Washington Braces for Democrat Defeat| Hugh Hewitt |11.1.14

Though Real Clear Politics’ race-by-race report on the average of polls is only just now beginning to reflect it, for several days the Washington tom toms have been beating out predictions of a big GOP sweep next Tuesday.

I’m not just talking about the pundits, such as Roll Call’s Stu Rothenberg. His Rothenblog report on an impending Democrat collapse in the House scored the top story on Drudge on Friday. Rothenberg says that by next Wednesday morning, measured in lost House seats, President Obama could rank as the biggest loser of combined first and second mid-term elections in modern times. Senate losses for the Democrats could be nearly as historic.

But, no, it’s not just the pundits who are pounding the drums of defeat. It is the Democrats themselves and the Obamagallery (like the old Peanut Gallery of the 1950s TV show Howdy Doody only less mature) in the media.

Some are saying that you hear the beat in reports that the Democrats have started trotting out their traditional race bating moves. Apparently Democrat Party campaign fliers have been appearing in African-American communities around the country with images, according to The Washington Times, of lynchings and the old segregationist South.

To be fair, while this appeal to racial fears looks desperate, don’t read too much into it. The last minute tactic has become routine for the Dems, who suddenly remember Africa-Americans at this time each election year. Having embraced policies that effectively pit the party against one of its core constituencies on everything from school choice to teen employment, the Democrat establishment needs something to scare Black voters back into the tent.

So every election they make it sound as though the KKK is about to ride again through the South (and most of the North, too). The accusation is a more than a little ironic, considering that all those Klansmen of old voted straight Democrat and were one of the foundaitons of the old Franklin Roosevelt coalition. But how the narrative got flipped in the late 1960s, even as the Nixon Administration successfully and peacefully oversaw the end of segregation of the South, is a story for another column.

No, it is not in their neo-racism that the Democrat establishment’s desperation reveals itself. It is in the way they and the media are already spinning their losses. Many are pointing a finger at the President. Every Democrat candidate is happy to accept the money Mr. Obama has so obsessively raised. But appear on a podium with him? Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s opponent amazingly refuses so much as to acknowledge voting for the President last time, even though she was an Obama delegate at the Democratic National Convention. This kind of fleeing is extreme but not unique.

And then there is the story that has emerged from Democratic sympathizers in the media over the past couple of weeks — that this is the Seinfeld election. It is about nothing.

Now let me see. A GOP takeover of the Senate means that Congress can stop the White House’s borderline lawlessness in issuing executive orders – ending the Senate’s rubber stamp of the president through obstinate inaction. I guess that’s nothing.

A Republican Senate means Congress can start laying out alternatives to Obamacare, sure to draw presidential vetoes but essential as a first step to developing a patient-oriented, market-based replacement. That’s nothing, too.

Congress could also start passing budgets again, and getting to the business of government – instead of being tied up by the Harry Reid tag team that is the current Democratic Senate majority. Senate Democrats have spent recent years binding up and gagging every proposal for reform in every arena that has come out of the House. Ending their obstruction is nothing, too.

All year the Democrats have been counting on dominance in dollars, the ability to scare African-Americans to the polls even after six years of economic fumbling that has been particularly hard on minorities (and women, too), and an historically unrivaled turnout machine. They may yet pull hold the Senate, if only by a vote or two, and somehow minimizing their losses in the House.

They might, though day by day it looks less and less likely.