Imagine if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were a Republican. Imagine that the Republicans, including many moderates, just lost more than 60 House seats in the worst rout a party has experienced since 1938. Yet the hard-core conservative speaker -- of whom, polls show, a majority of voters have a decidedly unfavorable opinion -- decides to run for the step-down position of minority leader.
Let's try to put some metrics on last Tuesday's historic election.
Barack Hussein Obama, the mixed-race president born in Hawaii, partly educated in Indonesia -- defender of a controversial Islamic center near ground zero in Manhattan -- is tentatively scheduled to visit Jakarta's Masjid Istiqlal, the largest mosque in Southeast Asia. Mercifully, the American elections are over.
Mere days after winning the presidency on the strength of his proposed “middle class tax cuts,” U.S. President Barack Obama switched gears and began outlining his vision for a massive “economic stimulus” – one that he promised would create three million jobs.
The Democrats did good. Not in the election -- they did pretty miserably there. But they did good for the country. They led America back from the brink of economic disaster.
The urge to punish politicians is understandable no matter who is in power, because they inevitably disappoint the fond hopes of their admirers and raise the hackles of their detractors -- and yet that same urge is almost never satisfied for long.
Back in December 2009, a full 11 months before Election Day, a Democratic strategist concluded that if the Rasmussen Reports Generic Congressional Ballot data was accurate, Republicans would gain 62 seats in the House during the 2010 elections.
Removing the snake from the garden with a stick was a rejection of the snake, but should not be seen as particularly an endorsement of the stick -- except as the closest available tool with which to eject the snake.
At his post-victory news conference Wednesday morning, Governor elect Jerry Brown showed why he won the election with a million votes to spare. He's steeped in the issues, he listens to what is happening on the ground, and he's not afraid to mix it up.
Uncharted territory.
Momentous events this week -- the Republican House sweep and the Fed's QE2 -- moved the stock market needle only a little over Tuesday and Wednesday, although the net impact was a gain of about 90 points.
1994 was much worse. Much. So was 1980, but of course, that was also a presidential election. Within days, there were makeshift unemployment offices in all the congressional office buildings.
If you are a big fan of Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, you probably got a big kick out of the title of Saturday's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" on the National Mall in Washington.
It's a fair generality that the young are more technologically up-to-date than the old.
Heading into what appears to be a disastrous midterm election, the Obama Democrats profess to be puzzled.
Former Gov. Pete Wilson is the only politician to have beat Jerry Brown in an election. In 1982, Wilson, then-San Diego mayor, trounced Brown, then California's big-foot governor, in the race for U.S. Senate 51 to 45 percent. Now Wilson serves as Meg Whitman's campaign chairman. On Thursday, he told me not to believe polls that show Whitman losing by as much as double digits. Whitman, he says, has a real shot at beating Brown.
On the eve of the midterm elections, a third-quarter gross domestic product report showing a meager 2 percent growth rate is the final nail in the Obama Democrats' political coffin.
For half of the candidates on Tuesday's ballot, these are the days you remember.
I love this quote from clean-tech exec Eric Dresselhuys to the San Francisco Chronicle's David R. Baker: "If California isn't leading the charge on implementing these technologies, why be here?
