why these three are in trouble shows not only how well the Democrats have done in recruiting candidates in marginally competitive races for them but also GOP vulnerabilities among their base supporters.

Republican Chris Chocola is going for a third term against a strong Dem challenger Joe Donnelly. After winning by a landslide in 2004, Chocola finds himself trailing going into the final weekend. Here I think incumbency and GOTV efforts (Bush 56%) could end up saving him. But Donnelly is no liberal and has run an outstanding campaign, tying himself to “Indiana values.”

7. Florida 13

This seat is open as a result of Katherine Harris leaving to run for the Senate. The fact that she will be slaughtered today by Senator Bill Nelson could help drag a couple of Floridian GOP’ers with her.

By local reports, Republican Vern Buchanan has run an uninspired campaign in a district where Bush received 56% of the vote. But Buchanan got a boost with a recent visit by Laura Bush and his Democratic challenger, Christine Jennings, while running a smart campaign, found herself nearly broke by the weekend. A last minute infusion of cash from the DNC helped and this race is almost certainly too close to call.

8. New Mexico 1

While Bush got less than 50% of the vote in this district, 3 termer Heather Wilson is a scrappy campaigner and has run an excellent race. Dem challenger, Attorney General Patricia Madrid is well funded but inexperienced; she allowed Wilson to tar her with failing to do her job in a corruption case involving a state official. This plus Wilson’s incumbency may make the difference in a district that has been trending Democratic for years.

9. Indiana 9

Vulnerable first termer Mike Sodrel is in a tough fight with former Representative Baron Hill. Both candidates have been slugging it out in one of the dirtier campaigns in the country.

Both candidates are well known, well funded, and have good ground games. But Bush got a whopping 59% of the vote in this district and it appears that later polls are showing Sodrel pulling ahead. This one is probably a Republican hold.

10. Illinois 6

This is an open seat in a race to fill the spot of retiring GOP icon Henry Hyde. The Dems have pulled out all the stops in this one, recruiting a very articulate, attractive double amputee Iraq War vet Tammie Duckworth. She is smart and well funded but her inexperience has shown on the stump.

GOP hopeful Peter Roskam is much more polished having served in the Illinois House and Senate for 14 years, worked on Capitol Hill for Hyde, and been a political fixture in the district that went for Bush with 53% of the vote. Roskam has tried to paint the moderate Duckworth as a liberal, tying her to Ted Kennedy. Duckworth has tried to pin the extremist label on the moderately conservative Roskam. Both have failed and this one is definitely in the toss up column. Give Roskam a slight edge due to his big lead in very red Dupage County.

11. Arizona 5

Six termer J.D. Hayworth is in a tight battle with former Tempe Mayor Harry Mitchell. Another example of excellent recruiting by the Dems in a marginally competitive district as Hayworth coasted to victory in 2004 with 60% of the vote, outperforming Bush who got 57% in the district.

Mitchell is another moderate who is as strong as J.D. on immigration reform thus closing off an avenue of attack that Hayworth has used successfully in past campaigns. This race shows Mitchell surging the last two weeks and may tip to the Democrats.

12. California 11

This is a district the Dems targeted from the beginning despite the seven termer Richard Pombo’s record of racking up large margins of victory. The demographics of the district are changing rapidly (Bush 52%) with heavily Hispanic areas growing rapidly.

The Dem challenger Jerry McNerney is extremely well funded and has run a spirited campaign, scoring points against Pombo repeatedly for his votes on the war and veterans benefits. Pombo on the other hand has recently received a huge boost from a visit by Laura Bush and has an excellent ground game in place. Expect this one to be very tight and probably a real bellwether on how the night will go for both sides. A McNerney win will probably signal a big night for the Dems.

13. Kentucky 3

Six termer Anne Northup is showing strong in this Dem leaning district as she once again is enduring a tough challenge. She faces former newspaperman and columnist John Yarmouth who local papers say has underperformed in this race against the vulnerable incumbent.

