Wouldn't you know that "Cuckoo Ken" Cuccinelli was a pioneer of the Art of the Election Night No-Concession-Call?

Oh no, Cuckoo Ken's feelings were hurt?

by Ken

Am I the only one not to have noticed that the political concession speech is going the way of Judge Crater?

At least I have an excuse. Although there was a time in my life, a really long time, when I was an Election Night junkie, just couldn't get enough, in recent years -- no doubt in response to too many nights of emotional devastation -- I adopted a new strategy for Election Night: something close to a boycott. In a good year I manage to get through the entire night without peeking. (Hey, it's not as if the results are going to be kept secret!)

This inquiry by washingtonpost.com "Fix" reporter Sean Sullivan was clearly inspired by the recent concession-call-free primary defeat of Washington DC Mayor Vincent Gray, the historical record takes us quickly back to one of the vilest pieces of filth to sully American politics (quite an achievement when you consider the quantity and vileness of the pieces of filth who've risen to the challenge), former Virginia AG "Cuckoo Ken" Cuccinelli, who performed the feat the night of his defeat by current Gov. Terry McAuliffe. He was, it appears, miffed by the McAuliffe campaign's suggestion that his opponent would try to restrict birth control. From which one concludes that Cuckoo Ken has never listened to the wingnutty insanity and personal filth that has emanated from his piehole throughout his career in public life.

Anyway, in case you missed it, here's the scoop (lotsa links onsite):

THE FIX

The death of the political concession call is upon us

By Sean Sullivan

It's the political equivalent of shaking hands at the end of the big game. But the concession call may be falling out of vogue more and more. Just ask D.C. Councilmember Muriel Bowser, who just won the Democratic nomination for mayor.

Briefing reporters Wednesday, Bowser said she still had not spoken with Mayor Vincent C. Gray, whom she defeated in Tuesday's primary. It's not the first time a runner-up has declined to make the congratulatory call to the winning candidate that has long been customary. You don't have to reach back far into history to find at least a pair of other high-profile candidates who refused to pick up the phone.

After losing to now-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) after a bruising 2013 campaign, Republican Ken Cuccinelli never made the call. Two weeks after the election, Cuccinelli still appeared to harbor negative feelings. He explained to The Washington Post that it was McAuliffe's conduct during the campaign that prompted him to buck tradition. The Republican pointed to claims that he would outlaw common forms of birth control which he said were false.

Hard feelings could also be felt a mile away in the 2012 Republican presidential primary. After wins in the early nominating states of Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida, eventual nominee Mitt Romney never heard from former speaker Newt Gingrich.

"The other candidates all called," Romney told NBC's "Today" at the time. "I guess Speaker Gingrich doesn’t have our phone number."

Ouch. Romney said he called to congratulate Gingrich after he won South Carolina. Ouch x 2. Gingrich's explanation for his silence? Romney didn't deserve a call.

A refusal to make nice is more notable after a primary than it is following a general election. The day after winning the party's nod, candidates need to unite their party behind them. Any signs of lingering rifts could threaten to undercut their standing heading into the general election and make them look weak.

It's not like the conversations that do happen mean all that much. As Mark Leibovich wrote in the New York Times in 2010, they are often superficial exchanges. But not going though the motions -- especially in the age of Twitter and other social media that have applied an extra layer of scrutiny on campaigns -- instantly threatens to open a candidate up to charges of sour grapes.

The concession call isn't going away overnight. None of the above examples would be notable unless the obligatory conversations still happened in the vast majority of cases.
But the next time a candidate loses a high stakes campaign, don't think they will automatically pick up the phone.

Lame-duck Washington DC Mayor Vincent Gray is seen here not making a concession call.

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My pick for Election Night is Brahms, but I guess we ought to at least try to focus a little

Vice President Biden appears to be arguing forcefully that the pathetic homeless guy next to him shouldn't lose his food stamps. Oh wait, on closer examination the guy turns out to be Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. Well, if he's entitled to food stamps, he shouldn't lose them either, should he?

by Ken

I usually try to keep myself occupied on Election Night, since the likelihood is usually pretty strong that most of what happens is going to be upsetting. Tonight I've got the first couple of hours covered with a concert of the Brahms Second and Third Piano Quartets, music I love a lot, and if I take the bus (or rather buses) home that'll lop off another big chunk of time, and then . . . well, I was nodding off during this week's Boardwalk Empire episode, so I really should watch that again.

Nevertheless, it is Election Night, and I feel as if I ought to be contributing something electionesque. It's hard to get terribly worked up, even though there are important races and issues on many ballots. But most of those contests are pretty well decided. Still, I guess there will be people poring over the results, if only because they're genetically wired, or perhaps paid to do so, or (for the lucky few) both, and even I have a few results I'm curious about. But I think our best bet here in trying to care is to seek help from the pros.

For example, Washingtonpost.com's Sean Sullivan offers us "five biggest things to watch":

1. Will Virginia Democrats make history with a sweep?
2. The business vs. tea party showdown in Alabama.
3. Chris Christie’s margin of victory.
4. Detroit is poised to elect its first white mayor in four decades.
5. Ballot measures in Colorado, Washington state and New Jersey.

Some thoughts:

(1) I started out writing a lot about the Virginia governor's race, when it looked as if Virginia Republicans were going to hold their noses and vote for their current nutjob-slimebag attorney general, "Cuckoo Ken" Cuccinelli. For a while the Cuckoo Man did make some modest efforts to try to sound vaguely sane, but his heart clearly wasn't in it (or maybe sounding vaguely sane just isn't within his range of capabilities), and despite the hideous awfulness of his Democratic opponent, Terry "The Bagman" McAuliffe, which you would think would have incentivized GOP voters to trudge to the polls and do what they had to, there were mounting signs of revulsion and outright revolt. Apparently you can push those folks only so far. And then the polls started to get away from Cuckoo Ken and his even nuttier running mate, E. W. Jackson (possibly the only candidate the party could have come up with who can make Cuckoo Ken look, if the light is really bad and you squint hard enough, almost sane).

