The aftermath

John Cole

No idea what is going on with the election other than that Russ Feingold, a civil libertarian hero, has lost. Maybe he could have used some help from those principled libertarians at Reason magazine, but they were too fucking busy attacking Cuomo to notice much of anything else.

Bob Barr endorsed Feingold. Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, and other Koch stalwarts- not so much. They do have time for a farewell, though. Thanks for all the help, principled libertarians! Maybe a couple more smooth Nick Gillespie videos about Obamacare could have made the difference. Wait, what?

But don’t you dare call Reason magazine a bunch of ineffectual Koch stooges, though. Because then you are just OVER THE FUCKING LINE QUESTIONING THEIR INTEGRITY.

David Neiwert:

Right now, it's looking pretty damned grim in the House. But at least it's looking like the Senate is going to remain in Democratic hands.

We'll all talk about this more tomorrow, but I blame the geniuses in the Democratic Party -- both in the White House and elsewhere -- who failed to establish firmly the narrative after the election that needed to be hammered home daily and relentlessly and fearlessly: that Americans had repudiated conservative rule because it had manifestly proven itself a failure. Instead, Democrats thought "bipartisanship" was more important. Sure it was.

This clearly was The Fox Election. This was a political victory entirely engineered by a fake "news network" that in reality is a relentless and powerful right-wing propaganda machine. Democrats need to wake up and figure out how they're going to beat it.

mistermix on Some Sterling Analysis

I didn’t bother to stay up and watch last night’s trainwreck. It’s tough enough to click through the House maps this morning. That said, the message is obvious—it’s another disappointment from Obama:

Although I wonder just how bad it would have been if the White House didn’t do what White Houses always do and pretty much sit around and watch their Party lose, to preserve their precious Cult of the Leader? Changey.

Clearly, the biggest wave election since the 30’s could have been stopped by a little more bully pulpit.

Marshall: Palin A Loser

It makes sense to be pretty careful in judging how things will affect Sarah Palin. But there's a decent argument that this is not a great night for her. Think about if Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell hadn't won their primaries. There's a decent chance Dems would have lost the Senate tonight. That's a pretty big deal. She also made a late endorsement of John Raese in West Virginia. He got crushed. And perhaps most importantly, she went to war in a big way with her state's senior senator, Lisa Murkowski. She got her beat in the Republican primary. But now it's looking like Murkowski's quite likely to win as a write-in, which is usually pretty much impossible to pull off.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think Sarah Palin will be going anywhere soon. The problem for the GOP is that the people who love her -- and there are a lot of them in the GOP -- really love her. And this won't matter a bit to them. But this result is going to get a lot of talk in GOP circles. Because there's a plausible argument that she lost them the Senate.

kos:

Bennet has just taken the lead in Colorado. And with just Boulder (deep Blue) and a sliver of El Paso County (Colorado Springs) left to report (and maybe Arapahoe, though that looks like another AP glitch), this one stays Blue.

So thanks Teabaggers! Thanks to your efforts, we got to keep seats in Colorado, Nevada, and Delaware.

Thanks to your efforts, we'll have a 53-47 Senate, rather than a 50-50 one.

Heckuva job rescuing the Democrats from themselves!

Anne Laurie

Just got a press release from the self-proclaimed “pioneer [of] political direct mail”, who boasts that he “has been called “one of the creators of the modern conservative movement” (The Nation magazine), one of the “conservatives of the century” (The Washington Times), and one of 2008’s “top 25 influencers” among Republicans”“:

Manassas, Virginia – “Voters have given Republicans one more chance to get it right,” Richard A. Viguerie said today. “They are on probation, and if they mess up again, they won’t get another chance.”

“The last time the Republicans were in charge, they became the party of big spending, Big Government, and Big Business. They abandoned the philosophy of Ronald Reagan and cozied up to lobbyists and special interests. And they paid a price at the polls.

“This year, the Democrats under President Obama and Speaker Pelosi drove millions of voters right back into the arms of the Republicans. But if Republicans return to their bad habits – if they start working for K Street instead of Main Street – they will pay a terrible price. Tea Party voters and conservatives will turn them out in the 2012 primaries.

“People will say: Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, and the Republican Party is dead,” Viguerie said.

The upcoming, ongoing battles between the common Republican careerists and the wackaloon true believers are going to make the internecine sniping between Obots and firebaggers look like a… garden fete.

I’m just a little giddy that my beloved Commonwealth of Massachusetts has stayed solidly Democratic. Incumbent Governor Patrick held off Charley Baker, aka “Mitt Romney with a functioning neocortex”, and Barney Frank defeated our own version of “Joe Miller Lite”. The local newsbots are already babbling about “the end of the Scott Brown effect”—Cosmo Boy is now reduced to another quirky swamp yankee anomaly, not the much-ballyhooed John-the-Baptist foretelling a new regime of Masshole Republicanism. I wonder what the 2011 version of those Watergate-era “Don’t Blame Us, We Voted for McGovern” bumperstickers will be?

BooMan:

It's a bloodbath in the House. However, that is not yet been proven to be the case in the Senate. It's still too early to say. Ohio looks pitiful in the House and Senate, but pretty good in the governor's race, which is the most important. My initial assessment is that we're getting killed in the midwest in any district that doesn't have a substantial number of racial minorities. This is basically what I feared based on the resiliency of the Birth Certificate "secret Muslim" crap. This is a culture war, and we just took a standing-eight count. There are some surprises for the Republicans though. They might lose the state house in South Carolina, and there are a couple of House seats that might fall that people weren't thinking about. Overall, though, we're going to be in pitched combat over the next two years, fighting off a pit bull of hate.

Dennis G.

This is a night of redemption for the politics of the Confederate Party. It is their second great redemption, the first one being the election of 1876. Like that election they needed to speak in code to win. Back then it was all about how slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War. Now it is all about masking racism in vague economic mumbo-jumbo.

Years ago the Confederate Party maven of code-speaking—Lee Atwater—taught the the gang how to cover up their meaning as they took over the Republican Party:

In 1981, during the first year of Mr. Reagan’s presidency, the late Lee Atwater gave an interview to a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University, explaining the evolution of the Southern strategy:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

After America foolishly elected a black man President, the gang had to kick it up a notch. They tried many new ways of screaming ‘nigger’ from socialist to screaming “I want my country back”.

But of all the undercover code words to scream ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger’, the best is “Center Right Nation”. All that really mens when decoded is “White Nation” and that is what tonight’s Confederate Party gains were all about. It is a story about the white supremacy movement in America reasserting itself.

Some will of course disagree—as pointing out the deep racism of this neo-Confederate movement is considered extremely rude—especially with the pundit gasbag class. So many feel that one must respect proper decorum when our Confederate ‘betters’ discuss their racism in code, but fuck that.

I sorta wish they had the balls to ditch the code and go with their heart, but Lee Atwater and generations of Confederate code talkers have taught them well. The next two years are going to be really special and if we want to understand the newly elected Republicans we will just have to learn the code.

Perhaps we need a new tag: “Center White Nation”.

Josh Marshall

Whatever the merits of Evan Bayh's arguments (in an oped in Wednesday's Times), given that he walked away from a winnable Senate seat and held on to a $10 million war chest that other Dems could have put to good use, I think what most Democrats would like from Evan Bayh right now is for him to shut up.

It's really not about his analysis. He just walked off the field in the middle of the game. Who can respect that? He just has no standing to talk.