Northup has run a good race, marred by tragedy. She lost her son last summer which placed the campaign on hold for both sides. That didn’t stop the classless folks at Moveon.Org from holding anti-Northup events which may have damaged Yarmouth’s chances. Also, Northup’s demise has been predicted in every election since she got to Washington. A good shot at a GOP hold here.

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I expect that the GOP will hold 4 of these seats. But if it is, in fact, a Democratic night, even candidates like Taylor and Northrup could find themselves on the losing end of things.

One more note: If enough of these races are close, don’t expect Democrats to celebrate their takeover until tomorrow at the earliest. Many of these races could be in doubt for days as challenges, recounts, and other maneuvers play themselves out.

Join me today from Noon - 2:00PM Central Time for The Rick Moran Show on Wideawakes Radio.

A slew of polls over the weekend seemed to show the GOP gaining ground. Other polls show them getting farther behind. What’s going on? For the surprising answers join me for what should be a slam-bang show.

NOTE: MY MYSTERY GUEST WAS UNABLE TO TEAR HIMSELF AWAY FROM HIS JOB THIS PAST WEEKEND SO WE’VE RESCHEDULED THE INTERVIEW FOR LATER THIS WEEK. DETAILS FORTHCOMING.

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If, as seems more and more likely, the Democrats take control of the House, we will hear much crowing on the left about the part that the War in Iraq played in the GOP’s downfall. They will demand that the President now come up with a plan that would bring the troops home in a specified period of time.

Democrats will tell you that they will tie that timetable to real progress by the Iraqi government and military in getting a handle on the security situation and other benchmarks. The problem is a simple one:

DOES ANYONE REALLY BELIEVE THAT IF ONE OF THOSE BENCHMARKS HASN’T BEEN ACHIEVED THAT THE DEMOCRATS WILL ALLOW THE TIMETABLE TO SLIP?

They will argue that the timetable is more important than any “artificial” measurement of progress and agitate for the withdrawal anyway. In fact, I would fully expect the Democrats to use the published timetable as a political club, constantly beating the Republicans over the head with the fact that the war is not going according to the schedule they so carefully set down. At the very least, they’ll have one more thing about which to Blame Bush and, because wars tend not to cooperate when politicians set down arbitrary conditions for its ending, the Dems will have a field day until November of 2008 at the Republican’s expense.

The problem with this “anti-war mandate” that we will be hearing so much about over the next few days and weeks is that it only seems to exist in the minds of of war opponents. That’s because, from where I sit, there is no talk from the candidates here in Illinois about leaving Iraq at all or any kind of “anti-war” sentiment whatsoever.

Melissa Bean (Ill eight), a freshman Democrat running in a marginally red district and considered extremely vulnerable hasn’t even mentioned the war in her ads which effectively skewer her opponent as a right wing extremist. (That’s okay because, well, he is.) And perhaps most surprisingly, Democratic candidate Tammie Duckworth, an Iraq War vet and double amputee running in the hotly contested sixth district of Illinois, is running an ad that, if I were in her district, would make me comfortable with voting for her. Nowhere does she express an iota of anti-war sentiment in the ads. Instead, she concentrates on trying to get the President to “change course” as well as make sure our troops have everything they need.

I have a theory about what’s going on in the country with people’s ambivalent feelings toward the war. And to illustrate it, allow me to pose a counterfactual for you.

Suppose D-Day had failed and the allies had been thrown back into the sea. Most of our airborne troops dead or captured. The assault waves decimated. Instead of the more than 2,000 men who sacrificed their lives on the beaches of Normandy, the number of dead could have approached ten times that.

Even worse, Hitler would have been able to transfer the bulk of his western armies to the east and possibly defeat Stalin’s Russia given that another invasion was out of the question for at least a year. And an extended war in Europe would have meant a possible delay in throwing our best at Japan.

What would the American people have done when they went to the polls in November of 1944?

If Wendell Wilkie and the Republicans could have framed the election around the idea that they could do a better job in running the war and bringing victory, I daresay FDR and the Democrats would have been in enormous trouble.

