So nothing. Boner will be Speaker for two years and and have to work with Obama instead of obstructing. Good outcome.
Would that it were so. I suspect they’ll try to provoke some vetoes and hope for a GOP capture of the White House two years hence. Boehner has plenty of uberconservatives in his caucus who won’t want to give the President any bipartisan accomplishments to brag about in his reelection campaign.
So, does Harry Reid remain Senate Majority Leader?
Probably, though technically he doesn’t have to be.
That depends. Are the Democrats going to be able to get anything done in the next two years? If so, then you want the credit to go to someone who has better long-term prospects. Are the next two years going to be as ugly as the last two? Might as well leave Reid in there as the sacrificial lamb.
I lean toward the latter.
I guess it pretty much depends on what kind of punishment Reid could deliver to Democrats who didn’t support his bid. At least that’s what I always heard was how Robert Byrd managed to hang on to the position of Majority Leader for so long – he was the ultimate parliamentarian and if you crossed him, your bills would probably never see the light of day. One of the funny lines I heard back in 1980, after the election where the Republicans gained control of the Senate, was “Who’s going to tell Byrd he’s not the Majority Leader any more?”
Before:
But the polls say!
And then afterwards:
So I overestimated the intelligence of the voters. Shame on me for not being cynical enough and giving them too much credit. I should have learned from the Bush years.
Rasmussen is still a joke.
Got it. You weren’t wrong. It was the voters.
Funny how you didn’t allow for the possibility of stupid voters when you said, “Pelosi isn’t going anywhere, and neither House is in danger of changing parties.” I guess this was the first time you’d ever encountered the phenomenon of stupid voters, and were thus unprepared for the vagaries of their whimsical ways.
Boehner has some wit and can deliver some great zingers but he is an establishment Republican to the core and is going to oversee a sellout to the corporate interests unlike anything seen before. Watch Teapublicans, as your new leader shows his true colors.
You’re comparing two different “wrongs.” I was wrong about my prediction. The voters were obviously wrong about how they voted.
I thought maybe they’d turned a corner after '06 and '08. I was wrong. I should never have allowed myself to believe that the American people had any brains. my bad.
As Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.” Sometimes the American electorate gets it wrong, I think, but more often they get it right. I’ve found that reading history is the best tonic for despair when the elections don’t go your way. No party, no candidate has a perpetual monopoly on power. There will always be another election, the political winds will someday shift, and candidates you like will get elected again. Be of good cheer.
It’s seems to be a commonly held fallacy that elections determine who is right when all they really determine is who is more numerous.
According to Nate Silver, Bricker, Rassmusen was a joke.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmussen-polls-were-biased-and-inaccurate-quinnipiac-surveyusa-performed-strongly/
That part of Dio’s statement, was, in fact, correct.