The Virginia sweep of which Sean speaks would have not just Cuckoo Ken and even-cuckoo-er E.J. succumbing to their Democratic opponents, Terry the Bagman and State Sen. Ralph Northam, but also the race to succeed Cuckoo Ken as state AG going the Dems' way. This race is still up for grabs, and while the possibility is strong that large numbers of Virginia Republican and independent voters may simply sit this election out (and who could blame them?), I'm thinking that the very impossibility of the other GOP statewide candidates may actually win the race for Republican Mark Obenshain over Democrat Mark Herring. We're hearing a lot of talk about ticket-splitting on Obenshain's behalf, and I can't help thinking that there are a lot of Virginia Republicans desperate for someon they can vote for, and in 2013, Obenshain is about all there is.

It's true that a lot of Virginia Republicans may well sit this election out, and who could blame them? Large numbers of highly visible state Republicans have already made clear publicly that asking them to vote for Cuckoo Ken is simply asking too much. If I'm wrong, though, and Herring wins along with Terry the Bagman and Ralph Northam, "it will," says Sean, "mark the first Democratic statewide sweep in Virginia in 24 years and the first time in 44 years the party has controlled all five statewide offices." (He points out the both of the states U.S. senators are Democrats. They're pretty useless Democrats, even by the low standard set by Terry the Bagman, but presumably Harry Reid will vouch for their party affiliation.)

(2) The Alabama jamboree has a certain comic charm. It's Teabaggers vs. Economic Predators for the soul of the Republican Party, "the first big test pitting business vs. the tea party since the two sides found themselves on opposite sides in the government shutdown showdown."

The Chamber of Commerce has spent at least $199,000 to try to help Bradley Byrne win the Republican nomination in Alabama’s 1st district special election. Companies like Aflac, AT&T and Home Depot have given Byrne thousands more. Still, he’s no shoo-in to win the GOP runoff Tuesday. That’s because of Dean Young’s insurgent campaign. A controversial Christian conservative aligned with the tea party, Young has lacked resources and help from national Republican groups. But he’s tapped into a palpable anger with Washington in the Mobile-based district, and he just might spring an upset. If Byrne wins, it will embolden business-minded Republicans in other races on the map. If Young wins, it will be a big victory for tea party grass-roots activists. The GOP nominee is expected to cruise to victory in the Dec. 17 general election.

From where I sit, although you could view this clash of the titan-surrogates as win-win, since either way some horrible people will receive a well-deserved slap in the face, it seems to me more like lose-lose. After all, either way a notably horrible person will win, and the even more horrible people behind him will be celebrating.

(3) As for the NJ gov race, I find it hard to get wrapped up in "margin of victory" nailbiting -- too many factors go into determining it in a race that has been decided as long as this one has, which is to say from the get-go. We have a race kind of like this here in NYC, where Republican Joe Lhota is so far behind progressive Democrat Bill de Blasio that a potentially large number of potential de Blasio voters may simply have seen no reason to trouble themselves with voting. (The NYT's "Afternoon Update" e-mail included: "New York Sees Light Turnout After Lopsided Mayoral Polls.")

Hey, I wish as much as anyone that the reality were different with that big blowhard Chris Christie, but his political instincts at present look better than just about anybody's in the country, and you can hardly blame New Jersey voters for feeling more secure with him than with anything that comes out of the state's Democratic Party off its woeful performance these last four years. I don't mean that as a knock on the actual Dem candidate, Barbara Buono, who seems to me quite praiseworthy, but you can't call her a "good candidate" since not a soul in the state has any idea who she is, except the Democrat running against their trusted Fat Man.

In any case, we know the Fat Man is going to win big, and we know that he has to think about the 2016 presidential situation. But does anyone really believe that his margin of victory is going to make a major difference? (Unless it's, say, only 5 or 6 percent, but does anyone see that happening?) To scared-shitless Republicans, Governor Chris is already their hope of salvation; to the Republicans who control the presidential nomination, however, he will remain about as acceptable a candidate as Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.

(4) Sean clearly has a bug about the racial angle in Detroit, which featured prominently in the piece he directs us back to from August, before the mayoral primary, "5 Reaaons you should care about the Detroit mayor's race." Three of the reasons why we should care were: "2. A field of 16 (!)," "4. Duggan? Dugeon?" (a confusion, quite likely deliberate, between the names of two write-in candidates), and "5. This one could take a while," because of the need to produce usable totals for the write-in votes. Now these are all facts about the primary race, but it's hard to see how any of them are reasons why we should care.

The other two reasons why we should care were "1. Detroit’s bankruptcy" and "3. First white mayor since 1974?" The first is of course a huge deal, but Sean himself wrote, "The next mayor will be under under a statewide and even national spotlight, given the backdrop against they will enter office. And it remains to be seen what, if anything, they will be able to accomplish." Again, then, kind of hard to pinpoint our reason for caring. And as for why we should care about Detroit having its first white mayor since 1974, well, apparently that was thought to be self-evident, because all we were told about was the electoral challenges between former Detroit Medical Center CEO Mike Duggan and the state house. I'm not suggesting that race isn't part of Detroit's struggles, but I would have thought that those struggles are monumental enough that they don't need to be compounded with an automatic race angle.