But we don’t have that situation today because the Democrats refuse to acknowledge anything but defeat in Iraq. They have set parameters that don’t even define victory, only withdrawal and, given what is happening in Iraq at the moment, a humiliating defeat as we retreat and leave the battlefield to al-Qaeda.

Bush/Rummy/Cheney have made every mistake that was possible to make in Iraq and then blundered some more. But this is not Viet Nam. The American people are not resigned to stalemate and defeat. If you were to ask 100 Americans “If there were a way to win the War in Iraq, would you support our staying there until the job was done?”… my guess would be a very healthy percentage would answer in the affirmative.

This is why Democrats are not running “anti-war” ads - except true blue liberals like Ned Lamont. And look what’s happening to him.

All of this brings up the point that there is not going to be an “anti-war mandate” despite what you may hear from the left after the election. The American people want victory. And at this point, given the alternatives, even a timetable sounds like it could be spun as a win.

Try another counterfactual, this one more recent: Suppose the Democrats had run on a platform that they had a plan that could bring us victory in Iraq. Suppose they were willing to raise troop levels, get serious about training the Iraqi military, tell Maliki to shove it and take off after Mookie and his militia and finish the job that should have been done 2 years ago - kill the bastard and destroy his ability to make trouble.

I don’t think the Republicans would have had a prayer. They would have been steamrolled.

At bottom, when given the choice between victory and defeat, the American people choose to win. And if, by some miracle, the Republicans hold onto the House tomorrow, it won’t be because they deserve it or because they’ve managed the legislative branch so expertly. It will be because in the end, the American people made this election a referendum on who best would pursue victory in Iraq. And that just might be the most shocking surprise of all.

Tomorrow, The Rick Moran Show will move to 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM central time.

Originally, I planned on having a special interview with a mystery guest. However, that particular sit down has been delayed. Instead, we’ll have an in depth look at Republican chances to hang on to the Senate (better today than it was yesterday) as well as the still almost dead certainty that the GOP will lose the House.

On Wednesday, I will have the Political Director for The American Thinker Richard Baehr on to discuss the aftermath.

Hopefully, the move will allow more of my regular readers to hear the show. I know I’ve been remiss in making podcasts available but the fact is, I was waiting until the show entered its “second generation” of technology - something that will be happening very soon.

In the meantime, tune in tomorrow at noon.

“What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god!”
Hamlet Act II Scene 2

“There’s many a man alive of no more value than a dead dog.”
Sgt. Buster Kilrain from the movie Gettysburg

Saddam Hussein is not the most prolific mass murderer in history. Mao’s rampages make the Butcher of Baghdad appear meek and mild by comparison. Nor is Saddam one of the more inventive killers in history. Vlad the Impaler had a particularly unique and exquisitely painful method of dealing with his enemies. And Genghis Khan took great pleasure in coming up with new and exciting ways to end human life.

In fact, in the grand sweep of history, Saddam will be remembered as pretty much of a run-of-the-mill 20th century tyrant, a second tier mass murderer who will be mentioned in the same breath as Idi Amin and Slobodan Milosevic.

Regardless of how history remembers him, the Iraqi people will never forget his brutal, sadistic rule. And now the tyrant and his reign, ended by force of American arms, has been judged:

An Iraqi court on Sunday sentenced Saddam Hussein to the gallows for crimes against humanity, convicting the former dictator and six subordinates for one nearly quarter-century-old case of violent suppression in this land of long memories, deep grudges and sectarian slaughter.

Shiites and Kurds, who had been tormented and killed in the tens of thousands under Saddam’s iron rule, erupted in celebration — but looked ahead fearfully for a potential backlash from the Sunni insurgency that some believe could be a final shove into all-out civil war.

Saddam trembled and shouted “God is great” when the hawk-faced chief judge, Raouf Abdul-Rahman, declared the former leader guilty and sentenced him to hang.

