Sunday, October 26, 2008

Senate salvage   [Mark Steyn]

David Frum's piece in The Washington Post on the need to give up on the White House and save the Senate is interesting, and at one point hilarious:

The statehouses were the engine of our renewal in the 1990s; the Senate will have to play the same role after this defeat.

Good luck getting anywhere with an engine firing on cylinders that include Susan Collins, John Warner*, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, Chuck Hagel*, etc, etc, all the way to (one assumes) John McCain.

David's thesis is that Sarah Palin fires up the base at the expense of everybody else. It's true that McCain has more or less inverted the traditional Presidential model: Instead of running toward the base in primary season and then the center in the general, he gleefully ran for and to the center in the primaries and then belatedly found himself in need of a base in the general. Even so, this sentence struck me as a huge stretch:

The themes and messages that are galvanizing the crowds for Palin are bleeding Sens. John Sununu in New Hampshire, Gordon Smith in Oregon, Norm Coleman in Minnesota and Susan Collins in Maine.

I wonder if David might like to provide any evidence to connect the first half of that sentence with the second. (Norm Coleman, by the way, seems to have stopped bleeding and just received an unprecedented endorsement from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)

Look, I like Senator Sununu and always have (aside from the fact that he stole my assistant away from me). He's about the least worst New England Republican in Washington. I want him re-elected. I have his sticker on my truck and at least two signs down by the road with a big poster on a tumbledown out-building. But I saw him and Sarah Palin together about a week-and-a-half ago, and she was good and he was ...not so. If we're all going down to the defeat David predicts, I wouldn't be surprised if, in the Granite State, McCain-Palin outperform the downticket candidates.

David now wants to prioritize the senators in order to save the party. We're in this mess in the first place because we have an over-Senatized party, starting with the presidential candidate, whose fortunes went south not when he picked his running mate but when the subprime hit the fan and he reacted senatorially - by heading back to Washington and "reaching across the aisle". Whether the bailout bill was good or bad, it was always going to be ugly - and it was something a shrewd national candidate would have stood aside from, as Obama did, coolly detached as the Capitol pygmies scurried hither and yon. In Westminster terms, Obama acted as if he was running for monarch while McCain was running for chief whip. Even now Mister Maverick is still boasting that he's better than Obama at "reaching across the aisle". If the livelier polls are correct, Obama won't need to be good at "reaching across the aisle" because there'll be hardly anyone over there.

If McCain loses and he's back in the Senate with Arlen and the Maine ladies and the rest of the gang, it will be a club of bipartisan accommodationists and capricious eccentrics. The idea that these guys will be any kind of "engine of our renewal" strikes me as far more ludicrous than the possibility of Mister Maverick getting to 270 next Tuesday. The best way to help Senator Sununu & Co is not to write off the top of the ticket but to drive up turnout for it.

[*UPDATE: Readers remind me that John Warner is retiring, while Chuck will be the token Republican in Barack's "cabinet of stars". Indeed. But the point holds, and emphasizes that my colleague's generalization takes many disparate factors and dumps them on the Moose-Slayer. In most conceivable scenarios for 2008, Mark Warner (D) would have been the favorite to take the Virginia seat from a retiring John Warner (R). Likewise, Susan Collins (I believe) will hold her seat in Maine. In neither case can the results be blamed on what David regards as the GOP's Palinization.]

10/26 01:26 AMShare