Jesse Ventura had a morning radio show before he ran for Governor in which he ran his mouth off every day for years. He was very much a known quantity.
I didn’t know that. Here it’s the reverse. First they get into office, then they have a radio show.
Doesn’t it? How many Senate candidates start out with national name recognition? And any use of one of Franken’s soundbites in an attack ad will only draw public attention to the, probably, book in which it was published, which is all to the good.
I have some speculation …
… with the Dems firmly in control of congress and likley to gain seats, we won’t hear much conventional wisdom about how Americans like divided government coming from ABCNNBCBS and their cohorts in the print media.
Unless they need to rationalize an Obama loss due to his liberalness and inexperience and can’t blame it on Willie Horton-like ads.
No, we won’t . . . nor should we. What reason have we to think Americans “like divided government” as an end-in-itself anyway? It’s just that, electoral politics being what it is, the separation-of-powers system sometimes happens to produce that result.
Oh, look! It’s the UTTER MYTH of the “liberal media”…
A zombie myth, too, killed over and over and coming back more times than Jason.
So your theory is that if the people don’t vote for a divided gov’t, then we won’t hear much about how people like to vote for a divided gov’t? I can’t really argue with that.
Wrong thread.
There’s a pretty good discussion of ticket-splitting and the claim that Americans yearn for divided government already going on over in the Obama Bonanza thread.
Not that there’s anything wrong with discussing it here, but just pointing it out.
He’s pretty well off. I don’t think he’s running to sell books.
Gordon Smith, the GOP incumbent in Oregon, is in no danger of being unseated. He’s been consistently rated one of the more liberal Republicans in the Senate, and his district is overwhelmingly rural, conservative, and religious. I’d like to see it, and I’ll vote against him, but there’s not much hope.
EDIT: Two caveats: he could be unseated fairly easily by a “macaca” moment and possibly unseated if a high-profile Democrat, like a popular former Governor, ran for the seat. But it would take one, possibly both of those to oust him, and he’s not that conservative; the Democrats are better off spending their money elsewhere.
No, he isn’t; by “all to the good,” I meant, if more public attention (in Minnesota) is directed to his books (even by way of attack ads), and more voters read them, he’s more likely to win.
Two comments:
Oregon just had their primary. The Democratic nominee is the Speaker of the Oregon House.
Second, and I hope this is a case where I’m not fully understanding your remarks: Senators are elected statewide.
Mind you (as is stated above), I currently am not expecting this seat to flip.
Hard to say. Obama is not as unpopular in Kentucky as his spanking in the primary would indicate. The issue is that a lot of counties in Kentucky are so overwhelmingly Democratic that one has to be a registered Dem to have any vote at all in local elections. (We have closed primaries.) So the average KY Democrat is way to the right of the average nationwide, and a whole lot of them can be expected to vote GOP in the fall. A lot of other factors went into his defeat, including good old fashioned racism, but that’s the big one.
Those conservative Democrats are the ones who have kept McConnell in office, since Dems are a strong majority across the state. A big push from Obama might draw some of the lefty voters that wouldn’t have come out for Lunsford on their own, but it might lose just as many conservative Dems who otherwise would have considered getting off the McConnell boat.
Mitch apparently thinks Obama can only hurt Lunsford, as he’s been out there talking about the “Obama-Lunsford Plan for America”.
Shouldn’t it be the “Obama-Lunsford-Jeremiah Wright-William Ayers Plan for America”? 
I’m not suggesting that Americans do like divided government.
I’m suggesting that the argument has been trotted out most often if it can be used to help elect Democrats.
I see.
Cite?
More importantly, relevance?
nvm
I thought it was relevant to your comment … maybe it wasn’t relevant.