Dem You! Dem You All to Hell!

Ah, nothing like a good Planet of the Apes reference on a Wednesday morning!

Yesterday I chose not to watch most of the election night coverage. And no it wasn't sour grapes on my part (I'm actually fairly pleased about it, which I'll get to in a second). It's just that there really weren't a lot of surprises or excitement, and the few that there were (like Quinn potentially beating Brady) are still being decided now. So instead I made another attempt to get through the 4-plus hour Kenneth Branagh version of Hamlet. Now, I consider myself to be of at least reasonable intellect, I already know the story of Hamlet, one of my favorite films of all time is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which is certainly not Hamlet but does feature a lot of dialogue from it), and I even read Hamlet in high school. Nevertheless I have to admit that watching it is akin to watching a foreign film without subtitles. More specifically, for me it's like watching the French dubbed version of a movie I've seen a couple times before. I took a couple years of French, so I can pick out a few words here and there, and since I've seen it before I know what's happening and is going to happen, but the vast majority of the actual conversations sail over my head. But perhaps the truly weird part about it is that I'm still enjoying it! I guess it is true what they say - that 90% of conversation is not what you say but how you say it and how you look when you do. In any case, I've been watching it in roughly 30-40 minute chunks and I'm 2 and a half hours in right now.

But back to politics. It looks like the Republicans are going to pick up about 65 seats in the House to take firm control of that chamber and cut the Democratic majority in the Senate to ~53 to 47 (pending a couple close races and counting the two Independents as Democrats). First of all I think it's important to put this in some historical context. Although this is certainly larger than most times, this is what happens in mid-term elections. Going back to 1934 (now encompasing 20 midterms), guess how many times the party of the sitting President has gained seats? 3 in the House, and 5 in the Senate. That's a record of 3-17 and 5-15 (respectively) so this is by no means shocking. And if Democrats are looking for some good news today, it's the fourth time that control of one or both houses of Congress has changed in the mid-term of a President's first term. All 3 previous times, the President has been re-elected (Truman, Eisenhower, and Clinton). And that's exactly what I see happening here. As of today, the Republicans still do not have a viable challenger for the White House in 2012. And they're also somewhat trapped in how to position themselves for that Congressional election: if things improve between now and then they can't take complete credit for it (since the Presidency and Senate are still under the control of the other party) and if things don't they can't continue to simply be the party of "no" since they now have a responsibility to join in the governing process.

Speaking of which, here's one person who is hopeful that the Republicans finally do actually believe in their own rhetoric of restoring financial responsibility. To this point, all we've gotten is vague promises of "across the board spending cuts", which never happen. In fact, I'd like to also point out to the Republican banner wavers out there, that the prospective new Speaker of the House John Boehner is the same guy who said in a position paper on 2001 that (and I'm paraphrashing here) "it turns out that the American people didn't care about balanced budgets, and it's unrealistic to think that we can actually shrink the size of the government. The best we can do is limit the rate of its increase." Mind you that this is the same guy who was part of the 1994 Republican sweep into power that promised, well, pretty much the same thing they are promising now. Hmm, the Who song "Won't Get Fooled Again" comes to mind. By the way, that quote appears in Alan Greenspan's book (and it is properly cited) and after reading it 4 years ago I was so surprised that I sought out the source document and found it. But upon looking for it again in 2009 I noticed that it now can no longer be found anywhere on the net. Literally. I can find as much trivial info about Blake's 7, an extremely obscure and low-budget British sci-fi show from the 70's, as I want but apparently a position paper written 9 years ago by a sitting U.S. Representative is now lost to us. I'm sure it's just coincidence though. I'm sure it wasn't intentionally removed or anything like that. In any case, I'll be the first one to cheer if the Republicans really do decide to concentrate on their fiscal responsibility crede rather than going on social crusades to please the religious right.

But now that I've blasted away at Republicans for a while let me blast away at Obama too. Yesterday he was out trying to get the disenfranchised and disillusioned out to vote. Fair enough. But he was quoted as saying that his "whole agenda was at risk" if Republicans swept into power. Excuse me, Mr. President, but I seem to recall that your message in 2008 was "Yes we can" but apparently that was just the truncated version. I guess the full version was "Yes we can, provided that once you bring me into power you also give me sweeping majorities in both houses of Congress and keep them there for my full first term". Guess I should have read the fine print on those yard signs.