2010's winners and losers

They say that 12 months is a lifetime in politics. And it's true that political fortunes can certainly rise and fall in a year. That means each year has its share of political winners and losers.

2010 Winners

The Tea Party - In 2010 this group went from being considered on the fringe to being credited with Republicans' big gains in this year's Congressional elections. There's no doubt the Tea Party stirred interest in the mid-terms on the Republican side (polls show most Tea Party activists were and are Republicans). However, most insurgents the Tea Party backed in primary wins over Republican insiders - Joe Miller in Alaska, Sharon Angle in Nevada and Christine O'Donnell in Deleware, for example, lost in the general election. Still, the Tea Party elected enough of their favorites to influence the GOP in Congress.

Republicans - They took back the House of Representatives, closed the Democratic margin in the Senate and captured a majority of the nation's governors' mansions. That's despite polling that shows the county still doesn't trust them or their approach to the issues. November's vote wasn't so much "Yes" on the Republican agenda as "No" on the current Democratic Congress. The GOP gain was also fueled by Tea Party activism and the party is now challenged to find a way to keep those activists enthused and engaged, without letting them actually choose the party's nominees, a recipe for electoral disaster.

Ken Cuccinelli - Virginia's activist attorney general became the darling of the national Tea Party by taking on President Obama's health care reform program in the courts and winning, at least temporarily. Although there's a good chance the Supreme Court will eventually rule against him, Cuccinelli gained national exposure in conservative circles.

Barack Obama -  It might seems strange to say this less than two months after his party was shellacked at the polls, but Obama personally had a pretty good year. While some of what he pushed through the Congress, stimulus funding and health care reform in particular, may seem unpopular now, those measures give  him a chance at being re-elected. So does the additional stimulus he was able to get in the budget deal with Republicans that temporarily extended the Bush tax cuts. He's also been winding down the war in Iraq in good fashion, as promised. If the economy picks up Obama, who looked like the only adult in the room as Democrats and Republicans in Congress argued, will benefit.

Virginia Republicans - Regained the three House of Representatives seats they lost in 2008 and picked up another by knocking out long-time incumbent Rep. Rick Boucher in the 9th district in Southwest Virginia to take an 8-3 lead in the House delegation. That had to build confidence for 2012 and what could be a bloody rematch between Jim Webb and George Allen for the seat Webb won in 2006.

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Obama proves he's politically nimble

After Democrats got "shellacked" in this year's elections, many wondered how long it would take President Barack Obama to move "back to the center" in the face of an incoming Republican majority in the House and a diminished Democratic majority in the Senate.

Turns out it took about a month for Obama to get on top of the situation.

And, he didn't really have to go all that far to get "back to the center," particularly compared to the incoming class of Republicans.

Although the recent deal Obama cut with the Republicans on the Bush tax cuts was roundly denounced by liberals in and out of Congress, it seems he was fairly adept at using what Republicans wanted above all else -- a tax cut for rich folks -- to get something Democrats had no other chance at -- a second stimulus package.

Republicans, who won the election saying they cared about the deficit, quickly showed where their allegiance really was, negotiating a major increase in the deficit for a two-year extension of the George W. Bush's tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 per year.

They've also put themselves in a position where they are virtually forced to vote for an increase in the nation's debt ceiling, which will alienate their Tea Party backers, to pay for the tax cuts they asked for.

The deal includes other tax cuts, including a temporary roll back of the Social Security payroll tax, that will pump money into the economy. It also included an extension of unemployment benefits. That's something that Obama and the Demcrats wanted, but had no way to get past Republicans on their own.

Those measures can only help the economy by putting more money in the hands of people very likely to spend it. Obama hopes that it helps enough to win him re-election two years from now.

In return, the GOP really got only part of what it wanted. Republicans campaigned on and negotiated for making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent. Instead they've only been extended for two years. That includes a restoration of the Estate Tax at 35% on estates worth more than $5 million. While some Democrats think that's too much, the Republicans wanted no inheritance tax at all. The two-year extension means the GOP's insistence on cutting taxes for the wealthy and trying to ensure Paris Hilston inherits as much as possible while resisting help for working folks struggling during the recession remains a potent campaign issues for Democrats in 2012.

About the only place where Obama stumbled, and this is a mistake he's been prone to, is that he wasn't tough enough in negotiations. He underestimated how much Republicans wanted that tax break for the well off.

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Gridlock to grip America again?

So the mid-terms are over.

