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It almost seems like this year, in Nevada, the Republican Party is running a grand political science experiment to see if it is possible to run a candidate so bad that they counteract the overwhelming political determinism of skyrocketing unemployment. Harry Reid has made no major gaffes or been involved in any big scandals, but during his tenure as majority leader, unemployment has state soared from under five percent to over 14 percent, and for this reason alone, Reid should be a political dead man. He only has a glimmer of hope because his opponent, Sharron Angle, is such an unbelievably poor candidate. Watch this closing argument ad from the Reid Campaign:
It is simple, it is brutal, but it is honest. It plainly lays out just the policy case for how extreme and unacceptable Sharron Angle is. It doesn’t even address her many bizarre non-policy statements, her race baiting campaign, or her history of claiming she didn’t say things even when there is a clear record that she did.
If ever there were an election where the alternative was so bad that the unpopular incumbent could turn the race into a choice instead of referendum, it is this election in Nevada. It would be tough to believe a major party could nominate a worse candidate than Angle.
Yet, despite all of Angle’s flaws, she and Reid remain neck-and-neck in the polls. If Angle does win, it is essentially proof that there is no campaign wel-run enough, nor any opponent terrible enough to overcome the political determinism of being an incumbent during a large spike in unemployment. With most economists projecting continued high unemployment, there should be nothing more concerning for President Obama in Tuesday’s results than a Sharron Angle victory.
38 Comments
Thanks for this. Can you even imagine a candidate so bad that he is virtually tied with Angle! Harry truly does not deserve to win but the alternative is absurd. Harry’s loss might, just might, send a clue to the Dems. Nah
Yup. The main reason Watergate got traction against Nixon is very likely because the economy started to blow up on his watch. (Anyone remember his “wage/price controls”?)
The converse is also true: When people are doing well and have lots of jobs, it’s hard to get them to give a shit about things that aren’t their business, such as whether their president has sex with people other than his wife. That’s why the Clinton impeachment blew up in the Republicans’ faces.
In other words, if the experiment pans out for the Republican Party, the worst of their worst will defeat the incumbent in 2012.
Agreed, it is depressing.
It’s about jobs. If Obama had pushed through, using reconciliation, a stimulus that was twice the size of the one that he did, the unemployment rate would be back below 7% and people would be happy. But noooooo.
Angle : the only Republican that could lose to Reid
Reid : the only Democrat that could lose to Angle
That about sums it up.
Pathetic. The whole thing is mind-numbingly pathetic. Does Reid even grasp what an epic failure he is to be so close to LOSING to a reichwing nutted up lying hypocritical dirtbag like Angle?
I cry for myself and our nation should Angle win, but otoh, IF there’s the slightest chance that Reid’s big loss will send a message to failure Dems… then… I dunno… is THIS what it TAKES? mebbee… we’ll see.
I’d suggest a different title:
NV Sen: Tight Race with Terrible Candidates Becomes Depressing Political Science Experiment
Reid is the embodiment of ills affecting the Democratic Congress and the Prez. Ineffective, indulgent milquetoast. He’s to blame for his negative perception by NV voters. That Angle is successful candidate is an indictment of both parties and the lack of intellectual process by the electorate.
Reid smartly avoided bs like the Aqua Buddha (Conway is probably still kicking himself) and stayed focused for the most part on important issues.
As Jon says: Simple. Brutal. Honest.
They won’t. Democrats have an uncanny ability to turn victory into defeat and then learn the exact opposite lessons from their mistakes than the ones they should have learned.
C’est l’economique, imbecile.
Corporate Dems and Corporate Republicans have been known to work together.
If the GOP was playing to win this “Reid” election they would have made sure a good GOP candidate with great credentials ran against Reid.
However, this smells, like an inside job!
Reid and his friends on the GOP team helped him out here!
ALL WAR IS BASE ON DECEPTION! SUN TZU
WELCOME TO MORE KABUKI
The only potentially positive outcome I could see to this is a Reid victory so narrow that it is tied up in recounts or perhaps court past the start of the new session, with the Democrats holding the majority. They would have to elect a Majority Leader, and Reid would not have been sworn in yet so he would not be eligible; they would have to pick someone else, and they could hit a better ML with a water balloon. Then later on Reid is victorious in the recount and gets sworn in.
If Sharon Angle were running in Georgia she wouldn’t be that exceptional. She would win in a breeze and fit right in with most of our elected officials.
I have no debate with the claim of jobs being pre-eminent but I think if Angle wins it will also be evidence of the spreading corruption of racism and ignorance as positive values for voters.
Query: As jobs are so important why is it that the same voters when working appear to not be concerned about stagnant or falling wages?
Heh, why on earth would anyone want to support a party like that?
there was a sqib earlier in the week that appeared to have potential for eliminating Reid – but didn’t see the Angle camp take it up – wont link it here, did I mention it came from Gawker ?
