NYT: Liberal Admits Health Reform is Suicidal for Dems — urges doing it anyway


This a classic case of attempted big-man-chest-beating, that comes off as kinda-whine-y — as in, do you want some cheese with that whine? — when Shrum attempts to rally defeated, wounded and shell-shocked troops.

And this is now what passes as the top Dem political advice on why Congress should pass health care:

“A PPP poll shows that by itself the act of passing the bill cuts independent support for Republicans by six points. And that’s before the law goes into effect and people figure out that there are no death-panels, rationing schemes, or cuts in Medicare benefits. If the majority party can’t figure out both the moral imperative and the electoral calculus of health care, then it doesn’t deserve to be in the majority [sniff].”

Let’s just say the poll question about a hypothetical is accurate (in a land called Candyland)

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The Political Elite Collectively Hold their Breath Until Tuesday Night


When the lead paragraph in a story in the Boston Globe — owned by the New York Times — from a story titled “Obama here for Coakley, trailing a diminished aura,” reads:

“The feverish excitement that propelled Barack Obama and scores of other Democrats to victory in 2008 has all but evaporated, worrying party leaders who are struggling to invigorate the base before Tuesday’s Massachusetts Senate race and November’s critical midterm contests, pollsters and party activists said [emphasis added].”

even the hard-core Obama-lapdogs in the media can’t purposefully ignore the fact the public hates ObamaCare, or its negative political impact on the Democrats.

And President Obama and Speaker Pelosi and walking-dead-man-Reid are to blame.

Their cram-down is not working. The Dem-go-it-alone-on-health-care-strategy is not working.

The ignore-actually-actively-refuse-to-listen-to-the-public and keep pushing the political loser ObamaCare no-matter-what-and-no-matter-the-cost, is not working.

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Trende: The New Undecided Rule and the Massachusetts Senate Race


Trende, who writes the horse race blog at RealClearPolitics is among the best in country, and here is his take on various polling data from the MA Senate race:

Consider: PPP (D) has her at 47%. The Globe/UNH poll has her at 53%. Rasmussen has her at 50%. Even internal Democratic polling — which usually represents the Democrat’s best-case scenario — has her leading state Senator Scott Brown 50%-36%. In other words, most of the variance comes from Brown’s numbers — which vary between 36% and 48% support — not Coakley’s. As I’ve noted before, when you see one candidate very stable and one candidate with a high degree of variance in their numbers, it means that the undecideds are trending toward the candidate with the higher variance. In other words, that candidate will tend to be toward the high end of their polling range.

This is where the “undecided rule” starts to come into play. It’s a political science rule that predicts that undecided voters will break heavily for the challenger.”

Sean Trende also discusses the new-internet age “undecided rule,” and up-dates it. Here is his bottom line:

“So if we look for a principle that survives this new age of saturation advertising and internet-driven intensity, we might say that when you have two well-known candidates, the undecided rule is probably inapplicable as a predictive device. But if there’s a disparity between the candidates, the undecideds will still tend to break toward the lesser-known candidate. There’s probably caveats and exceptions here, but I think that’s probably about right.

“So what does that tell us about the Massachusetts Senate race? We have a sitting Attorney General who came out of a contested primary, going up against a more-or-less completely unknown state Senator. She’s struggling to get above 50%. All of this points toward a very close final race — potentially much closer than a week ago when I guessed at a 54-46 spread. Again, this is also consistent with what we’re seeing in the variance in the Coakley/Brown numbers. Coakley should be worried.”

The Dems keep thinking that the health care jihad has no consequences. How wrong their jihadists in chiefs: Pelosi, Reid and Obama are.


Rumors of Mike Huckabee’s Political Death are greatly exaggerated.


In case you haven’t known, quite a lot of people on the conservative blogs proclaimed, with their esteemed credentials in the area of politics, that Michael D. Huckabee’s career was dead. It now appears that their previous estimates were indeed wrong.

In case you are in disbelief, please note the post that Tom Jenkins made here at the PPP polling firm.

 http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2009/12/looking-at-huck.html 

Not only did Mike Huckabee stay on the top of the pack, but he also managed to narrow the gap between him and Obama as well.

This leads me to believe that the Huck-haters played their hand way too early in their piling on of Huckabee, as it allowed Huckabee time to create a credible defense on his half. Because this is more than two years away from the 2012 primary, this issue will more or less fade from the minds of the people.

All in all, this incident appears to be an epic failure on the part of the people who wasted no time piling on Huckabee before the bodies of the officers grew cold.

I part with this well known saying from a movie icon we all know and love, “Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”