The Most Important Election In The History Of The World

by digby

So all day long I’m hearing the gasbags blather on about how this lame, off year election is a referendum on liberalism and Obama and things are looking grim, grim, grim.

The Democratic blue dogs have it all figured out:

“It looks as though the anger that has been boiling up the last couple of months is going to lead to a pretty high turnout from Republicans and from people who are concerned about increased spending,” Altmire said Monday evening during an appearance on Fox Business Network.

“And I do think that if the results show Republicans have a pretty good night, that probably is going to lead some Democrats to think that, going into next year, we need to take a second look at the way that we’ve done a lot of bills we’ve addressed up to this point,” the Pennsylvania congressman added.

Oh, Golly let’s hope this radical eight month experiment in slightly less corporate conservative governance has run its course and we can get back to tax cutting, deregulating and bloodletting, which is what the government does best.

According to CNN, it’s bad news for Democrats even before the votes have been counted:

Blitzer: … our new CNN Opinion Research poll that shows the president enjoys a 54% approval rating with a 45% disapproval. Let’s bring in our senior political analyst Gloria Borger who’s looking at all these numbers.

This approval rating. Does it help him and does it help Democrats go forward? Because 53 percent’s still a good number.

Borger: Let’s put it this way Wolf. It doesn’t hurt Democrats. But this is a personal approval rating for President Obama and that doesn’t necessarily translate into an approval rating for congressional Democrats.

And here’s the real problem they’ve got right now. And that is that all the intensity and enthusiasm is on the Republican side. Our poll shows that Republicans are 5% more enthusiastic about their candidates than democrats. If you go back to the last election, the 2008 presidential, Democrats had a 19% lead on enthusiasm, so that’s a big drop for them Wolf.

Blitzer: I should say 54% approval rating. Gloria stand by for a moment. Also in our brand new poll, there’s this: when registered voters were asked who they would vote for in congress in the next election, they favored Democrats over Republicans 50% to 44% Republican.

There you have it.

They went on to discuss in depth the fact that the Republicans are on a huge roll because of this “enthusiasm” gap which translates into huge losses for the Democrats comparable to 1994. (And since Obama’s job approval on the deficit is down to 40% the sky is falling.)

I’m sure you all recall the endless pearl clutching when Democrat John Warner won the Governor’s seat in Virginia and Democrat Jim McGreevey won in New Jersey in 2001. What, you don’t recall that those races were widely considered to be a referendum on Bush because he he’d stolen the election, lowered taxes on millionaires and the country had just suffered a devastating terrorist attack on his watch? That’s because it didn’t happen. The blatherers could barely rouse themselves to declare the Republicans in trouble when the Democrats actually took over the congress in 2006. The constantly said Bush was extremely popular well after his personal and job approval ratings were in the low 40s.

This is a perfect example from March of 2006:

As Media Matters for America has noted (here and here), Matthews has repeatedly inflated Bush’s likeability ratings. Appearing on the March 1 edition of NBC’s Today, Matthews falsely suggested that until a new CBS News poll indicated otherwise, Bush had personal likeability numbers “going for him.” In fact, Bush’s favorability ratings have been low for some time; they were low when Matthews said in November 2005 that “Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left.” From the March 15 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: I always thought Bush was more popular than his policies. I keep saying it, and I keep being wrong on this. Bush is not popular. I’m amazed when 50 percent of the people don’t like him — just don’t like this guy. Thirty-nine percent like him. Are you surprised? Does that fit with the world you walk in?

Yeah, it easily fit with the world that Americans who don’t live in the beltway walk in. But in Matthews’ world, Republicans are always popular and everything that happens is always a benefit to them.

And FYI, according to Chuck Todd, just because the Republicans have held NY 23 for a century it’s really a Democratic district because it narrowly went for Obama. So if Hoffman wins, it’s a serious loss for the Democrats and we can expect all Dems in swing districts to move right. he might be right about that last part, but not for the reason he says …

Stay tuned to the cable gasbags who are all geared up with full election night coverage to rival the presidential race in 2008, complete with Big Board and duelling partisan shills. This is just that important.

Update: I should make clear that the voter intensity issue is real. The Democratic base is not enthusiastic and that could be a problem in 2010. But rest assured that Borger and the Borg are convinced this will only be helped by the Democrats moving to the right.

Just as they always say that Independents are independent because the Democrats are too liberal and the Republicans aren’t conservative enough, they also oddly believe that the Democrats become demoralized when their party leans “too far” to the left while the Republicans become energized when they think their party is doing the same thing. The lesson is that moving left is always the problem. Even when nobody’s moving left.

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