What is it that makes a man like Saddam? Certainly an essential part of humanity is missing from his soul - the ability to feel empathy, pity, or any of the other “angelic” attributes that Hamlet praised in his soliloquy. But in context, Hamlet was also torn between this majestic view of humanity - made in the image and likeness of God - and the view given voice by the rough hewn Kilrain whose dismissal of any elevating characteristics in most men rings as true as Hamlet’s paean to man’s perfectibility.

We are all of us monsters and saints. The potential for both is present in each of us. Saddam’s brutality cannot be laid at the feet of any cultural or religious peculiarities. Psychiatrists might point to his childhood where he was constantly beaten and abused by his uncle or some other aspect of his development where the finer instincts that adhere to most people either died or were never implanted in his soul. But in the end, Saddam’s evil was the result of his own deliberate choices.

Whether Saddam had been tried under the auspices of the World Court or some other supra-national judicial forum doesn’t matter. The atmospherics may have been different than a trial in Iraq. The lawyers would have been able to maneuver, delay, obfuscate, and preen for the cameras with more freedom than they had in the Iraqi courtroom. But the facts of the case - overwhelming physical and documentary evidence - would have sealed his fate regardless.

The calls are already coming fast and furious to spare his life. I am ambivalent about his execution. There are political, military, and even strategic arguments against hanging the tyrant. But what does civilization do with someone who is directly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings? In cases like Saddam’s, “punishment” has no meaning in a legal sense. There is simply no sentence that could have been handed down to fit the crimes committed by this bloodthirsty sadist. Death is as good as any. And if justice were indeed blind, hanging would be seen as merciful indeed.

In the midst of the bloodletting that is his legacy (and, to some extent, ours), the Iraqis who suffered so long under the heel of the dictator’s jackboot are celebrating. I just wish they could unite in their recognition that Saddam’s judgement has offered them a new start, a new way to live that doesn’t include killing their neighbor because of what occurred in the past.

Somebody better take that glass of kool aid away from Dean Barnett before he does irreperable damage to the synapses of his brain:

So what’s it all mean? In the tied races, the Republican will win. In the close races, the Republican will win. It adds up to Republicans running the table in the Senate. That’s right – running the table. Montana, Virginia, Missouri, Tennessee, New Jersey, Rhode Island (whoopee), and Maryland will all send or re-send Republicans to the Senate. But wait, there’s more! Michigan will send Sheriff Michael Bouchard to the Senate. And in Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum is in striking distance.

In the House, the same holds true. Republican Joe Negron will take Foley’s seat. New Mexico’s Heather Wilson will return to Congress. So, too, will Connecticut’s Chris Shays. We’ll lose a handful of seats for the individual failures of certain Congressmen (hello, Curt Weldon), but we will retain control of the House.

Okay, I’m officially out on the limb. But I’m comfortable here. The paradigm has shifted. People like Stu Rothenberg are like old generals re-fighting the last war; they’re re-analyzing the last election without realizing that certain key facts on the ground have changed.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Dean Barnett. He’s witty, smart, shrewd, and usually level headed in his analysis. That’s why his pre-election departure from planet earth should be considered cause for alarm - or more likely the product of blogging in close proximity to the most relentlessly optimistic man I have ever seen.

Hugh Hewitt has never lost faith that Tuesday will not see the end of the Republican majority in Congress. That kind of enthusiasm is necessary and vital in any political movement. One might point to it as the major difference between left and right, liberals and conservatives. Especially since they’ve been out of power, there has been little in the way of optimism from the left - even about their own party. Instead, the Democrats have been doing a slow burn for a decade with constant recriminations against one faction or another. The Clintonian Democratic Leadership Council has come in for some scathing criticism for trying to be “Republican lite” in their policy prescriptions - despite the fact that they proved to be the most politically successful Democrats in a generation.

But Dean and Hugh - while I believe wildly off base in their predictions for Tuesday - are two good reasons why the Republicans will not be left out in the political wilderness for long. Positive people will succeed a helluva lot more often than the contrarians, the curmudgeons, the sourpusses, the angry, bitter, relentlessly negative partisans who make up much of the leadership of the Democratic party.

As for throwing some cold water on Dean’s victory party, a couple of quick observations are in order.

