Tuesday's retirement news may look worse than it really is for this year's elections

Democrats aren't dead yet
Tuesday's retirement news may look worse than it really is for this year's elections
By Mike Madden


WASHINGTON -- At the White House Wednesday, press secretary Robert Gibbs wasn't about to play political prophet.

"Look, it is hard to look into the crystal ball 11 months from Election Day," Gibbs said. Hard -- and also, if you're a Democrat these days, a little scary. The surprising news Tuesday night that Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., wouldn't run again was followed not long afterward by the slightly less surprising news that his Connecticut counterpart Chris Dodd would join him in retirement. Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter announced his retirement, too, and just for good measure, Michigan Lt. Gov. John Cherry said he would sit out the 2010 election as well. Republicans and the media alike declared the sky was falling for the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

"The real question is whether Harry Reid, now the Senate's most vulnerable Democrat, will follow Chris Dodd's lead and step aside," Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said in a statement. (Take this one to Vegas, in Reid's home state -- he won't.)

Clear away the overheated rhetoric, though, and the reality in Washington looks a little different. Sure, Democrats will struggle in November's elections -- which they were already going to do anyway. The timing is bad, because all the retirement announcements stacked up on top of each other. So the "optics," as political operatives say, are terrible. But the Democrats aren't actually in substantially worse shape Wednesday than they were Monday.

Take Connecticut. Dodd may be a beloved member of the Senate Democratic caucus, but there was almost no way he was going to win another term. His ill-fated move to Iowa during the 2008 presidential primaries, his sweetheart mortgage deal from Countrywide and his work to enable AIG to issue bonuses despite billions of dollars in federal aid left him the most endangered incumbent senator in either party. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, though, entered the campaign Wednesday with at least a 30 point lead over his GOP opponents, according to one poll taken before Dodd bowed out.

"Let's get real here," one Senate Democratic leadership aide told Salon. "We had a huge problem, and now it's gone."

With Blumenthal in much better shape than Dodd, the party won't have to devote anywhere near as much money to holding Connecticut as it might have otherwise. Buying ads in the state means buying ads on New York television; Democrats say the cash they'll save in Connecticut could help out in races in Ohio, Missouri or Kentucky.

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http://www.salon.com/news/politics/2010_elections/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/01/06/sky_not_falling

Blumenthal's popularity is the good news of the day!

be a miserable lot, in and out of politics.

Well, maybe except for those who creep out of the box, like Craig, Ensign, Foley, et et et al al al!

:rofl:

They are not as confident as they were before. Actually, they are not confident at all anymore that a Rethug will win here in CT now. That is all I need to know.