If you believe most of the mainstream media, Barack Obama has been rejected by the people and the new Republican majority in the House has a mandate from the Tea Party to roll back spending and repeal health care reform.

It's both more complicated and simpler than that.

Is Obama doomed to be a one-term president? Well, his approval numbers at this point in his administration are higher than those of Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. Both of those guys managed to overcome big defeats in their first mid-term elections to win second terms by a comfortable majority.

And, in exit polls, voters Tuesday split evenly on whether health care reform should be repealed or not. In any case, Republicans don't have the votes to repeal it in the Senate or override Obama's veto if they did. They could shut down the government to leverage him, but that didn't work too well when another group of Republicans tried it against Clinton.

The simple fact is that Tuesday's results weren't about  health care reform or the deficit or foreign policy or Don't Ask, Don't Tell or even about taxes.

They were about the economy.

The unemployment rate was 9.6% on Election Day. If it had been 6%, Tuesday would not have happened. And it wouldn't have mattered what the Tea Party or mainsteam Republicans or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck had to say about it.

If the unemployment rate is over 9% on Election Day 2012, Barack Obama will lose -- unless the GOP does something truly suicidal like nominating Sarah Palin.  If the economy has improved, as it seems to be doing, he won't.

And that brings us to what the next two years will look like.

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Political wheel to spin again Tuesday

Republicans will almost surely take control of the House of Representatives Tuesday.

They won't win the Senate, although they'll gain seats. They squandered a chance to win the Senate by choosing too many Tea Party wackos as Senate candidates.

Which is amazing when you consider that two years ago pundits were wondering if the GOP was doomed as a national party.

A combination of the Tea Party, the still dragging economy and relentless propagandizing by Fox News and right-wing talk radio has brought the party back from the brink of the abyss and has them on the brink of their biggest election victory since 1994.

Virginia, were the polls close early, may give an early signal on how the night is going to go.

Expectations have been that Republicans would take out at least two of Virginia's six Democratic congressmen -- freshmen representatives Glen Nye in the 2nd District and Tom Perriello in the 5th. Both have trailed their Republican challengers throughout the race, although the polls in both races have closed over the last week. Still, incumbents polling less than 45% a week before Election Day are probably doomed. In both races the presence of a Tea Party-affiliated independent candidate raises the possiblity that the seat could be won with as little as 45% of the vote. That's probably the best shot Nye and Perriello have.

I either Nye or Perriello survives, the GOP wave may be smaller than predicted.

On the other hand, two races Democrats felt confident about -- long-time incumbent Rick Boucher in the 9th District and freshman Gerry Connolly in the 11th District, have begun to look shaky in recent days. Although he's held a comfortable lead over Morgan Griffith, the majority leader of Virginia's House of Delegates who actually lives in the 6th District,  througout the summer, the most recent poll in Boucher's race showed it deadlocked. Tuesday will show if that poll was an outlier or caught late movement. In the 11th, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has committed $1 million for a last minute TV ad blitz. With the number of incumbents they have in jeopardy around the country, it's unlikely they'd do that if Connolly was safe.

If either Boucher or Connolly go down, the GOP is likely in for even a better night than has been predicted.

The Democrats' problem is the stubbornly high unemployement rate and, let's face it, discomfort in the country that there's a black man in the White House.

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Like kicking a crippled puppy..

This week's blog entry is about a story you didn't read in The Virginia Gazette.

You didn't read it because I, along with Editor Rusty Carter and Publisher Bill O'Donovan thought it was a tawdry invasion of someone's privacy, and a political low blow that crossed the line.

If you live in the 1st Congressional District and you've followed other media, you probably know what I'm talking about.

Last week embarrassing photos of Democratic candidate Krystal Ball appeared on a Republican blog. The photos, from a party when Ball was 22, showed her in a Santa-themed dominatrix outfit with a man identified as her ex-husband wearing a red rubber phallus for a nose.

It looked a lot like the kind of thing most of us probably did once or twice while in college. Would you want everything you did in college spread across the Internet?

The photos quickly spread through the Republican blogosphere, and beyond, though many GOP bloggers took them down at the request of Rep. Rob Wittman's campaign.

The Wittman camp said it wanted to run on the issues and, from a practical standpoint, they don't need the controversy. They stand to trounce Ball in the heavily Republican 1st District. It would be a moral victory for her to score more than 40% of the vote.