What the post says is true — as far as it goes. What isn’t touched on and I rarely see mentioned is the appalling, mind-numbing, abysmal, abiding, over-riding, depressing, stunning, and overwhelming stupidity of the voting public. I’m not confining this to the Right. The Left is the same. I don’t believe for a nanosecond in the ‘collective wisdom’ of the voter. People are sheep; dumb, mindless, easily led and distracted by any bullshit narrative. Proof? Watch any political ad. Lies, distortions, half-truths, omissions, misinformation, disinformation, defamation, character assassination, and more.
I’m 62 and have watched this pathetic parade since Kennedy-Nixon. When I was a young boy, there was an old man who lived nearby, kind a folksy-woodsy codger. He was kind of a surrogate Grandpa. He taught me a lot about many things. One day, he was teaching me how to paint the side of a shed and said, “A boy alone is a whole boy. Two boys together is a half a boy. And three boys together are no boy at all.” I didn’t understand until much later in life what he meant. He meant that the more people together in a group, the lower their collective usefulness. I’ve seen it validated time and again. Lynch mods, gang rapes, looting after natural disasters, and especially in politics. It doesn’t matter how high or low the office. People continually vote for the worst candidates for the worst reasons. The cream doesn’t rise to the top. It’s like a cesspool where the shit rises to the top and floats around giving off and awful stink. And this election cycle is the worst I’ve ever had the displeasure to witness. This country is Fucked with a capital ‘F’. It won’t matter who is in the office because the system is so fundamentally corrupt. It is bought and paid for and the owners will not give it back. George Carlin was right about so many things, but especially about politics and who really has the power. It’s a big private club and the common people ain’t in it.
People vote for who they are attracted to.
The dumbing down of the america voter is a direct effect of the current media.
There are no Walter Cronkites on TV now
The elites after the 60′s got rid of intelligent news, and made everything more TMZ and Fox ” Fake News rules the Day” (it funny how Jon Stewart show is more news worthy than CBS news)
You hear that? no one talks about the two crazy wars and what they cost
The USA is in a depression, and the media calls it a Great Recession
The current media considers Obama a liberal, (the new definition of Liberal makes Reagan a Progressive)
The GOP now has the dumbest voters on the Planet Earth! The avg GOP voter will vote for a candidate, that can’t wait to send their good paying job abroad for cheaper labor.
People always wonder how democracy ends? It ends with a lot of applause! “Great line from a Star Wars Movie
There are several reasons. This year a very good reason is that the only other viable political party has gone round the bend. On Sunday the person that party would make Speaker of the House, John Boehner, is going to campaign with a Nazi re-enactor.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/john-boehner-to-campaign-with-nazi-reenactor-rich-iott/65304/
Said as if the qualities of the incumbent, or absolute lack thereof, have absolutely no influence whatsoever.
Maddow’s been making the same specious case, saying Angle proves that sufficient money cancels any amount of craziness.
It sure does, when the incumbent has absolutely nothing to offer the electorate other than essentially saying, “Despite having presided over this catastrophe, elect me or my rival will blow your head off.”
Selling us down the river all day and night during the interim, then playing the pity card during election
sweeps weekelection season, is no way to run any nation, let alone one the very same pathetic incumbents extol as the greatest in human history.Harry Reid’s transparent sell-out nature has to figure in here somewhere, or we’re being intellectually dishonest with ourselves.
It’s not complicated. The only positive from our high unemployment is that it may act to penalize Reid & others for the OTHER sins they ARE did while in office! If we give people power & they abuse it and we don’t hold them accountable, then we deserve we get. The people of Nevada elected Reid to represent them. He didn’t do that with HCR or Financial Reform. He shut his eyes to the problems of FannieMae & FreddieMac, he bowed low before Greenspan, he ignored the ballooning real estate bubble. Holding Harry Reid accountable for what he did & didn’t do as a Dem. Senator & later Senate leader is VERY IMPORTANT to our political system. Electing Reid again because you’re worried about what one whacko may do, especially when she’d need 60 votes & Obama’s signature to do ANYTHING, is just plain NUTS.
Harry fucking Reid (and the donkey he rode in on over our backs) shoulda thought of that before spending the last several years selling us to
slaughterhousescampaign donors by the truckload.One more lunatic freshman senator will hardly make a difference.
I’m going to do a little dance of glee when I watch that pathetic homophobic bigot Reid get tossed out on his ass !
I would point out H-A-T-R-E-D is one of the prime factors driving admittedly stupid voters in this election. Racial hatred leads the pack of these demons. Following is LGBT hatred, “Liberal elite” hatred, urban hatred, and others. The power of hatred is vast when it gets rolling, like now, fueled by fear of the economy slipping further down. Fear, hatred wound up with stupidity will take US to a scenario previously unimagined, except in fiction like “The Road” (or will it remain fiction?).