(5) As to those ballot measures in Colorado, Washington state and New Jersey:

As our friends over at GovBeat noted Monday, voters in six states are weighing in Tuesday on initiatives and referenda. On the line in Colorado is a marijuana tax package and an income tax hike worth about $1 billion together. Two other notable measures: A amendment to the New Jersey state constitution to raise the minimum wage that is likely to pass, and a vote in Washington state over whether genetically modified food must be labeled.

Fair enough, but I won't be losing sleep over this. Tell me tomorrow how it all turned out.

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"Wake up," Rachel Maddow says to right-wingers whose reality bubble has been punctured. "It will be a painful process, but it will be good for the whole country"

APOLOGIES FOR THE LACK OF PARAGRAPHING IN THIS POST, but the new software forced on us by our host, Blogger, is the worst software in the history of the universe. I've been struggling with it for a couple of months now, and I'm very near the end. I have tried putting the paragraph breaks back in every way I know how about ten times. Nobody at either Blogspot or its current owner, Google, seems to give the slightest damn about the screeching incompetence of their godforsaken pile-of-crap product. I can't begin to tell how much I hate them, and what horrible things I wish for them. I had a choice of not putting this post up or allowing it to post in this form. I'm still not sure I made the right choice. [UPDATE: I just noticed that I left a whole word out of the post title. This is because with this software there is literally no way to see the entire title until the post goes up. It's what you get when software is designed by people who are too dumb to qualify as idiots.] -- Ken

Eye-popping moments in TV history: OMG, the Great Socialist Conspiracy has found its way into the heart of Fox Noise! Noiseman Bret Baier ushers Election Night co-anchor Megyn Kelly off on the long march to the far, far-away Decision Room in an attempt to "figure out what the deal is" with the clearly socialist decision-makers' call of Ohio for President Obama. You can see it all in the Rachel Maddow Show clip below.

BRET: Here's what we're going to do. Karl Rove said that we should figure out what the deal is with this Decision Desk, and the Decision Desk is in a different place. Megan, I will escort you down the steps here so you can go and interview them.
MEGYN: All right.
BRET: Watch your step.
MEGYN: Thank you, thank you, I don't want to fall, in front of all these millions of people.
BRET: Okay. Megyn is going to go to the Decision Desk and interview them.
MEGYN: They're way down the hall. We'll do a little interrogation and see if they stand by their call.

"We have a two-party system in government, and the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country.

"There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. . . . If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation."

-- Rachel Maddow, on her show last night

by Ken

I had to be importuned by colleagues that even those of us who hate watching clips need to watch the one we're about to see, from last night's Rachel Maddow Show. Those colleagues turned out to be right. You'll have to endure a commercial first, but then a whole bunch of remarkable things happen, starting with extended consideration of the good things that happened in Tuesday night's election results, including due consideration of the relative small list of bad things that happened. Watch it; you'll enjoy every second.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

We're going to be concerned here with the last few minutes, in which Rachel tackles the crucial issue of the damage done to the country as a whole by the movement-wide right-wing abandonment of any connection to "the factual lived truth of the world," as Rachel puts it later. By the time Rachel shows us the dramatic Decision Room bunker scene we saw above, she has shown us a collage of Far Right crackpundits -- life forms like Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, George F. Will, "Chucky" Krauthammer, Dick Morris, and Larry "Krazyman" Kudlow -- assuring viewers in real time that the scenario about to unfold was a Republican triumph, and possibly one of landslide proportions.   (For the record, Chucky the Hammer was actually within visual contact of reality, forecasting a Romney victory of a mere 1 percent in the popular vote and a narrow margin in the electoral vote. Considering how far removed Chucky is from reality, we can measure t he distance from which the others are viewing events on the planet Earth.) LET'S GET BACK TO MEGYN KELLY'S LONG MARCH TO THE FOX NOISE DECISION ROOM This amazing scne we've seen was instigated by Fox Noise "political contributor" Karl Rove, who fomented on on-air uprising against the Decision Desk's call of Ohio for the president. No doubt Fox viewers expected to see the decision-making terrorists groveling in shame, admitting to their act of sabotage and preparing for transfer to Guantánamo. It's not clear whether Megyn was authorized to use deadly force if necessary against the terrorist infiltrators holed up in the Decision Room. Luckily, she didn't have to machine-gun her way in, and promptly challenged the terrorist infiltrators to defend their propaganda bombshell. One of the rebel leaders declared his unit "actually quite comfortable" with their shocking Ohio call. "There just aren't enough Republican votes left," says another. Pressed by Megyn to express their degree of certainty, Turncoat No. 2 pronounces it "99.95 percent certainty." Let's pick up here with Rachel's commentary.

Ohio really did go to President Obama last night, and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately president of the United States -- again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to oversample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us; it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone's guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And U.N. election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial-services industry in this country are not the same thing as Communism. Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for Democrats, for very obvious reasons. But it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country, we have a two-party system in government, and the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems, and we debate between those possible solutions, and by the process of debate we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides, about real problems in the real country, should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum-sealed, door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good, and denying the factual lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate between competing feasible ideas about real problems. Last night the Republicans got shellacked. And they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real, humiliating time, not believe it even as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside -- if they do not want to get shellacked again. And that will be a painful process for them, I'm sure, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we're counting on you. Wake up. There's real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let's move on from there. If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations, everybody. Big night!

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"I have been a harsh critic of Barack Obama . . . but on [every] matter of serious contention in this election, Mitt Romney is decidedly worse" (Robert Scheer)

Tom Toles in the Washington Post [click to enlarge]

"I have been a harsh critic of Barack Obama for continuing that bipartisan capitulation to Wall Street, but on this and every other matter of serious contention in this election, Mitt Romney is decidedly worse."

