I can tell you everything you need to know about the upcoming midterm elections in two sentences:
One, according to the latest NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll, only 24 percent of Americans have a positive view of Republicans.
And two, according to virtually every poll, these are the guys who are winning.
The conventional wisdom is that Republicans will roll over the Democrats, who are polling at an unsightly 33 percent positive themselves. Republicans are now favored to win back the House, which is obviously bad news for Betsy Markey and possibly bad news for John Sala zar. Let’s just say the news is even making Ed Perlmutter nervous.
And if the electoral storm goes to tsunami, it’s even possible that Republicans could win back the Senate, which is why the Michael Bennet- Ken Buck race is becoming ever more important.
It’s easy to get distracted by the Maes/Tancredo gubernatorial sideshow, but there are real stakes in the Senate race, meaning, of course, that the commercials promise to get even more negative and that your ability to find the mute button becomes even more critical.
The Bennet-Buck race is a microcosm of the national election — in which voters decide which candidate they dislike less.
Bennet stands in for Barack Obama, only without the charisma. He’s an Obama loyalist who backed Obama long before it was fashionable. He was the Yale Law Journal editor to Obama’s Harvard Law Review editor. Buck — a Princetonian who’d rather not mention it — ran as a Tea Party favorite, upset the establishment Republican to win the nomination and is now being painted by the Democrats as, well, a Tea Party favorite. (The Tea Party, in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, is running at 30 percent.)
The Bennet-Buck race is a minor- league version of the Harry Reid- Sharron Angle race being played out in Nevada. Bennet has barely spent any time in Washington, and Buck isn’t saying we have any “domestic enemies” in Congress. But for Colorado, where the politics are relatively un-extreme, you get the idea. And the Buck-Bennet polls, like those in Nevada, are running just about even.
It’s easy enough to figure out why a party with 24 percent approval could possibly be winning. People are angry. At everyone. They’re angry about the economy, we hear. Or about the deficits. Or about Obama. When the voters threw out the Republicans in 2006 and in 2008, they were angry about the war. Or about Katrina. Or about Bush.
Maybe you can put the anger down to how the news is delivered these days. Or maybe you can put it to the frustration of middle-class economic stagnation. Obviously, Obama has not been able to find a theme for his presidency that sells. You can read too much into this — the president’s party nearly always loses in midterm elections — but the trend line is clear.
Obama is now saying that Republicans are treating him like a dog — which is presumably meant to rally the dog-lover troops. At this point, virtually every poll shows Republicans as more enthusiastic than Democrats, who are desperate to find a way to get their people to vote.
But the same polls showing the big enthusiasm gap also show many more people blaming George W. Bush than Obama for the economy.
OK, it’s not as simple as it looks. If it were just about Obama — who’s running at about 45 percent in his approval ratings, which makes him among the more popular politicians in the country — the Tea Party candidates wouldn’t have been beating the establishment favorites in Republican primaries. Lisa Murkowski didn’t lose in Alaska because she spent a lot of time hanging out with Obama.
And if it were just about the economy, that would require, it seems, that the Republicans put forth a plan to turn things around. It isn’t that they don’t have ideas. Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman who is the House intellectual, has a detailed plan but one that only 13 Republicans have signed on to. Democrats are portraying Republicans as the Party of No, but no seems to be the right answer.
Democratic pollster Peter Hart has called this the JetBlue election — you know, for the mad-as-hell flight attendant. Everyone is angry, and everyone wants a way out, preferably with a beer in hand.
This is where we are. In Colorado, Buck is being painted as an extremist. Unfortunately for Buck, he had the, uh, bad luck of actually saying some fairly extreme things — mostly in a willingness to pander to his Tea Party supporters. Bennet is being painted as a deficit exploder. And even if the problem largely derives from two wars we refused to pay for and an economic meltdown, the problem is still there. And the economy is still faltering.
And if you’re not furious now, I promise you will be by November.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