A week ago, I couldn’t have imagined that Burns (MT), Steele (MD), Corker (TN), and Allen (VA) would be victorious on Tuesday. Now it appears a distinct possibility. Corker and Steele appear to have tremendous momentum while Kerry’s gaffe may very well have doomed Tester in Montana and McCaskill in Missouri. I am convinced we won’t know the results of the Allen-Webb cage match until at least Wednesday and probably beyond that but given the redness of Virginia, the incumbent may very well squeak by.

But Rhode Island? New Jersey? I think that we’ll find that the GOTV machines in both parties will be working in tip top condition. And, like the redness of Virginia helping Allen, I think the very blue states of New Jersey and Rhode Island will give Menendez and Whitehouse a GOTV edge so that you can bank their wins on Tuesday night.

Along with almost certain losses by Santorum in PA and DeWine in OH, that would mean a net loss for the GOP in the Senate of 3 seats -a testament to the power of incumbency rather than any victory for conservative principles or acknowledgement of Republican competency in running the legislative branch.

In fact, that will be the hallmark of this election even if, as expected, the Democrats take control in the House. The only overarching issue that seems to be on voters minds is Iraq. The left will try to spin their victory as an anti-war mandate when in fact, what the American people want is someone to define victory in a rational way. Americans don’t like to lose wars. But since the Democrats failed to offer any kind of coherent message on Iraq - except that the war has been badly botched - they’ll settle for a party that will force the President to change course.

But where Dean and Hugh and the other Republican Rebeccas of Sunnybrook Farms allow their enthusiasm to get the better of them is in believing that 1) the polls are a crock; and 2) the GOP GOTV machine will carry them through to victory.

I have no doubt the polls are skewed toward Democrats; in some cases badly. But polls are scientific endeavors and to dismiss their findings so cavalierly flies in the face of rationality. Many of the concerns expressed by Dean in his article are addressed in the statistical model used by the pollster. That’s why polls are much, much more than simply counting noses.

As for the GOP’s GOTV edge, this excellent article in The Hill magazine shows why Republicans who are hanging their hopes on turnout may end up being hugely disappointed:

How likely is a 20 percent increase in turnout based on a GOTV effort? The best serious academic estimate is that all the GOTV work in the presidential campaign of 2004 increased turnout not by 20 percent, but by about 3 percent.

Experiments on turnout by Alan Gerber and Donald Green suggest that the most effective means of increasing turnout raise it by less than 10 percent — and that’s for people who get canvassed in person. None of this is to suggest that GOTV efforts are not valuable. When 2000 or 200 votes decide an election there is no question that GOTV efforts can make all the difference in the world. But again, that is simply not the case that is being argued by GOP operatives.

Can’t micro-targeting help them achieve spectacular successes? Anyone who has ever modeled data knows there is much more salesmanship than science in Republican claims about these efforts. Our firm and others on the Democratic side have been using these models for half a dozen years or more and we know they can make our efforts much more efficient; expand our GOTV and persuasion universes; and provide message guidance. So when races are otherwise marginal, the lift models provide can make all the difference between winning and losing. But no model is going to turn what would otherwise be a 5-point loss into a victory.

There are about 20 Republican incumbents or open Republican held seats where candidates are losing by 5 points or more according to RealClear Politics. Blumenthal’s Pollster.Com has even more GOP seats at risk. If, as Mellman suggests in the article, GOTV efforts will only affect many of these races at the margins, it seems virtually certain that the combination of scandal and voter dissatisfaction will mean a Democratic takeover the House.

My own estimate (more on my methodology on Monday) is that the GOP will lose between 18-23 seats. The low end of that estimate is if the GOP can pull out some tough races here in the Midwest, specifically in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. But no amount of enthusiasm will help the GOP in the wild blue states of the northeast. In fact, New York and Connecticut are shaping up to be GOP disaster areas on Tuesday night with Pennsyvania not far behind. It’s hard to see how GOTV efforts will have much of an effect in many of those races.

