Open Threads

The justly renowned Al Giordano has a post up explaining why the media comparisons between the 1994 elections and this year’s amount largely to the Media Village’s nostalgia for its own political golden age:

… Back then, network TV news and daily newspapers were all powerful in determining the political discourse in the United States: ABC, CBS and NBC, and their local affiliates, were royalty. Their news shows were the most important slot for candidates to place their campaign ads, because that’s where most of the voters could be found each night. Network TV news and daily newspapers still enjoyed the illusion of authority. People actually believed that what the local TV newscaster or the editorial page writer said was true!…
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I take you on this stroll down this Amnesia Lane because the new media landscape makes it less likely that electoral history in 2010 will so cleanly repeat what occurred in 1994. I’m not saying that it is impossible that the Republicans could take the House or the Senate or both. What I’m saying is that if it does happen, it won’t happen because the dominant national media discourse (as it did in 1994) stokes an electoral stampede, but, rather, it will happen because one party outmaneuvered the other, one contest at a time, in 50 or 60 key congressional districts and senate contests, more or less.

Do go read all of Giordano’s post, where he dissects the various polls behind the media spin and names the eight states “where the control of the Senate will be decided” (plus four possible wild cards), and provides a bracingly astringent corrective to the torrents of HFCS Kool-Aid being slopped about on both ends of the political spectrum:

… A similar political logic is at play in the House. If there are 50 or 60 or 70 congressional districts where one party might wrestle the seat from the other, that means that 80 to 85 percent of Americans live in districts where the incumbent party will almost certainly retain control. In the coming weeks I will try to produce a list of the remaining 15 to 20 percent of congressional districts that are in play, because that is where the action is going to be this fall…
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In those closer contests, a lot depends on the individual candidates and the competence of their campaigns. Organizing for America – Obama’s grassroots political army, now part of the Democratic party – has made lists of all the first time voters from 2008 in each of those contested districts and a lot will ride on whether they can be inspired or pulled by the ear to actually vote. That’s not going to happen because of duplicitous scare tactics. That kind of thing only happens the way it did in 2008: through person-to-person recruitment, effective door knocking, phone banking and the deployment of community organizers in social networks, and not just the online variety.
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Another factor that cuts somewhat against GOP chances to retake the House or Senate is the dysfunction in its own party ranks, between the Republican establishment and the in-house radicals broadly painted as “tea party” factions… [T]here is a lot of internecine bad blood flowing inside the GOP ranks. And in cases where the more radical “tea party” associated candidate won many primaries, the sheer battiness of the nominee produced is going to scare some voters away (and this phenomenon could still happen in some contests yet to have their primaries, such as the Republican senate primary in Delaware).
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In this sense, a political parody site like Wonkette has become more relevant to the 2010 midterm elections than the entirety of the so-called Netroots, which in 2006 became a kind of kingmaker in the Democrats’ midterm electoral triumphs… day in, day out, Wonkette is producing wonderful caricature profiles of the insane class of GOP congressional and senate nominees this year, and is actually driving the media discourse about them.
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Likewise, the cable TV political shows on Comedy Central – The Daily Show and The Colbert report – have become far more relevant to the national political discourse than any host on MSNBC or even Fox, which has gone down the Glenn Beck rabbit hole in a manner that only increases the dysfunction inside the GOP. Fox and the “tea party” minions it has stoked are now the Republican Party’s own version of the 2010 Netroots: mirrors on each side of the partisan divide that seem more concerned with asserting their own illusory relevance and factional power than with actually getting out there and winning general elections in November.
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In the cases of Wonkette and Comedy Central the defining edge is, of course, a sense of humor, or, more importantly, not having lost one. My own coverage of the upcoming US midterm elections will try to adhere more closely to theirs than to the humorless pundits, talk show hosts and bloggers of the right and the left. That took a summer of turning all of them off to rewire my own news gathering habits and get back to the basics of researching what the actual numbers really show us…

Keep the Faith, and Your Sense of HumorPost + Comments (125)