Specter to switch parties

[Brittain33]

Honestly, this is one of the best things to have happened to the Republican party this year, strangely enough.  There may finally be a bottom soon enough, if not now.

My thoughts, as well. Once the Republicans have been relieved of their last lever of power, they will no longer bear any responsibility at all for any policy outcome from Washington. The Republicans know well that an obstructionist minority is a big rallying point for the majority base.

[Brittain33]

Toomey is on MSNBC right now on the phone.

What's he saying? This is record time for him to engineer a party switch; usually it takes until the general election.

[Brittain33]

certainly wouldn't seem impossible that he loses a Democratic primary, especially since I believe he is still against EFCA and still old and sick and etc.

He has a ton of money and the Democratic machine will crush anyone who tries.

[Brittain33]

How has every other western country managed the astonishing combination of a public health system and a (pre-2008) functioning bond market?

Not to drag this thread too far into the ditch but I have to agree that I doubt the introduction of a government health-care program will cause the destruction of the American economy as we know it..

Also, both President Bush and President Obama have already played games with the deficits ten times the size of those that the bond market smacked down viciously when Clinton tried them.

I know, because like many Democrats, I kept hoping and waiting for the bond market to discipline President Bush and punish him for what he was doing. Never happened.

[Brittain33]

Ask the New York State Democratic Party about how much they've been doing while in power with their 1-vote State Senate majority.  And since the Democrats control everything, everything is their fault.

I really don't think that's the dynamic yet. Everyone recognizes that the Senate Dem majority is dysfunctional because it is no majority at all, and that a larger Dem majority would behave differently. We will see a larger Dem majority before we see Republicans ride backlash into control of the NY Senate again because "everything is bad and the Dems own it." 

[Brittain33]

What is "WFP" Sam?  Welfare for peasants? 

Working Families Party in New York. I have no idea what Sam is talking about, and am generally curious about what kind of hackish point he's trying to make this time.

My guess: the WFP forces Democrats to run to the left on fiscal and labor in order to keep their ballot line, which would drive New York's policies so far to the left that they cause the destruction of the state's budget and economy a la California and give the Republicans an opening to come back into power.

As far as Patterson having negative coattails for Democratic senate candidates, I don't see it. I think there are too many other factors at play, not the least of which is that this is the first election where Republican senators won't have the many strong financial and institutional advantages of running as the majority party, while Democratic candidates will have a real prize to compete for.

[Brittain33]

Well, no, everyone doesn't recognize that - a majority is a majority.  And that's my point, anyway.  A 1-vote "filibuster-proof" majority is just large enough so that every Democrat can extort his or her own agenda, like what's happening in the NYS Senate.  So nothing ultimately gets done, and what does get done is a bloated joke that is loaded with crap.  Yet the NYS Democrats are in complete control of the government and if NYS Republicans had any political sense, they'd be harping on the Democrat disfunction every day.

We agree about the current state of the NY Senate, sure, I guess we just disagree on where things go from here. The Senate Republicans can not credibly call themselves a force for change as long as they are a gerontocracy that racked up an embarrassing amount of wasteful projects and in-house perks as recently as last November. Anything they call out, Democrats have 30 years of responses to. The Senate Republicans will have to bottom out before they can regroup, much like Texas Democrats. They may then regroup quickly, but it will take more than technical management of the Senate by the other party for one year to do it.

[Brittain33]

I don't know whether you've read through the budget they put together up in Albany, but it may be a bigger joke than the budget in California, just generally.  And most of the more ridiculous stuff (which cannot be funded long-term) was put in by the afore-mentioned WFP.

I haven't, but I don't doubt it.

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I'm sure it will have an effect, but it is one effect among many, and I think the countervailing forces for Democrats are so strong given their prevalence in the state. You're familiar with the many factors working in Democrats' favor. Perhaps having Patterson at the top of the ticket (which I hope won't happen, but who knows) could dampen their success, but I can't see it generating new Republican senators out of the Tedisco-type seeds available to the party.

The best analogies I could come up with for pitiful incumbents running for governor and winning are California and Ohio, 2002. I can't find how their legislative parties did, but I don't think it was that badly.  (Redistricting comes into play.) What's significant was that the party majorities in each state legislature were firmly established, moreso in Ohio than California; you'd expect a backlash against the governor to have some resonance against the legislature. Yet they easily held control. In the case of Ohio, it's because the opposition was fractured, underfunded, and at least as unpopular. (Sound like anyone else we know?) The N.Y. Senate Democrats are a young majority, much like Republican majorities in Georgia a few years ago or in Texas or Virginia several years before that.

[Brittain33]

(Even Gramm would've gone down if he'd stayed a Dem into the 90s.)

I think he would have been reelected, but it would've been slightly tougher.

College Station has shown it will vote for a Democrat.