Bob Herbert:
[Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class] describes an “organizational revolution” that took place over the past three decades in which big business mobilized on an enormous scale to become much more active in Washington, cultivating politicians in both parties and fighting fiercely to achieve shared political goals. This occurred at the same time that organized labor, the most effective force fighting on behalf of the middle class and other working Americans, was caught in a devastating spiral of decline.
Thus, the counterweight of labor to the ever-increasing political clout of big business was effectively lost.
Ultra-rightist warmonger Michael Ledeen has been saying "Faster, Please!" about Iran for a decade. Now he's saying it again. Yawn.
Bruce Levine:
Next year, the country will begin observing the sesquicentennial of the bloodiest war in U.S. history -- the Civil War. But the question of how to remember that war sometimes seems as contentious as the war itself was. On Oct. 20, The Post reported that in Virginia, fourth-grade students received textbooks telling them that thousands of African Americans fought in Confederate armies during the Civil War. The textbook's author, who is not a historian, found that false claim repeated so many times on the Internet that she assumed it had to be true.
She thereby helped propagate one of the most pernicious and energetically propagated myths about the Civil War.
Add that to the pernicious and energetically propagated myth that the Civil War wasn't about slavery.
Clive Crook, in a pre-mortem, blames the "whining left" for the electoral fortunes of the Democrats.
Rick Manning serves himself up what could be a heaping serving of the stuff Larry Sabato made into a slogan in 1994: "He who lives by the crystal ball ends up eating ground glass."
Jon Weiner says Democrats will win in California:
The best explanation: Democrats remain strong in California because "demography is destiny." That's what Harold Meyerson says—he writes a column for the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and the LA Times.
"The electorate in California is the least white of any state, except Hawaii," Meyerson said in a recent interview. "That matters, because the Republicans have a genius for alienating voters of color."
The Republican Party is increasingly a party of white people—and that, Meyerson says, "is death in California." And although the Democrats in Congress have been, frankly, bad on immigration reform, the Republicans have been a lot worse: for them, "you’re a criminal suspect if you look Latino."
Nick Baumann:
Forget the Senate and House. That's short-term thinking. The real prize in Tuesday's midterm elections is the power to draw congressional seats and determine the country's balance of power for the next decade.
If either party can achieve what politicos call the "trifecta"—control of the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature—in a given state, it will be able to draw congressional districts within that state unencumbered by any need to compromise with the other party. That's the kind of power that creates electoral maps like the one former GOP Majority Leader Tom Delay helped bring to Texas in 2003—a map that pushed four of the state's Democrats out of their seats.
Cal Thomas says "Priority One for Republicans" after today is to make sure the Bush tax cuts stay in place.
Jack Betts is sick of negative campaigning in North Carolina:
A campaign mailer falsely accuses [state House Majority Leader Hugh] Holliman of supporting legislation that would allow killers on death row to be paroled and potentially move into your neighborhood. But the legislation does not allow release of death row killers. It only allows killers on death row to try to show they were unfairly convicted because of their race, and if they do their sentences can be changed to life in prison without parole. A footnote: Holliman's daughter was raped and murdered and Holliman attended her killer's execution. He supports the death penalty.
This bogus mailer, which turns upon a demonstrable lie for its effectiveness, has rightfully earned its place among some of the worst ads in state political history - and we keep seeing more of them.
Enough. May they all backfire.
Dream on, Jack.
David Corn:
The fight between the left and right is never over. I'm not referring to the cable news face-offs, but to the struggle between those who advocate communal government action to better society and those who consider such collective cooperation a threat to individual liberty, between those who question the prerogatives of powerful economic interests and those who side with forces of unrestrained capital, between those who champion tolerance and diversity and those who seek to protect or advance their version of fundamentalism. It's not always black or white, us versus them. There are issues and moments that transcend or defy the usual divides. But there are basic conflicts. Politics in America is a long war. On an Election Day 2010, it will get longer.
Doug Henwood:
I don’t think an elite can stay rich and powerful forever while their society’s foundations rot underneath it. Am I right in this? Or can the oligarchy barrel ahead while everything around them goes to hell? Has it become so globalized that it doesn’t care what happens at home? Will our billionaires take crash courses in Chinese and Kannada and abandon Manhattan and Greenwich for Shanghai and Bangalore?