So I would say to Dean, Hugh, and the rest of you who have been so up-beat and enthusiastic, no matter what happens on Tuesday, your attitude will almost certainly mean that the GOP wil retake the House in 2008 - all things considered. By then the American people will have tired of the never ending witch hunts carried out by Democrats in Congress against a Republican Administration and perhaps, a chastened and reformed GOP will give the voters a reason to trust them again.

UPDATE

Don’t miss AJ Strata’s superior piece on the elections. Nice round up and some good points about predictions.

If there were a Pulitzer Prize for wishful thinking, I have no doubt the New York Times would win hands down.

Here we are 3 days before the election and, right on cue, the Times pulls a journalistic stunt that, if we didn’t know how partisan and biased they truly are, would be remarkable for its blatant attempt to plant a horrifically negative spin on one of the Republican’s only major pluses going into Tuesday’s vote; the relative economic health of the country.

First, the set up. In a front page story, the Times reveals that many Republicans are running on the economic record for the last 6 years and are buoyed by the Labor Department’s report of a significant drop in the unemployment rate:

Republicans seized on a drop in the unemployment rate to assert on Friday that tax cuts were invigorating the economy, highlighting just four days before the election an issue that party strategists are counting on to offset bad news about the war.

The Labor Department announced Friday morning that the unemployment rate had fallen to 4.4 percent in October — down from 4.6 percent in September and the lowest rate since May 2001, when it was 4.3 percent.

Within hours, President Bush mocked Democrats for predicting that the administration’s tax and spending policies would wreck the economy.

In fact, by most indices, the Bush economy is at least as good as the Clinton economy from 1998 during that off year election. Unemployment, income, GDP growth, and other broad markers are as good or better than when the Times and other media were talking about the Clinton “miracle” economy. That’s not to say that there aren’t enormous problems, largely created by Republicans, that we must address down the road. But the current state of the economy is, in fact, fairly good.

But never let it be said that the New York Times let any positive news for Republicans be allowed to speak for itself. In an almost comical juxtaposition, the Times’ editors run an editorial that cuts the legs out from underneath any salutary news about unemployment by telling us that layoffs are coming - you just wait:

The latest information about the economy leaves no question that it has slowed down by just about every measure — housing and manufacturing, retail sales and job growth, and others.

Even the recent increase in compensation is generally believed to be a sign of coming layoffs, not a harbinger of wage inflation. When business dries up at firms and factories, employers don’t cut back immediately. So for a time, pay and benefits hang in there. As for the recent improvement in the unemployment rate, sorry to say, it’s an aberration. The job market won’t turn up in any meaningful way when the overall direction of the economy is down.

In fact, the “overall direction of the economy” is still going up although at a slower rate than the frenetic pace of the previous 2 1/2 years when the Times never missed a chance to, well, miss a chance to prominently report the fantastic rates of GDP growth (never in the news section; always in the business section).

To the editors, it’s not a question of if but when the slowdown will occur and whether it will be a recession or not:

All of this information has fed the debate on the dominant economic question of the day: Is the United States economy headed toward the longed-for soft landing, in which it cools without contracting. Or is another recession inevitable? It’s an interesting question, but in many ways it also is a diversion.

Most Americans are ill prepared for an economic deceleration, even if it ends in a soft landing. When economic basics like income and insurance coverage are taken into account, most working families are no better off now than they were when the economic expansion began in late 2001.

Some Americans are always unprepared for bad times. Those that live on borrowed money end up paying for it when the economy goes south. The fact that people borrow against the future should not surprise us. The government has been doing it for more than 6 years and when that bill comes due, true economic pain will be involved.

The Republicans and Bush have done more damage to the long term economic prospects of the United States than any two Administrations before them. The debt burden, extending out as far as they eye can see, is almost unbelievable. This AP piece on our economic future is one of the more frightening things I’ve read in quite awhile.

Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That’s almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America - Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.

A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.

And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.

People who remember Ross Perot’s rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a few years during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn’t grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.

But that’s about to change, thanks to the country’s three big entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.

