With Victory Comes Responsibility

For decades, although voting Democratic for the President and, more often than not, for the governor, Michigan has been a Republican-dominated state. Governor Granholm had a Democratic majority in the State House for only the past two years. Even with that, Senate Republicans stymied any meaningful Democratic initiatives. Assuming there were any....

One of the frustrations of living in Michigan is seeing the dearth of ideas for "fixing" the state's problems. Things started to go south before many of the state's sitting politicians were born, and have been on a serious downward track for decades, but it often seems like there's been no change in state "policy" - wait long enough and things will get better on their own. Yes, Michigan is attempting to subsidize its way into being a new home for TV and movie production, but even if that effort succeeds it will do little for the state's economy as a whole.

Now, with the 2010 election, Michigan has a Republican governor, a Republican House, a Republican Senate with a supermajority, and will have a Republican-dominated state Supreme Court. A friend lamented this state of affairs, and the inevitable gerrymandering that will soon occur to try to cement a Republican advantage into the state's electoral districts. And yes, if you're a Democrat, I can't say there's much to cheer in any of that.

At the same time, victory - and victory of a magnitude that it can really be called ownership - carries responsibility. I know that many Congressional Republicans hope to shirk that responsibility, sabotaging the Senate and the White House such that the government seems ineffective and they can gain additional power in the next election. But Michigan's Republican Party has no scapegoats, and is pretty close to maximum power. If it does not deliver, it is safe to say that it cannot deliver.

If the recession continues, or if Michigan remains in recession while the rest of the nation recovers, it will be perfectly reasonable for voters to hold the state's Republican Party responsible. After all, unless they're going to throw up their hands and admit that they have no solutions to the state's problems, they are implicitly responsible. And if they do make such an admission I'm not sure that it helps them, as it would effectively be an admission of incompetence. That is to say, in two, four, six years... however long it takes... if the Republicans don't deliver something they're likely to experience what G.W. Bush and the Republicans went through during the 2006 and 2008 elections. Gerrymandering may be enough to get some of their seats back if things don't immediately get better (as we just saw, nationally, with Democrats losing most Republican-leaning seats won during the prior two elections) but it won't save a party from a backlash against its ineffectiveness.

My friend asked, "But what if the Republicans succeed?" Um... well, then, no backlash. But I'll take a vibrant state economy over either the ineffective governance of the past decade, and certainly over the type of yo-yo elections that effectively just held the President responsible for his predecessor's incompetence. (Which isn't to say that, particularly in retrospect, there aren't a lot of things the President and the Democrats, particularly a self-serving, party-sabotaging faction in the Senate, couldn't have done differently to potentially avoid or diminish this outcome.) In simple terms, when you control everything there's nobody for voters to blame but you.

The "Myth" Of Karl Rove

I've read a number of comments where people suggest that the outcome of the midterm election reveals that Karl Rove's plans and abilities were overrated. It's possible to take another interpretation - that his tactics were (and remain) extremely effective, but that he pushed too hard. If history is a guide, we can expect even more Rovian tactics in future elections, and anybody who wishes to win (locally or nationally) would be wise not to underestimate their effectiveness. Had the Republican Party not become overconfident after 9/11, and taken a more cautious approach to pushing the country to the right, I believe that they would still control the Senate, and quite possibly the House.

I do suspect that people tended to give Karl Rove too much credit for past election victories, but I think it's unquestionable that many are attributing to him too much fault for this loss.

Robocalls

With all of the accusations of unethical conduct circulating around "robocalls" - automated phone calls which play recorded messages to prospective voters - perhaps a good first step would be a simple change in how the sponsorship information is announced. If the sponsorship is announced up-front, it seems less likely that the candidate (or organizations supporting the candidate) will try to engage in dirty tricks. I believe this would simply involve applying existing FCC regulations to political calls - you know, the same laws which apply to everybody else. (Or do they apply, in which case these shenanigans are even more shameful.)

Independent Joe....

What's wrong with this picture:

I wonder if he'll further expand his search for "independent voters" by getting voter lists for registered Republicans....

Joe Lieberman's Website Woes

Joe Lieberman's campaign is apparently still accusing Lamont of somehow being responsible for hijacking his website.

"We call on Ned Lamont to make an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately," Smith said in a statement. "Any attempt to suppress voter participation and undermine the voting process on Election Day is deplorable and has no place in our democracy."

The latest version of their accusation seems to be of a denial of service attack:

"This statement is to confirm that the suspension of displaying the Web site www.joe2006.com was not due to to an overdue account. Friends of Joe Lieberman is completely paid in full. The screen that showed yesterday is a default image from the server," the Lieberman campaign said Tuesday in a statement.

"In order to isolate where the denial of service attack was coming into the site, we disabled it as rapidly as possible. Once we were able to isolate all the site files for study, we were able to add an appropriate one-page maintenance message."

Except throughout this "attack" people were able to access the website and see an error message. It gives me no confidence in the Lieberman campaign staff, or their accusations of sabotage, that they seem to think that their website is served from a magic box which can only fail in the event of the malicious acts of others. They also seem to believe that only a political opponent would target a high-profile website in a manner likely to grab headlines.... A savvy opponent would not do this on the eve of a primary.

Here's another lesson for political campaigns - particularly major or national campaigns - set up your servers to automatically refresh site content on a regular basis (e..g, every half-hour) such that no vandalism of the site itself will last long, even when responsible staff members are busy with other matters or are asleep. Consider setting up a separate SMTP server to handle mail. Implement frequent automated backups of any areas of the site which are regularly updated, to prevent or at least minimize data loss. This is basic stuff, which is why even I know it....

Gerrymandered Nation

I saw Joe Scarborough joining in those on the right who presage that the Democrats will "take back Congress" this fall, while giving some cues which suggest that his prediction was not necessarily sincere. Not one word about the gerrymandering which has removed any real danger of election loss for the vast majority of Members of Congress.

What's going on? It's a "can't lose" for the right-wing talking heads. If they are right, they can pat themselves on the back for their "unbiased" predictions. If they're wrong, and I think most expect to be wrong, they can describe it as a great victory for the Republicans and a vindication of the President.

Personally, I think this is part of a coordinated media campaign.

Blogs and Negative Campaign Ads

In the last Presidential election, we saw certain blogs and websites emerge which professed to assess the veracity of campaign ads and statements by the candidates. Although I haven't been following the race particularly closely, I have noticed that in Ned Lamont's supporters in his race against Joe Lieberman choose not to wait for these sites to analyze Lieberman's ads - they link to the ads up on their unofficial Lamont weblog and make fun of them. It also seems to be one of the first places that Lamont's new ads apepar. Should the responses go over the top, well, it's unofficial. (And Lamont's campaign is doing quite well.)

I don't know how effective this is yet, but given that it is an inexpensive way to publish a response to an opponent's attack ads, and if done right may be one of the first places the media looks when covering campaign ads (you know - those "We don't agree with negative campaigning, but we will now play in full candidate X's latest attack ad" segments), I think we can expect to see this type of blog commentary in pretty much every contested race in the fall.