Searchlight's Not As Dumb As He Sounds(Welcome, fellow
Ankle-Biting Pundits readers)
He's dumber:
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday that President Bush will go down as the Millard Fillmore of our time, and said the Republican president is the best thing Democrats have going for them for the 2006 elections.
"I think our biggest cheerleader for getting back some of the votes we've lost in the last couple presidential elections and some congressional elections is George W. Bush," the Nevada Democrat said in predicting a big election year for his party.Over the next year we're going to hear about how poorly ruling parties do in midterm elections. Quite a bit of this will just be the media and the liberal bloggers fantasizing about a takeover of Congress, followed soon by an impeachment trial with Cindy Sheehan as a star witness.
But this talk about mid-term corrections is misplaced in 2006. Why? Because mid-term corrections typically come because of long coattails. When a president wins reelection, he usually does so by a substantial margin--see Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1984. But the problem with big wins is that they have coattails, bringing into office a lot of weaker candidates of the president's party.
Nixon and Reagan swept into office large numbers of Republicans in their respective reelection campaigns, much as had LBJ with the Democrats in 1964. In all of those cases, they brought in weak candidates in marginal districts that could not be held.
But interestingly, the midterm corrections have not happened since 1994. In 1998 Clinton's party did not get walloped despite an amazing presidential scandal. Why? Probably because his win in 1996 did not restore the Democrats to power in Congress, so they didn't have much to lose.
And that's pretty much the same case in 2006. Bush did not substantially improve the Republicans' position there in 2004. They gained a
net four seats. He did help them gain a big edge in the Senate, but those particular seats aren't up again until 2010, and 2006 doesn't play to the Democrats' strengths.
So the notion that next year is going to be a big one for the Democrats is just wishful thinking.
