VOTE!

If you live in New York's 23rd district, New Jersey or Virginia it is critically important that you vote today.

These elections will be seen (and, in fact are) a referendum on the Obama presidency. They are being closely watched by all elected officials, especially by members of the House or Representatives, who all must stand for election next November.

Republican victories in these three races will send a loud message to House Democrats that their political futures are in danger if they continue to carry this administration's water on issues like socialized medicine.

GOP victories in these races could literally spell the defeat of the current socialist health care takeover and if it dies this time it will probably be at least ten years before any serious attempt is made to resurrect it.

This will buy Republicans a decade in which to bring about market based reforms like health savings accounts, tort reform and insurance deregulation which will begin to reduce health care costs and greatly lessen the pressure for any renewed attempt at a government takeover.

Another positive effect of Republican victories today will be the way in which Obama will react to them.

Obama is a narcissist who has never been forced to cope with defeat and failure. His response to what he cannot fail to see as a personal rejection will be to fly into a rage and start seeking scapegoats. This will further diminish him in the public's eyes as they see him acting like a punk rather than a president and it will further divide and destabilize the Democrat party.

As Democrats wishing to win reelection come to the full realization that Obama is a liability rather than an asset they will seek to distance themselves from him and his policies.

This will further enrage him and as we have seen in his foolish vendettas against Fox News and Rush Limbaugh he will strike out at what he sees as his new enemies, within his own party.

This will further divide and destabilize the Democrats, setting them up for a historic defeat in 2010.

So even if you looked at the polls and figures that our guys were ahead so you didn't need to make the effort to go to the voting place and stand in line. Even if you are in New Jersey and think that the Republican is too liberal suck it up and go vote.

Because a vote in any of these races is a vote against Obama.

It was worse than I thought

From the Washington Post:

State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava (R), who dropped from the special election in Upstate New York yesterday, has now thrown her support to Democrat Bill Owens.

"It's not in the cards for me to be your representative, but I strongly believe Bill is the only candidate who can build upon John McHugh's lasting legacy in the U.S. Congress," said Scozzafava in a statement released moments ago.

Owens said he was "honored" to have won Scozzafava's endorsement, noting: "Now more than ever we need bipartisan solutions to help bring jobs to Upstate New York to get our economy back on track and move our country forward."

It's not clear how much Scozzafava's backing of Owens will change the race. Democratic strategists, who just 48 hours ago saw the race moving back in their direction, have grown pessimistic about their chances in the aftermath of the Scozzafava decision.

Polling conducted by the Siena Research Institute -- and released on Saturday -- showed that more than 60 percent of Scozzafava backers were self-identified Republicans, meaning that the majority of them are likely to back Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman.

I now withdraw my partial apology to Ms. Scozzafava.

As I've said before when these "moderate" RINO's are forced to choose between left and right they will almost always reflexively turn left.

I wonder if political hack Newt Gingrich will join his chosen candidate and also endorse Owens.

Aaron Gee posted this on the American Thinker Blog:

It is being reported today that Dede Scozzafava is endorsing Democrat Bill Owens. In one fell swoop she proved her detractors right. Her actions also speak to the Republicans that made excuses for her such as Newt Gingrich; they were dead wrong. When Dede withdrew from the race on Saturday, many (including me) thought she was doing the right thing for Northern New York, and the Republican Party. Instead we have been presented with the quintessential example of what the label RINO means.

"Scozzafava dropped out after Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman experienced a late-in-the-game surge. The move was expected to consolidate GOP voters behind Hoffman on Tuesday.

But on Sunday, Scozzafava backed Democrat Bill Owens -- the announcement was made in a statement sent out by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee."

When the DNC is releasing statements for the former GOP candidate you know something is very wrong. This is a wake up call for the leaders of the Grand Old Party. The party got its hat handed to it in the last election by running the most "moderate" candidate in decades why do they continue in the same vein that didn't work last time?

Listening to voters helped create the contract with America which propelled the GOP into the House and Senate in 1994. It was ignoring those principals that led to the GOP's decline. Instead of listening to Washington insiders the GOP would do better if it listened to the people.

I d0 have one quibble with Mr. Gee. Newt's "Contract with America" did not "propel the GOP into the House and Senate in 1994".

Newt Gingrich's real achievement in that affair was to be the first to get a real sense of how the electorate was going to vote in 1994 and run very fast in that direction yelling "follow me!" at the top of his lungs.

The Contract with America helped crystallize public sentement and it probably was responsible for the GOP winning 2 or 3 seats that it might not have won otherwise, but the House bank and Post Office scandals coupled with the gigantic mess that Hillary Clinton made out of her Stalinist "health care reform" guaranteed a bloodbath for Democrats no matter what Republicans did.

Subsequent events have proven that Newt was more lucky than smart. The Democrat takeover of the legislature in 2006 and the election of Barack Obama seems to have convinced him that the public was taking a sharp turn to the left and he has once again tried to run out in front yelling "follow me!" at the top of his lungs.

This explains his teaming up with Nancy Pelosi to promote global warming hysteria, his attacks on Rush Limbaugh and his endorsment of the left-wing Scozzafava.

However this time Mr. Gingrich has miscalculated. The facts on the ground are all pointing to 2010 being a big Republican year.

This is likely to leave Newt standing all alone out in left field.

The sleeping giant awakens

And is filled with a terrible resolve.

From The Washington Times:

This is one Mr. Deeds who apparently isn't going to town. The collapse of the Democratic campaign for governor of Virginia speaks volumes - chapters, anyway - about what the body politic is trying to tell Barack Obama's Democrats.

They're learning, painfully, that campaigning without George W. Bush is baffling, frustrating and scary. Worse, it offers a preview of what the congressional campaigning will be like next year. One Obama doorbell ringer, working neighborhoods in Northern Virginia for Creigh Deeds, says even the promise of free pizza can't lure faithful Democrats to a rally.

For weeks, The Washington Post, the house organ of the national Democratic Party, pounded away at Bob McDonnell, the Republican nominee, for having written politically incorrect term papers in graduate school, citing his master's thesis, which decried abortion, gender-bending and radical feminism, as proof that he doesn't like women very much.

Only a month ago, Mr. Deeds, the Post's horse in the race, wouldn't talk about anything but the McDonnell graduate-school thesis - maybe a boon to master's and doctoral candidates who can't get anybody but a professor to read their wit and wisdom, but, as it turns out, a bore to voters in Virginia. The public-opinion polls continue to show Mr. McDonnell ahead, despite all the Post's ineffective deeds, and with a lengthening lead.

Now Mr. Deeds doesn't want to talk about graduate-school scribbling at all, just as leaks from the Post newsroom reveal that the newspaper has a seven-part series ready for publication to prove that Bob McDonnell has had a lifelong hostility to those of the pink persuasion. He once pulled the pigtails of a little girl in the second grade, and as a third-grader he bounced a spitball, aimed at a male pal, off the shoulder of a girl two rows over. These are no doubt serious charges, violence against (tiny) women, sexual harassment and all that, but not likely to turn the tide of a runaway that is building in Virginia.

Suddenly, the White House is treating the bereft Mr. Deeds as if he's on the fourth day of a three-day underarm deodorant pad. Bill Clinton, accustomed to speaking to cheering thousands at a hundred grand a pop, was dispatched the other night to a Deeds rally to set the throng on fire with one of his late-October stumpwallopers. The rally, such as it was, was held not at an arena or a hotel - not even a Motel 6 - but in a campaign office in the Washington suburbs. The "throng" was counted in the dozens, about the size of a PTA meeting. Not even Bubba could dispel the gloom of a wake.

Didn't they learn anything when Clinton was president? Don't they remember how no one that Bill Clinton campaigned for actually won? Perhaps this was Obama's way of providing a scapegoat for Deeds' inevitable loss. After all the little tin messiah and Deeds were joined at the hip earlier in the campaign when everyone thought that Obama's anointment of a candidate would guarantee victory, but now that Deeds is sure to lose we can't have anything splash back and cast doubts on the deity of The One.

"These polls are either accurate, or they're not," he said, delivering an insight worthy of a Harvard political science professor. "So are the polls right? The answer is yes, no, and maybe." But what else could he say? Dispatched for mortuary duty, Bubba could only sympathize with the preacher called on to say something nice over the grave of the town bootlegger.

Barack Obama himself is offering the mere minimum of presidential support over the past seven days of the campaign, just mailing it in (even if delivering the mail in person). He'll make one last appearance with Mr. Deeds this week in Tidewater. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the president's political aides continue to dish the obsequies over a doomed candidate while pretending to pray for a miracle. So far no one has invoked Harry Truman, patron saint of doomed candidates, but there's still a week to go.

Mr. Deeds' friends are bitter about the anonymous voices peddling the discouraging word from the White House. "These 'anonymous voices' have decided those hard-working [down-ballot candidates] are just collateral damage in their effort to tell the world that if [Mr.] Deeds doesn't win, it is because he ignored advice," Paul Goldman, a former chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party, tells Politico, the Washington politics daily. "This isn't change we can believe in, but the same old, same old we voted out of office. Do they really believe their attempts to shield the president from blame is going to distract [Mr.] Obama's critics, much less change the arc of today's politics?"

Of course it won't, and that's what makes the Virginia race so scary for the president's men. Voters will use whatever club is available to "send a message," and sometimes, as any number of pols could tell you, the club is big, rough and means business.

Yes, a message is being sent. Here is another component of that message, from the Club for Growth:

Hoffman Surges Into Lead in NY-23
New CFG Poll shows Hoffman 31.3%, Owens 27.0%, Scozzafava 19.7%

Washington - A poll released today by the Club for Growth shows Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman surging into the lead in the special election in New York's 23rd congressional district to replace John McHugh, the former congressman who recently became Secretary of the Army.

The poll of 300 likely voters, conducted October 24-25, 2009, shows Conservative Doug Hoffman at 31.3%, Democrat Bill Owens at 27.0%, Republican Dede Scozzafava at 19.7%, and 22% undecided. The poll's margin of error is +/- 5.66%. No information was provided about any of the candidates prior to the ballot question.

This is the third poll done for the Club for Growth in the NY-23 special election, and Doug Hoffman is the only candidate to show an increase in his support levels in each successive poll. The momentum in the race is clearly with Hoffman.

"Hoffman now has a wide lead among both Republicans and Independents, while Owens has a wide lead among Democrats. Dede Scozzafava's support continues to collapse, making this essentially a two-candidate race between Hoffman and Owens in the final week," concluded Basswood Research's pollster Jon Lerner, who conducted the poll for the Club.

It would seem that voters in New York as well are using the vehicle of a special election to send a message to Washington about the direction that the little tin messiah and his Jackass Party are taking the nation.

As far as NY 23 goes Sozzafava is now the spoiler and should withdraw - that is if she truly has the best interests of the Republican party at heart.

But I doubt that she will. RINO's tend to be more hostile to genuine conservative than they ever are to left-liberalism. As the Queen of the RINO's Sozzafava will almost certainly think that denying the Palin wing of the GOP a victory is a more satisfying goal to achieve than denying the Pelosi-Obama wing of the Democrat party one.

Also we can only hope that events in New York will shame Newt Gingrich into shutting his stupid cake-hole.

Finally Rasmussen has more bad news for the Left as the residents of New Jersey (of all places) prepare to send the little tin messiah a message of their own:

With just a week to go in New Jersey’s closely contested race for governor, Republican Chris Christie holds a three-point advantage over incumbent Democratic Governor Jon Corzine.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in New Jersey show Christie with 46% of the vote and Corzine with 43%. While the margin is little changed from a week ago and the week before, the biggest news may be that support for independent candidate Chris Daggett has dropped four points to seven percent (7%). The number of undecided voters is down to four percent (4%).

The decline in support for Daggett comes in a week when several state newspapers endorsed Christie or Corzine, but none followed The (Newark) Star-Ledger’s lead and came out in favor of the independent candidate. Additionally, Christie began a new ad campaign linking Corzine and Daggett.

Christie leads by eight points among those who are certain they will show up and vote. A week ago, he was up by five among that group. Christie’s supporters are also less likely to say they might consider voting for someone else.

Of course 2010 and 2012 are a long way off in political terms however in politics trends like this rarely reverse themselves.

Sometimes it takes a Democrat president who is too arrogant and/or too stupid to hide what he and his party really believe to wake the public up and stir them to action. That happened in 1980 after four years of the almost unbelievably incompetent Carter administration and it happened again in 1996 after Hillary Clinton's bumbling attempt to impose a Stalinist socialized medicine scheme (now known as ObamaCare) on the nation made her the national face of the Democrat party.

Things are shaping up now to make 2010 a repeat of 1996 and 2012 an echo of 1980. The only thing that could save the Democrat party would be for B. Hussein Obama to emerge from the narcissistic fantasy world he is currently living in and realize that the "historic" nature of his presidency and his unparalleled skill at reading a teleprompter are not enough to keep the electorate somnolent in an era of double digit unemployment, a dollar in free-fall and growing international threats.

The problem for Democrats is that Mr. Obama is too arrogant to ever come to that realization, too stupid to know the right thing to do even if he did and too lazy to do the hard work to turn things around even if he did have the humility and good sense.

Far more satisfying to jet around the world on "date nights" with his wife, play golf and make speeches to handpicked crowds of brain-dead worshipers.