Palin v. Obama

Frank Rich in the New York Times does his baffled best to analyze the phenomenon of Sarah Palin:

What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

What particularly astonishes Mr. Rich is that the premiere of Sarah Palin's Alaska on the telly got twice the number of viewer's as the season finale of Mad Men! (Since we don't ordinarily watch the telly, hence don't have any of the specialty channels, Sally and I crouch in front of the computer monitor to watch Mad Men, which I buy off Amazon at $1.99 the episode, the day after it airs ... or creeps through the cable, or whatever it does to get to more sophisticated homes.)

But here's the thing: if you take away the snark, everything Mr. Rich says about Ms. Palin applies equally to Barack Obama. They are, in my judgment, two empty suits, each with his or her besotted demographic. If they are candidates in 2012, then as far as I'm concerned it will be a reprise of 1968. That was the year I voted for the Farmer-Labor candidate. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Gray Lady meets Facebook

The media is suffering from its biennial bout of post-election depression, to the extent that the New York Times has done a think-piece on the Facebook Problem. It seems that some of our candidates had earlier posted dubious photos of themselves on the internet. I particularly admired Krystal Ball, who in addition to her marvelous name once had herself photographed mouthing what the Gray Lady delicately calls a "sex toy."

Krystal Ball lost, but Aaron Shock (another marvelous name!) is a newly minted Congressman despite or perhaps because of the photo above, in which he poses with a woman in wide-stance bra. (Don't you just love it that the New York Times obscures her face?) Well, of course he won! The women all voted for him because they admired his pecs, and the guys because they yearned to have that cleavage bracketing them at the pool. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

We're the ones we've been waiting for

Give Barack Obama his due: he nailed it with that prediction, though we had to wait two years for it to be fulfilled. Was there ever such a rebuke of a sitting president and his party? (Perhaps more the party than the president.) Even New Hampshire, once a totem of the GOP but in recent years a bastion of Good Thinking as refugees poured in from Massachusetts, has returned to the Republican fold--for its Washington delegation. We returned a Democrat to the state house, and my home district returned six Democrats to the thundering herd of our state legislature. There's a message in that: not yet does the United States have a two-party system with the Tea Party on the right and the Republicans on the left. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Tuesday's child is full of grace

But ah, Wednesday's child is full of woe, and so it seems it will be for the Democratic party on November 3. My favorite pollster says that the next Speaker of the House will be a Republican, while the Senate Majority Leader will probably be a Democrat--though he may not be Harry Reid! Perhaps more important, because this is a Census year and many Congressional districts will be redrawn, a lot of states will have newly minted Republican governors.

Great news for the GOP? Not really, because they'll probably overreach, just as Messrs Obama and Reid have done over the past two years, and Mme Pelosi for four. Scott Rasmussen goes on to say: "But none of this means that Republicans are winning. The reality is that voters in 2010 are doing the same thing they did in 2006 and 2008: They are voting against the party in power."

The Rasmussen pollsters report that 51 percent of likely voters think that the Democrats are the party of big government, while 51 percent view Republicans as the party of big business. Who does that leave to be the party of the people--the Tea Party? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford