2010 Midterm Elections

I just got a gig with the DCCC and noticed there wasn't a dedicated thread for the 2010 elections, so I thought I'd start one and let the community compare notes on what races interest them and the like. The races that interest me are:

California's 44th Congressional District Race - Calvert (R) v. Hedrick (D). This is the race I'm working for, so my reasons for being interested are kind of obvious.

United States Senate - Boxer (D). Out of the two Senators we have, Boxer is the only one who is consistently on the side of her constituents and that goes for how she compares within the context of the Senate as a whole as well. I really hope she just wipes the floor with whomever the GOP challenger happens to be.

California's 2nd Congressional District - Herger (R). I am not a huge fan of the home district, I frankly think they deserve whatever they get in terms of government at this point, but it would be really, really nice to see Herger get clobbered. The guy is arguably the biggest asshole in the Congress. In 2008, the spending ratio between his campaign and Morris' was something like 40:1 and he just barely won.

California Democratic Gubernatorial Primary. I, eh, worked for the Newsom campaign, which was an interesting experience. It'll be interesting to see if Brown will even have to face a challenger when he actually files.

I used Google to search the forum and the only 2010 thread I could find was the one for the California gubernatorial race.

As for Giuliani, I would not fret too much about the guy getting a seat in New York. As we all recall, he wore out his welcome in New York City shortly before 9/11 and only gained a resurgence of popularity afterward because the media just couldn't help portraying him as the American equivalent of Churchill. Everything they used to do that is now debunked. Most people know now he wasn't marching around the towers to set a stoic example. Rather, the command center for the next terrorist attack had been set up in the WTC under his watch. Then there is the whole Kerik thing with the guy using rooms that were supposed to be for firefighters to bang hookers and it turned out he was a mobbed up high school drop out. After that, there's the little fact that Guiliani and the Republican Party basically used Ground Zero as a set for the 2004 RNCC after cutting all sorts of services and compensation for firefighters. Then we have the odd fact that it turns out the man has had a background intertwined with the mafia the entire time and lied to the FBI agents conducting the background checks for his US Attorney gig. He's an unlikable walking target range for the Democrats at this point.

On the presidential front, 2008 showed that, the more people get to know the man, the more they grow to dislike him. It kind of restores my faith in the public's ability to recognize and respond to a horrible human being, really.
The Republicans have not maintained any power. What the media and the administration both don't want to acknowledge is that the entire year has been an entirely inter-party squabble within the Democratic Party. (Obama only really bent over backwards to accommodate the Republicans during the stimulus package vote. When it became clear that the current Republican elected officials would rather see the country go down in flames than actually help "the other team" bag a win, they learned their lesson.) Everything right now is basically a fight between people in the House and Senate Democratic caucus who take their jobs seriously and people who are basically content with being paid interns for assorted special interests. Obama doesn't want to acknowledge this because it would require having a head-to-head confrontation with these interests, which is something he has demonstrated a complete aversion to doing. The media doesn't want to point this out because they answer to the same interests. What they want to do is portray this as an intractable Left v. Right debate and pretend that they're just impartial observers.

Rather than stay home, the thing to do here is get involved. If you live in a Democratic district that is served well by its representatives, support them. If it's a Democratic district that isn't being served well, get involved in the primary contest and support a candidate you think would better serve your interests. If it's a Republican district, do whatever you can to flip it.

The people with money in this country want you to believe you're insignificant and the situation is hopeless so that you will stay home. This outcome helps preserves the status quo. Right now, the country is seriously considering scrapping the Reaganomics platform that has crippled this country for the last 29 years. These elections are nothing short of referendums on what kind of country we are going to have for the next generation. Don't sit this out.

It's real, yes. The only thing more weirdly distracting than the haircut was his apparent feud with the Nation of Islam. I've never exactly been a fan of the Nation, but the Newsom for California experience has led me to actively loathe them.

California is exactly like that too. Outside of the greater LA area and the SF Bay Area, the state is entirely rural. Also, unlike NY, most of the LA area actually votes Republican. Orange County and my native region of the state are the last Republican strongholds. Over here, when you screw up in the slightest, the entire state turns on you pretty quickly. Davis was thrown out of office over a freaking automobile tax. I'd like to believe that a state that is so similar to us would recognize Mr. Noun-Verb-9/11 for what he is and respond accordingly.

No, actually, what drove him out of the race is embarrassingly obvious for everyone who worked on the campaign: nobody wanted to give Newsom money. Not even the Clinton endorsement brought any cash in for the campaign.

The sad truth is that the guy is personally unlikable and the Democratic establishment in California and the nation as a whole sees him as a major contributing factor to Kerry's loss in 2004 and the passage of Prop 8. It's really unfortunate because he is one of the leading crusaders for human rights in California--his support for marriage equality gets tons of attention but he also used his unique position as a county mayor to assemble a taskforce to go after human trafficking in SF--and he can work a crowd better than anyone I've ever met and I've met Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. He was also one of the main reasons San Francisco has not been firing teachers left and right like the rest of the state. The guy would have made a good governor. Hopefully, he works on his personal issues and rebuilding the bridges he burned with the people who control the money.

Dodd isn't seeking reelection.

People say Palin was the best gift the Republicans gave the Democrats in recent memory. I totally disagree. Unless you were both an Alaskan and intelligent, you couldn't really tell that Palin was a horrible choice for VP until she actually opened her mouth on national television. Michael Steele, on the other hand, is a disaster on paper. His CV should be the fucking word "disaster" in bold and 30 point font. The day he was announced as the new head of the RNC, my friends and I were laughing and giving each other high fives.

Good news! You got exactly that in the last election cycle with the election of Barack Obama.

Wow, he's wildly uniformed and xenophobic. Awesome.