-- Robert Scheer, in his Truthdig column "Vote for the B-"

by Ken

As I wrote last Thursday, after work today I head straight the Samuel Friedman Theatre on West 47th Street for Doug Hughes's Manhattan Theatre Club-on-Broadway staging of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's adaptation of Ibsen's Enemy of the People, carefully scheduled to keep me out of the line of fire of tonight's electoral media circus, which I don't think my nerves are up to.

(The stress is certainly not made easier by the fact that, at the presidential level, today's contest has no good outcome. But as Robert Scheer sets out so eloquently in the column, "Vote for the B-," that we'll get to eventually, there is one outcome that is measurably more horrible, significantly more horrible, than the other.)

Since the show is at 7, and I gather is a heavily chopped-down "adaptation" of what Ibsen wrote, I'm afraid it will put me back on the streets a good couple of hours earlier than I would wish. One thing I hope I won't be doing as a delay tactic is any significant eating. Since we've been back in our long-blacked-out Downtown Manhattan office (most of us were here Sunday, the day the lights came back on, to do whatever had to be done to have several of our magazines ready for the printer Monday morning) the office has been overflowing with food. Our version of "crisis mentality," I guess.

Even as I write I'm thinking about the remnants of the lasagna and the meatless ziti baked by one of my coworkers, who explained that she figured those of our coworkers still without power might be happy to have something hot to eat. Well, I never lost power at home, while I've still been delighted by her thoughtfulness. It's amazing how much mass transit has been restored given the devastation we suffered last week, but the commute has remained, shall we say, a challenge, and with the frigid turn the weather has taken, either the lasagna or the ziti fresh out of the microwave has been a treat.

Yes, we have power, and our computers and Internet connections are humming. One thing we don't have, and apparently won't for a while, is phones that connect to the outside world. But then, doesn't everyone have a cell phone? (Not me, actually. It's buried somewhere at home.) Another thing we don't have is heat. (Our office manager thoughtfully ordered in a wagonload of little space heaters, but when a bunch of them were turned on, one of the circuts blew, and the heaters were promptly reboxed and collected.)

My original thought was that if I get home around, say, 11, I could just flip the TV on and get the lay of the land, then either unplug myself or resign myself to riding out the storm. Now I'm thinking maybe I can leave all of that to the morning. if I'm home early, I've still got some of my Sunday-night TV pile-up stored on the DVR. I've already watched the Good Wife, Homeland, Boardwalk Empire, and Upstairs Downstairs, but that still leaves the Dexter and Tremé, where it's safe to venture that neither President-in-Waiting Willard nor his Boy Companion Paul will be mentioned -- not to mention the hundreds of other people running for assorted offices today.

I hope the rest of the country is doing better than we here in NYC are. At my little two-election-district polling place in Washington Heights, by shortly after 8am both ballot scanning machines were kaput. I had already realized, though, nothing on my ballot was really being seriously contested; we had several bruising contests, but they were all decided in the primaries. (I see that we weren't alone in Northern Manhattan: "Uptown Voters Face Broken Scanning Machines and Confusion While Voting.")

FOR THOSE OF US BEING MADE TO FEEL THAT A
STRONG PREFERENCE FOR OBAMA OVER WILLARD . . .

. . . makes us unwitting stooges of the oligarchy -- made to feel so by people I suddenly realize may not be as smart as I once thought, not to mention nowhere near as smart as they think -- I'm hard put to imagine the stakes in today's election being explained better than Robert Sheer does it in his Truthdig column today (which I read via Nation of Change). Of course this pass-along comes too late to be of any pradtical value, but I like to think that sagacity has some value that goes beyond the time-bound practical.

Vote for the B-

By Robert Scheer
TRUTHDIG / OP-ED
Published: Tuesday 6 November 2012

It’s crunch time, and I want to be on record, just in case some still undecided independent voter cares what I think. And one might, since I did write a decidedly nonpartisan book on the origins of the economic crisis entitled “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.” I have been a harsh critic of Barack Obama for continuing that bipartisan capitulation to Wall Street, but on this and every other matter of serious contention in this election, Mitt Romney is decidedly worse.

A vote for Obama in a swing state is a no-brainer, because, on a host of issues, including immigration, women’s rights, gay rights, health care, campaign finance, income inequality, tax breaks for the rich and the legitimacy of trade unions, there is a vast partisan difference that should not be ignored. It matters greatly who appoints an anticipated two justices to the Supreme Court, which is already dominated by right-wing ideologues.

In a state where a protest vote will not elect Romney, a vote for the Green Party’s admirable Jill Stein, the consistent Libertarian Gary Johnson, or the populist Rocky Anderson sends an appropriate but measured signal of contempt for the sorry state of our two-party system.

That disgust is warranted by the fact that this president has followed the broad ideological outlines of his predecessor on national security. Witness the continuing assault on due process that is the island prison of Guantanamo and the killing of innocent civilians through drone attacks, as well as the unwarranted Nixonian persecution of alleged whistle-blowers Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

But on all of that, Obama is the lesser evil compared to Romney, who has promised to increase military spending to fight a new Cold War that might, under his stewardship, turn hot against China, Russia, the forlorn Palestinians and anyone else with whom he can pick a fight. Romney is as dangerous as he is inexperienced in such matters. To compensate for his ignorance, he has turned to the same pack of neoconservative ideologues that lied us into Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

On economic policy, Romney has attempted to smear Obama as some kind of big government socialist, although the former vulture capitalist would surely have wasted just as much money as Obama rescuing his friends on Wall Street. Neither candidate would stop the Federal Reserve from continuing to purchase toxic assets to save the banks from their own folly. The candidates split on a bailout of the auto industry, with Obama helping save some decent American jobs, and they disagree about how much the obscenely wealthy should pay in taxes, although sometimes Romney disagrees with himself on that score.

