On Friday, November 2, 2006, I joined several of my legislative colleagues (State Sen. Leanna Washington, Reps. Dwight Evans and John Myers) at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in my legislative district in Philadelphia to commemorate a state grant that will give the Medical Center $250,000 to train nurse's assistants. Each of us received a doctor's smock with our name inscribed on it.
If I ever have occasion to wear it, I could imagine some one asking what kind of doctor I am. My first thought was that I could say I am a spin doctor. But I think Tuesday's elections are going to do a lot to discredit the notion of the importance of the spin.
My advice to anyone seeking to predict the outcome of Tuesday's election is this: seek all the predictions you can find of Democratic gains, and pick the highest one. Odds are that the Democratic gains on Tuesday are going to be higher than the highest predictions of gains.
The Philadelphia Inquirer this morning describes "the possible coming Republican apocalypse." Today's leading New York Times headline is "GOP Glum as it Struggles to Hold Congress: (Twelve) Lost Seats Seen In Even Best Outcome."
The only good news for the Republicans in Pennsylvania is that attempts to create a sex scandal out of Rep. Phil English's (Erie) private life do not seem to have gotten off the ground. But five of the twelve Republican Congress members in Pennsylvania are facing political extinction, Melissa Hart in Western Pennsylvania, Don Sherwood in Northeastern Pennsylvania,and Jim Gerlach, Mike Fitpatrick, and Curt Weldon in the Philadelphia suburbs.
Kirk Johnson of the New York Times writes that the "Pennsylvania House of Representatives, which has 109 Republicans and 94 (sic--it's 93 Democrats and one Democratic vacancy) Democrats, is the one (major state with a Republican state house majority) closest to the Democrats' grasp." Anyone interested in making a last minute online contribution to help can do so at http://www.pahdcc.org.
The scope of the Democratic landslide that will occur on November 7 will generally stagger the imaginations of people of both parties. It will occur because the Republicans lacked a serious of purpose to go with their great power.
They were not serious when they talked of how Iraq would welcome American troops, and then changed the subject as the total American death toll in Iraq (including non-troops and the suicide of troops) surpassed 3,000 with no end in sight.
They were not serious when they shamelessly demagogued to exploint fear of gays, and then elected a gay Republican National Chairman, hired many gay staffers, and tolerated gay sexual predators.
They were not serious when they saw government as merely an endless series of fundraising and media event opportunities, rather than a forum for genuine public service.
They were not serious when they killed virtually all Congressional oversight of the Bush Adminstration.
(I believe that it is literally true that Congressional interns in the Viet Nam war era, of which I was one, did a far better job of oversight of the Vietnam War all by ourselves than the the Republican Congress has done for the Iraq war. And I note that coverage of Congressional interns now almost entirely focuses on words like "skinterns" and "hottitude" and "hottest." The Republicans have trivialized what was once a tremendous educational experience.)
The price for all the Republican failures of omission and commission is going to be a well-deserved Democratic landslide. Watch the Republican districts on election night and be prepared for stories of how this and that unknown and underfinanced Democratic challeger running in a Bush stronghold either won or came close to winning.