My beef with the Times isn’t that the Republicans haven’t been lousy stewards of the economy per se. It’s the rank partisanship they exhibit with a regularity that makes them poster boys for Metamucil. For such an established and respected name in journalism, they have demonstrated that they are little better than shills for the Democratic party - and bad ones at that. At least a shill will make an effort to hide their partisanship. The Times doesn’t even bother anymore.

As for the future, taxes will have to be raised. Spending will have to be cut. And somewhere, somehow, we have to find the money to keep fighting an enemy that wishes to destroy us. Will we be forced by economic circumstance to curtail our efforts in the War on Terror? I don’t think so. But we are almost certainly going to be forced to fight smarter. A smaller armed forces with more emphasis on “asymmetrical warfare” and an even greater reliance on our technological advantages will probably be in the offing.

These problems are not going to solve themselves. It will involve real statesmanship at the top and a cooperation in Congress between the two parties that would almost be unprecedented. And we, the American people, must somehow wean ourselves from dependence on government for some things that today we might find convenient or even helpful.

A tall order all of that. And the hell of it is, there doesn’t seem to be the leadership in Congress now in either party that is good for anything except jostling for power and position.

The levels of irony on display with the “revelation” by the New York Times that some of the Saddam documents dealing with Hussein’s drive for nuclear weapons may constitute a dangerous release of classified info on how to build them is so perfect, so exquisitely delightful that it’s at times like these I wish I was a poet.

Only The Bard himself could do justice to the smorgasbord of delectable incongruities, tasty paradoxes, and bitterly sardonic idiocies that the New York Times, the left, our intelligence agencies, and yes - even those of us who pined for the release of this historic treasure trove of data have ultimately fallen into.

The New York Times, a news organ that has on many occasions revealed the existence of some of the most classified intelligence programs the government uses to protect American citizens, in violation of the law, of common sense, and (my own opinion) of their patriotic duty during a time of war, now implicitly criticizes the Bush Administration for (wait for it)…releasing classified information!

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.
But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

Michelle Malkin:

“The NYTimes blabbermouths are accusing the Bush administration of being careless with national security data?

Ouch. Stop. Sides. Splitting.

There really isn’t anything else one can say. Words are inadequate to the task of describing the poetic blindness evinced by The Times as they blithely empty the remaining arrows from their quiver of political barbs flung toward Bush and the Republicans in the lead up to Tuesday’s election. But to prove my point about this particular story being full of a particularly tasty brand of ironic disposition, in the process of trying to hurt the Republicans, they actually make their case about Saddam’s pre-war ties to terrorists for them.

Ed Morrissey:

This is apparently the Times’ November surprise, but it’s a surprising one indeed. The Times has just authenticated the entire collection of memos, some of which give very detailed accounts of Iraqi ties to terrorist organizations. Just this past Monday, I posted a memo which showed that the Saddam regime actively coordinated with Palestinian terrorists in the PFLP as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. On September 20th, I reposted a translation of an IIS memo written four days after 9/11 that worried the US would discover Iraq’s ties to Osama bin Laden.

Ed points to this excerpt that seems to explode a few cherished myths of the left about how close Saddam was to building an atomic bomb:

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United Nations Security Council in late 2002, as America got ready to invade Iraq. But unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive information on unconventional arms.

The New York Times - A Shill for Republicans? Who woulda thunkit?

Speaking of the left, it’s not surprising that they obediently took up the cudgel handed them by The Times to immediately bash Bush, the GOP Congress, and most notably, those of us who agitated for the release of the Saddam documents in the first place. Alas, in this season of ironic transposition and in their gleeful haste to score political points, they neglected to recall their previous position regarding the relative danger of Iran.

Even if some of the documents revealed secrets that might be helpful to a country’s nuclear program, how could it help a country like Iran who, according to legions of lefties, was not interested in building a bomb and was no threat to the United States in the first place?

