The House of Representatives adjourned last week with all the style we have come to expect from the Obama-Pelosi-Reid congress.\u00a0 The normally all but unanimous shout of acclaim to go home turned into a one-vote-margin, roll-call squeaker in which Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to descend from the podium to cast the deciding ballot.<\/p>\n
Messy?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 But the Democrat\u2019s desperate but brilliant campaign strategy for October depended on winning that vote.\u00a0 \u00a0How so?<\/p>\n
Start with the state of electoral play.\u00a0 According to the latest RealClearPolitics.com tally, the Republicans are leading in eight Senate races with five in the balance.\u00a0 A ten-seat pick up takes control of the chamber.<\/p>\n
On the House side, RCP rates the GOP solidly ahead in 207 seats versus 190 for the Democrats and 38 still in play.<\/p>\n
In other words, the character of the next Congress, particularly the Senate, remains very much in play.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t take a political savant \u2013 a Karl Rove or a James Carville \u2013 to see that the national upheaval against the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda is driven by revulsion over the unprecedented and potentially devastating spending of the last two years.\u00a0 That terrifying run-up in spending has been the determinative political fact of this election cycle.<\/p>\n
A very large portion of Independents has come to see the combination of spending with tax increases on entrepreneurs and small business owners as devastating to America\u2019s short-term economic recovery and long-term national viability.\u00a0 Anyone schooled in political campaigning knows that such strongly held views \u2013 which have remained steady in the polling for more than a year now \u2013 will not change before Election Day.<\/p>\n
So the normal class warfare arguments and denunciations of any spending cut as ruining this or that sympathetic group have fallen flat — actually, worse than flat.\u00a0 The more Democratic candidates have harped on those long favored themes, the more their poll numbers have declined.<\/p>\n
You have got to hand it to the Democratic leadership here in Washington.\u00a0 Yes, their strategy for reviving the economy was an exercise in economic fantasy.\u00a0 Actually, it is just a big payoff to their constituent groups and had little to do with economic revival.\u00a0 What more can you conclude when the president\u2019s own retiring chair of the Council of Economic Advisors turns out to have published a major paper on how taxes of the kind the administration has championed hurt economic growth?<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, even if they talk as though they live in an economic fantasyland, they remain in total touch with political reality.\u00a0 They know that, between now and November 2nd<\/sup>, every word, every vote, every news story, every reminder of any kind of their fiscal extravagance weighs on their prospects for holding the Senate and minimizing their losses in the House.<\/p>\n So the name of the campaign game has become change the subject.\u00a0 Through both paid and earned media, this past week saw an across-the-nation wave of personal assault on GOP candidates, particularly Senate candidates.<\/p>\n