Too many, especially white males, feel humiliation that the generations of fear was actualized in the black man being elected President,,,,, to make matters worse, by a large number of women’s votes. There is no end to their humiliation and hatred.
I live in Nevada and I feel dirty.
As a male, I have toto endorse that view. It’s not about the justice, self-determination, or any of that. It’s about the dominance.
Human behavior makes much more sense when viewed through the prism of primatology than self-exculpatory poli sci.
If it’s the economy, then pray tell, friends: whence comes the economy, a direct download from the freakin’ Vulcan Science Academy?
No, the ways we materialize our beliefs come from our beliefs. D’uh. Nevertheless, in keeping with the reduction of understanding ourselves to the very same framework we use to describe ballistics, we keep discussing our collective behaviors in terms that look up no further than the same APA-style reductive and mechanistic psychology that got us into this world of pain to begin with.
We won’t heal ourselves of this self-inflicted injury by appealing to the same iatrogenic explanatory frameworks that have so mortally wounded us in the first place.
No, with all due respect to my earnest interlocutors, it’s not the economy, stupid, That ignores our role in creating our world.
It’s our beliefs that give birth to the societies that spawn these hell-on-earth constructs to begin with. That’s where we need to address our efforts, toward busting the nation-jacking myths that fuck with our very sense of reality itself.
Look, it’s really simple.
Angle, whatever her current and past failings and possible future crimes, was not Senate Majority Leader (and, before that, Minority Leader) while illegal aggressive war based on lies, illegal wiretapping, torture and other blatant violations of constitution and law happened, nor did she hold the reigns of the Senate in the aftermath. Yes, she might aid and abet torture and war in the future. So don’t vote for her. But don’t vote for Reid. It does not matter whether or not an awful candidate might get elected. As long as voters are willing to compromise on issues as fundamental as torture – hostis humanis generis – and put their own short term parochial concerns over the minor issue of upholding and defending the constitution, they can’t very well complain about apparatchiks like Reid doing the exact same – especially if it should work out for another term.
Ditto
See, I had toto endorse that view so I could maintain plausible deniability to defend my fragile my ego from responsibility for helping to create the hell on earth of which it loudly complains (remember when the FME was all the psychobabble rage? and the “psychopathological” gays who all one day “got better” when APA revised their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual? good times).
My fragile male ego, that should be. I sure hope I’m not the only one who remembers that absurd construct.
Well said.
And, in both cases, the loss will be well-deserved. It’s really hard to know who to root for: Nevada needs the connections Reid’s leader-status brings the state but he’s terrible for Democrats and the Administration as well. Angle will be a nut-job without clout; she’ll demonstrate on a national scale the insanity of the Teabaggers.
A lot of later commenters have made many good points. Just want to toss out a further 2 cents worth, which is that Angle has been funded by truck loads of dollar$$$ from the Kochtopolis + Murdoch, and no doubt other Oligarchs as well.
Absent the sociological underpinings of all of this nasty, weird, bullying mess & crap-sh*t economy is also this thought: I think the PTB love ‘em some T-party Nutz a whole whole whole lot. Why? For the simple reason that most of ‘em are really dumb, themselves, and very easily manipulated. Why not BUY OFF Sharron Angle, rather than some other rightwing politician… who might think for him/herself once in a while.
No matter what, the Angles & Palins of this planet will be compliant little sock monkeys & do what their corporatist masters tell them to do. The fact that they appeal to the dumbest of the dull-witted is an added bonus.
Angle’s gotten as far as she has for many reasons, but a big one is: follow the money, honey. She’s been showered with cash… lots of it.
Yeah, there must be a lot of “cash” coming in for Angus, er Angle as the damn local stations can’t show enough of them.
Harry Reid is not just any corrupt politician. He is majority leader of the U.S. Senate. If he is defeated by an obscure local moron I will take a day off to celebrate. And why not? The Senate is a tool of the Oligarchy and will remain so regardless of the outcome of the election.
I don’t live in Nevada or follow it’s politics that closely but I reject the underlying premise of the argument on two different levels:
1) It’s Reid’s fault that Wall street and mortgage brokers conspired to make billions from a hyper-inflated real estate market?
2) Again, not having all the facts in hand, is Reid really that bad? A timid, ineffectual, vision-less majority leader? Yes. But, bad enough for people to overlook the genuine lunacy of Angle? Are the voters out there stupider than her?! How can one vote for a person when said person won’t answer a question? For crissakes, “chickens for checkups” looks positively reasonable compared to this buffoon’s “policy” proposals!
If I ever read that trope again, I’m going to scream.
Unless you are being ironic.