Obama sold out to Wall Street when he appointed Lawrence Summers, who had pocketed more than $8 million in bank and hedge fund fees while serving as a top Obama campaign adviser, to be his key White House expert on the economy. This was an egregious error vastly compounded when he appointed as his Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, former head of the New York Fed and faithful ally of the Bush administration in filling the lifeboats to capacity with bankers. However, Romney blasts Obama for not being solicitous enough in catering to Wall Street greed and defines the extremely minor reforms of Dodd-Frank as an attack on capitalism, when it is anything but.

As Gretchen Morgenson, the sharpest business journalist of our day, noted in a recent column in The New York Times: “Many Americans probably think the Dodd-Frank financial reform law will protect taxpayers from future bailouts. Wrong. In fact, Dodd-Frank actually widened the federal safety net for big institutions. Under that law, eight more giants were granted the right to tap the Federal Reserve for funding when the crisis hits.”

But Romney finds objectionable even the slightest improvement in transparency and accountability in Dodd-Frank, including a much-needed consumer protection agency championed by Elizabeth Warren. He absolves Wall Street and the Bush administration that let greed run wild of any responsibility for the economic mess and, indeed, seeks to cut funding for programs that aid its victims.

Romney’s talk of the deficit is specious. He would spend multiples of Obama’s stimulus on the military, alone, while relegating the unemployed, disabled and impoverished to the hope of charity and warm weather. Consider the millions of Americans kept fed by Obama’s hard-won extensions of unemployment benefits and food stamps during the worst lows of the recession. How would President Romney have handled such a crisis?

To employ the vernacular used in my day job teaching college students, I give Obama a generous B- grade for initiating a national health care plan that, while flawed, is a start, ending discrimination against gays in the military, easing the student loan crisis, signing equal pay legislation and appointing reasonable Supreme Court justices, among other achievements. Meanwhile, the rapacious capitalist turned candidate Romney—poster boy of the 1 percent—denigrates the less economically fortunate among us while growing filthy rich by slicing and dicing good American jobs out of existence and exploiting every tax loophole to aggrandize his own fortune. He earns a solid F and makes Obama look quite good in comparison.

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I've lined up the safest company I could think of for Election Night: Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen's battling Stockmann brothers: It's entirely possible that Richard Thomas (right) as Mayor Peter S -- seen here with Boyd Gaines as Dr. Thomas S -- indeed "does everything but twirl his mustache as the bogeyman" in what Bloomberg's Jeremy Gerard describes as "Doug Hughes’s clipped vaudeville of a production" of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People now on Broadway. But I'd still rather be there on Election Night than chained to the TV and the computer.

by Ken

So the ticket is bought, and can't be exchanged or refunded. But I think I got this one right.

For some time now the very useful online discount service Goldstar has been offering less-than-half-price (before you add in their fee, that is) tickets for the production, and for a larger and larger assortment of future performances, which tells you that their tickets aren't selling like hot cakes. And every time I've seen an announcement I've paused.

It's a funny play, Enemy of the People, and I don't mean funny in the ha-ha sense, though I note that the Goldstar blurb describes the adaptation used here, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, as "scintillating and surprisingly humorous." It's a play that hardly ever seems to come to us except in "adaptation," and the adapters always seem to reduce what I recall in the original as an exceedingly complex situation to cartoonlike dimension. (As august a personage as Arthur Miller certainly managed it in his version, which used to get a lot of play but mercifully seems to have slunk into the shadows.)

This by itself isn't that remarkable. Lots of plays can be stripped of their complexity this way. One often thinks it's the mission of our commercial (and, alas, noncommercial) theater to strip plays of their complexity. What's fascinating about Enemy of the People is that the cartoonification can be performed in either direction, making either the gung-ho pro-development mayor or the self-righteously inflexible whstle-blowing doctor the object of scorn.

(You'll recall that Mayor Peter was the driving force behind the health spa built around the economically battered town's spring which looks to be its salvation, while Dr. Thomas is the incorruptible man of science who discovers that the water is contaminated and the spa has to be shut down.)

It's ages since I read an unadapted version of the play (or at least as close as I can get to one, since I don't know any Norwegian and so can only access it in translation), and that will be a good project for these next couple of weeks. Still, it's certainly my recollection that it is in fact the complexity rather than any cartoonish two-dimensional reduction thereof that fascinated Ibsen. The mayor is fighting for the survival of the community, after all, while the doctor seems so lost in his self-righteousness that he doesn't seem to see much beyond his moral purity, and in fact treats his family rather appallingly.

My natural impulse, then, is to approach any new production of the play with deep skepticism, and the ballyhoooing of some revelatory new adaptation tends to amp it up. And yet, that's a pretty good pair of actors cast in the lead roles, and you'd think that the production could hardly fail to engage some of the social and human issues that crackle in the play, which you'll note has an awful lot of topicality these 130 years later.

So I kept tabling those offer announcements. Even the "bargain" price of $63 (including the $8 fee) wasn't that persuasive a sweetener, since the announced "full price" of $120 just makes me giggle.

And then this morning I was looking at the latest set of dates made available at the discount price, running well into November, and a dim light lit in some dark recess of my brain. Might there be an early-November Tuesday performance on offer? Like, say, the first Tuesday of the month? Sure enough, there was. To find out whether there were tickets still available for that evening I had to log in (site registration is free; you only pay when you actually buy something), so I did, and there were. I thought about it a little, and pulled the trigger.

