People in California, Delaware and New York? You deserve everything you get. As for Nevada, what can I say except that Sharon Angle was fighting against the machine.
With still more votes to count, we may see more seats changing hands to Republicans. With a 59 seat pick up, this wasn't a message to Obama and the democrats, it was a repudiation of his agenda. Senate races in Alaska and Washington are still too close to call and still may count towards Republican gains.
And the apparatchik bloggers and the left wing media crowd are already spinning this repudiation of the anointed one's agenda as being ready to "compromise", or "reaching across the aisle" and "bipartisanship".
Not quite.
Where was this compromise and reaching across the aisle when the democrats were running things since 2006? They shoved health care down our throats. They passed Cap and Trade in the House. They passed a number of other legislation under the radar and all without compromise or reaching across the aisle.
If there was a message in last night's elections, it was one of no compromise. What's good for the goose...
Obama has two directions he can go, as I see it.
A. ) He can continue to go full steam ahead and fight the Republican led House, in which case he'll try to pin the blame of not compromising on the GOP and try to use it against them during the next election cycle in 2012.
B.) He can move towards the center, as Bill Clinton did. In this case, he'll alienate his far left base even more and dashing all hopes of a second term.
As for those incumbent senators who narrowly won, it certainly sent a message for those who will be up for re-election in 2012. When legislation is passed in the House and moves to the Senate, those senators will be thinking twice before they vote. After witnessing what happened last night, they are not about to rubber stamp Obama's agenda as they did for the last four years, knowing that they may be next for retirement.
What about those democrat senators that vote so close to the Republican line that it's hard to tell what party they are in? My guess is that they will be courted to flip sides. Then there are those two independents. They may caucus with democrats, but, Lieberman is known for voting along Republican lines quite often.
What we need to hope for in this Congressional split is gridlock. In this case, nobody can get things done, thus preventing any of Obama's agenda from getting anywhere. Gridlock is good.
What concerns me at this point are those establishment Republicans who would try to co-opt the fresh faces in the House and the Senate, such as Trent Lott. This cannot be allowed to happen. If it does, then we'll back to where we were that ultimately led to GOP defeat in 2006 when we couldn't tell who the Republicans were.
In closing, I have a message for Karl Rove. Christine O'Donnell may have been defeated, but, if she had not defeated Castle, he would most likely have lost to Coons anyway. What Christine O'Donnell did was galvanize conservatives in Delaware and proved that sticking to those principles can work wonders. Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman lost, because they were willing to compromise and that's not what Americans were wanting when they went to the polls last night.
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