That's what made the decision the decision to post the photos so mean-spirited. It was unnecessary and uncalled for. It was like kicking a crippled puppy.

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Catching up....

 I've been slack on posting to the blog lately.
I went on vacation in Vegas and had a hard time getting back into blogging mode. And, I didn't want the blog to be too dominated by posts about Ken Cuccinelli, although he does something worth talking about nearly every week, or the governor's ABC privatization plan. I've written a lot about ABC privatization. I was on that bandwagon before Bob McDonnell.

However, with the full details of the governor's plan available since my last post, I'll hit it another lick in a grab bag full of topics in the news.

• McDonnell tries to give away the stores...and the wholesaler too: I'm on record as thinking Virginia needs to get out of the business of selling alcohol. It's hypocritical for the state to put people in prison for drug offenses while Virginia markets and sells the drug that has the most disruptive effect on society -- in terms of lives lost to drunk drivers, divorce, domestic violence, etc.  The state should never have gotten into the liquor business in the first place after Prohibition. But it did. We crossed that Rubicon more than 70 years ago. The state controls the right to sell hard liquor in Virginia. And, to paraphrase a now-disgraced former governor of Illinois, "That's a @#!$%&* valuable thing, you can't give that away for nothing." But that's essentially what our governor has planned. He's allowed a commission composed of many of the interests who will probably end up buying the business to set the bid price. They've come in at about $500 million. At a guess, the state's ABC business is probably worth closer to $2 billion, based on annual sales of more than $600 million. That's for 1,000 permanent retail licenses. To give but one example of how the governor has underpriced this asset, Paul Goldman former Zvengali to Gov. Doug Wilder points on at Blue Virginia that Maine will realize about $144 million from leasing its wholesale distribution facilities to a private entity for 10 years. Virginia has about six times the population of Maine, but the governor proposes to permanently sell the state's wholesale operation for $168 million. That doesn't smell right. An audit of the states liquor business, to find out what it's really worth, would be appropriate before the General Assembly proceeds with the governor's plan, which it's showing no inclination to do so far.
• The McDonnell Miracle: turns up $1 billion in unspent money at VDOT : Speaking of audits, an audit of the Virginia Department of Transportation turns up more than $1 billion in unspent funds. While the McDonnell administration acted surprised by this and said it created a windfall for transportation and inferred that it bespoke of mismanagement by the prior two Democratic administrations, there's less to this story than meets the eye. All state agencies accumulate cash reserves for unforeseen circumstances. In the case of VDOT, with uncertain funding coming partially from the state's general fund and partially from the Transportation Trust Fund from fuel taxes and with uncertain expenses due to weather conditions, it's not surprising that those cash reserves are unusually large. That's what VDOT would have used to clear the roads in a harsh winter or to make repairs if we had a bridge collapse like the one in Minnesota two years ago. It's not that big a deal.

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Who died and left Ken Cuccinelli king?

We are apparently living during the reign of King Ken I.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, aided and abetted by his liegeman Del. Bob Marshall (R-Manassas), has apparently hatched a plan to rule Virginia via attorney general's opinion.

That has the advantage of not only circumventing those troublesome varlets in the General Assembly but the increasingly irrelevant Gov. Bob McDonnell, who probably mistook last year's election results as putting him in charge of state government.

Shows how little he knows.

The Cuccinelli/Marshall's coalition's latest power grab is an attorney general's opinion, requested by Marshall of course, that opines that the state already has the power to regulate abortion clinics in the same way it regulates hospitals and out-patient surgery centers. Current state law applies to facilities that perform second and third-trimester abortions, but not to facilities that perform only first-trimester abortions. Cuccinelli says the state already has that power.

That's interesting. Marshall certainly didn't think the state had that power when he repeatedly introduced legislation that would have given the state such authority. That legislation was defeated in the General Assembly.

I guess that's why Marshall and Cuccinelli, also an ardent abortion foe, would prefer to rule the state by edict. So much more efficient than that messy democracy stuff.

In Virginia, an attorney general's opinion, which can only be requested by an eligible party such as a state legislator or local elected government, is treated as the state of the law until a court rules otherwise.

However, Marshall and Cuccinelli may have made an oversight in their latest attempt to circumvent the democratic process. While the attorney general can issue his opinion, he can't force the Department of Health Professions to promulgate regulations for abortion providers. The department doesn't work for him. Cuccinelli and Marshall are Republicans who embrace a philosophy that hates government. I guess they can't be expected to know how it works.

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