It's one of those modern-day early weeknight curtains, at 7pm, which isn't ideal. According to Jeremy Gerard's Bloomberg review the show has been hacked down to two hours (is that with intermission(s)?), so I could be back out on 47th Street not much after 9pm, which is too early, even adding in the 45 minutes or so it'll take me to get home. I may be forced to shell out more bucks to get something to eat, as a delaying tactic. But by that hour the streets of New York will be filled with people who know more than I want to know about the day's outcomes, meaning I may have to fight like the dickens to avoid being informed before I'm ready.

I understand that by that hour all sorts of contests in the East of interest to me will have been decided. And that even after whatever arbitrary "late enough" time I pick -- I'm kind of gravitating to 11pm ET, when the polls in California will have closed -- there are bound to be at least some and possibly many races still undecided. But the one thing my nervous system isn't up to this year is that hours-long drip-drip-drip of information intermingled with speculation. (By the way, if you need information about poll opening or closing times, Ballotpedia has a state-by-state list.)

Obviously I've got a bad feeling about this election. Of course I don't recall an election when I didn't have a bad feeling. The thing is, in nearly all those cases the bad feeling proved well-founded. I'm not even pretending that my strategy will make bad news easier to swallow. The news will be what the news will be.

I remember there was one Election Night when I employed this very strategy -- successfully cordoned myself off from all news till it could be delivered in a single blow. And I remember that it was quite horrible. On the other hand, I don't recall which election this was -- and that small measure of obliviousness seems to me worth targeting. Not to mention being spared that infernal evening-long drip-drip-drip. Sure, even in the worst-case scenario there all but certain to be bits of good news, and those I'll be pleased to accept as happy surprises.

I'm certainly not endorsing my Enemy of the People stratagem. It's entirely possible that I'll leave the theater in a rage. But even that could be a good thing, insofar as it takes my mind off . . . you know, the other thing. (On the other hand, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised! Strange things do happen.) If you want to check around and see what else might be happening in your bailiwick which might keep you out of the line of media fire during those agonizing evening hours, believe me, I'll understand.

Failing all else, you could read Enemy of the People. Now all I have to do is find a readable English rendering of what Ibsen actually wrote. There must be one of them, mustn't there?

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It might be possible to be more hopeful about the Obama administration if the cancer on this presidency were removed

With Thursday morning update:
Some smart pundits surprise me

"We have a cancer--within, close to the Presidency, that's growing. It's growing daily. It's compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself."

-- White House Counsel John Dean to President

Richard Nixon, March 21, 1973

by Ken

I know there's a tremendous clamor for my election post-mortems. Okay, "tremendous clamor" may be a slight overstatement. Well, it remains entirely possible that somebody out there is waiting on pins and needles.

As it happens, I have very little to add to my pre-mortems. Given how little was slated to happen of tea-leaf-readable significance, it was hardly going out on a limb to predict that the lesson drawn in the Village would be the erroneous one: that it's time for everyone to make a mad dash for the mythical Center -- everyone, that is, except the rampaging teabaggers, who are poised to inherit the earth. Why was that a safe prediction? Because that's the only lesson the Villagers ever admit.

Of course the totally kaput Creigh Deeds gubernatorial campaign in Virginia surely argues the opposite lesson: that Democrats are going to have an increasingly difficult time winning elections while standing for nothing, especially against candidates like now-Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell who have their shit together, projecting confidence to an electorate that will have plenty of time to learn how scary this guy is once he moves into the Executive Mansion. After Deeds's seemingly flawless Democratic primary campaign, he seemed to shrivel into a ghost fleeing his own shadow. Voters across Virginia's political spectrum noticed.

The one big surprise yesterday was the surprisingly poor showing of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose take-no-prisoners campaign was clearly designed to lead to a coronation rather than mere reelection. What I'm seeing now is a 50.61%-to-46.04% margin over City Comptroller Bill Thompson, which is a shocker to one and all. I don't think I would have wanted to be around the mayor today, with his famously short fuse. I like to think he had all those high-price consultants he bought up -- to make sure none of them would be available to potential opponents -- out in City Hall Park today on trash pickup detail.

I kind of suspected something might be afoot when I voted yesterday on the way to work. There were actually people other than the election officials at my polling place. There is, of course, some feeling that a tide of anti-rich-guys feeling in the land worked against both Mayor Bloomberg and, across the river, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, perhaps dooming his reelection bid.

I think I made my position about the mayor clear ("Why I wouldn't vote for Mayor Bloomberg if he paid me -- and you know, that's not such a bad idea, Mr. Mayor"). I had no trouble voting for Bill Thompson, whom I've always seen to be an exceptionally decent, thoughtful pol. (Mayor Bloomberg is on record thinking pretty much the same thing, until it suited his purposes to spend kajillons of Bloomberg-bucks on character assassination that he surely knows to have been totally without merit. It was just one of the things that made the Bloomberg campaign one of near-Nixonian hatefulness.)

The most interesting post-mortem to the mayoral race is the tart response from an unnamed White House slasher to the post-election speculation of New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, himself a candidate for the Democratic mayoral nomination until he was blown out by the Bloomberg Billions, as to what might have happened if the Democratic mayoral candidate had gotten a tiny bit of support from traditional Democratic bases, like the Democratic president. I think it's worth quoting a bit of Ben Smith's Politico account:

Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s stunningly narrow re-election in New York was a moral defeat for the billionaire incumbent, and a profound embarrassment for a Democratic establishment – from the White House on down — that abandoned his rival, City Comptroller Bill Thompson, as a hopeless loser.

Bloomberg’s meager five-point win left Democrats pondering what might have been if New York’s Democratic donors hadn’t turned their back on Thompson, if its politicians had worked for him, and most of all if President Barack Obama had offered anything more than the lamest words of praise.