To avoid this logical fallacy, the left does as it always does; they ignore the reality of any previous position they’ve taken and substitute an alternative narrative that begins, for all practical purposes, in medias res:

John Avarosis:

I’ve got a question for every Republican member of Congress on the campaign trail. Were you involved in this plan to propagandize to the American people that was so shoddy, so forced, so haphazardly thrown together that you gave al Qaeda and every other bad guy the plans for how to nuke New York?

Of course, we won’t ever have any hearings on this issue, or find out what went wrong, because the Republicans control Congress and they don’t hold the Bush administration accountable. They simply pressure Bush to literally hand Al Qaeda and Iran the plans for making a nuclear bomb.

Forgoing irony for the moment to highlight ignorance, here’s an expert’s opinion of whether or not al-Qaeda could use the information from the leaked web pages to build a bomb:

A senior American intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic issues said the documents showed “where the Iraqis failed and how to get around the failures.” The documents, he added, could perhaps help Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms, but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states. The official, who requested anonymity because of his agency’s rules against public comment, called the papers “a road map that helps you get from point A to point B, but only if you already have a car.”

I would suggest Mr. Aravosis stick with outing gays, which is something his personality and intelligence is perfectly suited - that of a grub crawling out from under a rock to “out” the slug as a multi-sexual mollusk. His powers of analysis - as in warning of an imminent attack by Evil George on Iran before the election next Tuesday - leave much to be desired.

For true irony (rather than blatant stupidity) Booman fills the bill nicely:

[T]he Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has completely f*cked up. You see, Peter Hoekstra just couldn’t believe Saddam Hussein has no WMD and thus posed no threat to the U.S. or his neighbors. So he threw a tantrum and insisted that our intelligence agencies put all the documents we seized in Iraq on the Internet where citizen wingnuts, fluent in Arabic, could discover evidence that our trained professional had missed. How did that work out?

[snip]

Hoekstra is supposed to be safe, but he is a total idiot that has endangered the safety of all 300 million Americans. There is no way he should be able to survive this, but Kotos doesn’t have much time to get the message out. Give him ten bucks so he can run some quick radio ads and maybe we’ll get a real progressive in a comservative (sic) western Michigan seat.

Leaving aside the laughably amateurish notion that a Dennis Kucinich liberal would have a ghost of a chance to win even if Hoekstra were to keel over and die, note first the title of Mr. Booman’s piece; “Peter Hoekstra Handed Our Enemies the Bomb.”

When has anyone on the left referred to any nation in the world as “our enemy” recently? Certainly not the Yankee Doodle minutemen killing our soldiers in Iraq. Those cuddly mullahs in Iran? The Laughing Goat in Venezuela? The inscrutable Mr. Kim in North Korea?

For the life of me, I can’t recall “enemy” being used by the left in any other context except when referring to the President of the United States. It would be delicious irony indeed if, in their haste to skewer Republicans over this story that the left discovered there are, in fact, nations who wish us ill and would destroy us if they could.

But I expect this eye-opening experience for the left to be a short lived fad - sort of like Hula Hoops or Davey Crockett hats but without the enormous collectible value attached. Once ensconced comfortably in power, the left will return to the moral blindness and suicidal ignorance about our enemies that has been their hallmark since 9/11.

In the end, I can’t let this ironic digression from the real world of a vitally important election go without reference to my own part and the part played by many conservatives in this Shakespearean interlude. We asked for it and we got it. And yes, as Ed Morrissey points out, many documents have surfaced (unreported by the Times and other mainstream news outlets) that prove if not conclusively than certainly circumstantially that Saddam Hussien had ties to terrorists and terrorist organizations - even al-Qaeda - that went far beyond what our intelligence agencies were telling the executive branch or the American people prior to the war.

But in our haste to discover the truth and in the Administration’s zeal to participate in this experimental program of unprecedented citizen-government cooperation, some respected experts believe we have damaged our own cause and given valuable information to those who wish to destroy us. This is perhaps the greatest and least palatable irony of all.

And in the increasingly dangerous world in which we live that will soon require decisions of monumental historical import regarding war and peace, the only laughter we may hear will be the bitter cackling of the Angel of Death, circling above bleached bones and rubble - remnants of a war that irony forgot.