Pyrrhic At Best

Lawrence Kudlow takes a look at Democratic missteps leading up to the election and sees many bright spots in the final days of the campaign. He sees it coming down to a real horse race here at the end, not the long-jabbered tsunami that the press has been cheerleading right up until the last days of the election cycle.

A series of late-October, early November surprises has turned the midterm elections into a real horse race. The bullish stock markets of recent months have been saying all along that a Democratic tsunami will not materialize, but now even a decent Dem wave seems a long shot.

First, we have the John Kerry blunder: The Massachusetts senator badmouthed American troops in Iraq as a bunch of uneducated losers. This was typical antiwar elitism from Kerry, but his timing was impeccable. In a scorched-earth negative response, undecided and independent voters are flocking into the Republican camp, according to late-breaking polls from Pew and Washington Post/ABC.

Just as Walter Mondale infamously became the face of the Democratic Party on the eve of the 2002 midterms when he replaced Sen. Paul Wellstone on the Minnesota ballot (Wellstone was killed in a plane crash), John Kerry has become the face of the Democrats on the eve of the 2006 vote. It's a disaster for the Democrats — and they know it. "Kerry's Blunder, Wall Street's Gain," read one financial headline.

Then, we have the blockbuster 4.4 percent unemployment rate, the last major front-page economic statistic to appear before the election. Jobs in the United States are booming, as government revisions clearly show. Corporate payrolls are rising at nearly 150,000 a month, but the more accurate household survey — which measures the number of people working — rose 426,000 in October, 420,000 per month over the last three months and 226,000 monthly across the whole year. Meanwhile, wages are growing at 4 percent — almost twice as fast as the 2 percent inflation rate, which itself has been cut in half with plunging gasoline prices.

There's a bunch more things that Kudlow details, go have a look. The important thing here is that even if the Democrats pull it out in the end and take the House (the Senate looks increasingly out of reach even to the media) the victory will be Pyrrhic in nature. Because if they could not build the wave that they have been cheering for even with the much vaunted "sour electorate", they are in real trouble with a losing message. They will not so much have won as the Republicans lost. That does not bode well for them in the future.

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