“Maybe one of those Corzine trips could have been better spent in New York. Who knows?" remarked New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who weighed his own run for mayor, referring to the White House’s devout attention to the New Jersey contest.

“Maybe Anthony Weiner should have manned-up and run against Michael Bloomberg,” shot back a White House official, who attributed the night’s results across the board to anti-incumbent fervor.

CONFIDENTIAL TO MASTER RAHM: When even the drones at Politico can see through you, you're pretty darned transparent.

Now I suppose it's possible that the White House official in question wasn't Master Rahm, and that there are multiple such vicious, plug-ignorant, gutless shitheads wandering around the building. But I wonder if it's really possible to wander the halls of the White House without interference from the Master's hall monitors. I don't think there's any question that the spirit is pure Rahm -- not only wrong on the facts, but imbued with his trademark ignoramus sociopath's conception of "manhood."

Around DWT, Master Rahm is of course traditionally close to Public Enemy No. 1. For those who are coming in late, this morning Jane Hamsher took a useful stroll down Emanuel Memory Lane, highlighting some of the Master's more memorably massive misreadings of the American electorate and wondering, "Is Rahm Emanuel Orchestrating 2010 Democratic Massacre?," concluding:

Rahm doesn’t think about Democratic turnout. His reputation for “winning a Democratic majority” rests on his ability as a self-promoter to take credit for victories that happened in spite of him. The truth is that his “act more like Republicans” strategy just hasn’t worked out, and we’re getting whiffs of the disaster it spells for Democrats who follow it.

Now I spoke at the outset of my election "pre-mortems," plural. And rather more than the nuts-and-bolts political one I've already referenced, the one I want to call attention to post-mortem is the sad hash I made of Drew Westen's terrific piece about the president's failure of leadership in the White House. If you haven't read the Westen piece, I encourage you to. And I have to repeat the quote I pulled out of it yesterday:

Genuine leadership means setting the agenda. It means taking tough stands. It means telling people the truth forcefully and evocatively in a way that makes them want to listen and act. It means drawing lines in the sand when you must, and refusing to compromise your values even if you have to compromise on some of the policies born of those values when you have no other choice. It means fighting for what you believe in and taking on powerful vested interests when people's lives and livelihoods are at stake. And it means looking backward at the past so you don't make the same mistakes, looking sideways at alternatives so you know your options, and using that vision to move the nation forward.

Leadership is a quality Barack Obama showed on the campaign trail. It is a quality he has failed to show as president.

I do want to be careful here, because, as I've indicated repeatedly, I still don't know what it is that President Obama actually believes in, or what he actually hopes to achieve during his time in office. Certainly the primary focus he's had to give to the economic meltdown may have diverted him from his other aspirations. Or, looking at the timid half-measures he took on the economy, does his response to the meltdown tell us perhaps more about his intentions? As I wrote yesterday, I had no trouble identifying with Cenk Uygur's uncertainty as to who and what the president really is -- someone we can rally behind, or someone who --

just played us to get elected and will give us just enough change to placate the masses but leave the system completely intact. That's the kind of guy who would push for a trigger for the public option and pretend he actually gave you the public option. It's not about the trigger, it's not about the public option it's not even about health care reform -- it's what it says about him. Is he playing the politicians and lobbyists in Washington or is he playing us?

Unfortunately, for me the Master Rahm Factor is looming ever larger here. Readers who were with us during last year's post-election euphoria may recall that both Howie and I had premonitions of disaster when it became known that the president-elect was trying to lasso his old Chicago pal into taking the job of White House chief of staff. This is a man whose only known political philosophy is to keep your tongue close to the butt cracks of the Rich and Powerful, because only they can make you a little richer and more powerful. He has no known political ethics.

I find it hard to imagine that there's anything I know about Master Rahm that the president doesn't, and this discourages me deeply when I contemplate the future of this presidency. As a number of wise commentators pointed out, even with the economic woes, this administration had a small window of opportunity for historic progressive change -- on the order of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to wrest out of the depths of the Great Depression, or President Lyndon B. Johnson was able to drive through Dixiecrat obstruction in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy -- but those windows are historically small.

That window of opportunity cried out for exactly the kind of leadership Drew Westen describes so eloquently. I'm afraid that window is closed now. Which doesn't mean that it's impossible to accomplish anything, just not the major change that might once have been possible, and about which Candidate Obama seemed so encouraging. If President Obama has serious ambitions for his time in office, whether he can realize any of them may depend in good part on an answer to the question: Is Rahm Emanuel the cancer on this presidency, or is this presidency itself the cancer?

Of course, if there's no will to remove the cancer, maybe it doesn't matter after all.


THURSDAY MORNING UPDATE: TWO SPECIMENS
OF PUNDITRY I'M INCLINED TO TAKE SERIOUSLY

Here I've been insisting that the punditocracy was going to make a noisy nothing out of nothing much from the election results, and straightaway in this morning's Washington Post I'm doubly surprised. I don't say that I agree with every word, but I take both these pieces seriously:

In Lessons from Virginia for the GOP, former RNC chairman ED GILLESPIE, who served as general chairman of Virginia Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell's campaign, offers five "pages" that "Republicans nationally would do well to take from McDonnell's playbook":

-- Convert conservative principles into practical policies -- and finish the sentence. ("McDonnell's campaign attracted crucial independent voters by focusing on the benefits of his policies: better elementary schools, more college degrees, less time stuck in traffic, more affordable gas and electricity, and most important, jobs, jobs, jobs.")
-- Run inclusive campaigns. (The McDonnell campaign had "a broad grass-roots network of 'Women for McDonnell' in place to respond" to criticism that the candidate is against working women, and "instead of indulging in the anti-immigration rhetoric of past Republican campaigns, McDonnell appealed to the growing Hispanic and Asian American enclaves of Northern Virginia, where his message of entrepreneurship, educational opportunity and strong families resonated." As state attorney general McDonnell "forg[ed] relationships in traditionally non-Republican areas.")
-- Use language voters want from their elected leaders. (McDonnell used respectful language regarding the president, and openly disowned a GOP candidate for the state House of Delegates who called the administration "domestic terrorism at its worst" and spoke of a possible need to resort to "the bullet box.")
-- Match the left's use of technology.
-- Back strong candidates.

And in "Warnings from the angry middle," Post columnist E. J. DIONNE JR., while celebrating "the defeat of third-party Conservative Doug Hoffman by Democrat Bill Owens in New York's 23rd District" ("consider the narrative that would have been woven if Hoffman had won"), makes a good case that the results in NY-23 and in the Virginia and New Jersey governor's races indeed represent an outcry of fear and anger from a rather nonideological "middle" of America which needs to be heard:

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, as he made his way to [NJ Gov. Jon] Corzine's concession speech at a hotel here, said he sees an electorate in a dark mood. "There are two things happening," the New Jersey Democrat noted. "One is fear. The other is punishment. Voters fear for themselves and their families, and they want to punish anyone who got them into this condition."

What Lautenberg underscored is a spirit far different than the buoyant confidence Obama inspired a year ago. And the Obama change-agents, particularly the young, were notably absent from the voting booths this week. In Virginia, a state Obama carried comfortably last year, a majority of those who showed up to vote on Tuesday said they had backed John McCain. This much more Republican electorate produced a GOP landslide all the way down the Virginia ballot.

That is the fact from this week that Democrats would be fools to ignore. It's not a resurgent right wing that should trouble Obama's party. Indeed, the stronger the right's role in shaping the Republican message, the harder it will be for middle-of-the-road voters to use the Republicans to express their discontent. But for the moment, the thrill is gone from politics, and that is very dangerous for the mainstream progressive movement that Obama promised to build.

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How do you plan to spend Election Night?

Hmm, maybe I should catch up on my sudden backlog of unwatched episodes of The Wire. Great entertainment, and a message depressing enough to suit tomorrow night's worst contingencies. (I've already seen season five, so as I've caught up on seasons one through four, I already know how things turn out for the wily and strangely charming Proposition Joe [Robert F. Chew, above]).

by Ken

So, how do you plan to spend Election Night? Partly I'm curious, and partly I'm looking for guidance. I haven't figured it out for my own self yet, and time is getting short.

I suppose I could latch onto some liberal-symp group preparing to make whoopee. But I'm not so good in groups, especially groups of strangers.

And most of all, I'm consumed with secret terror about the outcome tomorrow.

Oh, I know all about the polls, and all the even more encouraging private polls. Of course I know logically that it should be a GOP rout. And yet, deep down, I don't know. I guess I'm so used to Election Day horror shows that my psyche naturally gravitates to scenarios whereby it all comes undone.

Remember, we were being told in 2004 that Kerry was gonna win.

And besides, I can't forget that:

(a) there are going to be a lot of really terrible Democrats among the winners,

(b) the Democratic congressional leadership has yet to show that, even if it gets substantially larger majorities, it holds any priority higher than showing Corporate America that it can be just as stoogelike as that other party they usually support,

(c) the problems facing President-elect Obama (I don't even want to think about the alternative) are so monumental that even if it turns out that I'm comfortable with his proposed solutions (not at all a sure thing given our ideological gap), can anyone cope with the wreckage)?, and, perhaps most worrying,

(d) the McCranky campaign's strident, even violent across-the-board rejection of every vestige of reality and decency has almost certainly hardened some 40-45 percent of the electorate into a blood-oath-sworn commitment to lies, delusion, ignorance, hatred, and obstruction -- is this country even going to be governable?

A good part of me just wants it to be over, one way or another. If it all goes well, there will be plenty of time to celebrate -- after taking some really deep breaths of relief. If all doesn't go well, well, won't that be easier to absorb in one crushing blow than to spread out the agony over an indefinite period? My even more distrustful friend Peter has applied this attitude as much as humanly possible toward the whole 2008 election process. He says just wake him when it's over, and he'll deal with whatever needs dealing with then. (Of course he hasn't been able to completely avoid news of what's going on. Still, I have to admire the ideal.)

When I talked to Howie about this yesterday (in the online era I've wound up spending a good part of a bunch of Election Nights IM-ing with him, but I would be up to even that this time around, and in any case he has commitments for tomorrow night), he asked when I would be likely to arrive home, and when I said that it couldn't be earlier than about 7, he pointed out that by then we may have a pretty good vision of what's happening. The Virginia results, for example, should tell us a lot.

I could go to my (sort of) second job, as I used to do on Tuesday nights before my schedule got upended. There is a TV in the office, but without cable. But I guess tomorrow night even the networks will be in Election Night mode by 7.

I thought maybe this would be a good night to shell out the $12 or whatever ransom they're asking these days to see a movie. I know if I go straight home at some point I'll give in to the temptation to sneak a peek at The Show. I noticed that BBC America is carrying the BBC's coverage -- that might be a way of giving the bloody thing a veneer of civilization.

My backup plan is: Suddenly I've got a backlog of unwatched episodes of The Wire stored up on my DVR, from BET's weirdly scheduled wee-hours rebroadcast. (The backlog is probably in part the result of my now having to spend two and a half hours each weeknight with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Jon Stewart.) Maybe this is my chance to get caught up. The show is so amazingly well done that it's a treat to watch, depressing as the overall message is.

Hmm, a depressing overall message . . . I could be on the right track here.

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