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Mullings by Rich Galen�
A Political Cyber-Column By Rich Galen
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    Well, if it IS the Economy ...

    Monday October 21, 2002

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    • The Washington Post had an interesting weekend. On Saturday, the Post - not exactly the Mouthpiece of the Right - issued its endorsements for Congress in Northern Virginia.

    • The GOP went three-for-three including two incumbents - Frank Wolf and Tom Davis - as well as the Republican challenger to Democrat Jim Moran.

    • On Sunday the Washington Post had a front page story headed: "Republicans Planning for Full Control Of Congress: Accelerated Tax Cuts, Tort Reform on the Agenda"

    • I don't do this very often, but let me be honest: I thought the implication of the piece by Mike Allen was going to be: If the GOP takes control of the Senate and maintains control of the House, boy, will it be trouble for the poor, the downtrodden, the underserved, and the trial lawyers.

    • Allen's piece did not do that. Only the trial lawyers were mentioned. And nobody likes THEM except other trial lawyers.

    • To review the bidding, we have been told since the middle of August that if and when an Iraq Resolution got finished, then the Democrats were going to hammer the Bush Administration on its handling of the economy.

    • The Resolution passed last week - delayed largely by a series of highly visible Democratic attacks which kept the pot boiling for at least two weeks more than necessary - and the Democrats have, as promised, turned up the heat on the economy.

    • However.

    • The economy appears to be growing - albeit slowly - without any help from Washington. And, in any event, the Democrats have no alternate plan for the economy.

    • They whined about Republicans "raiding the Social Security Trust Funds" when the budget went into deficit, and so they can't ask for additional spending to stimulate the economy because that would be a further raid on the Trust Funds.

    • And, if Social Security is the third rail of Republican politics, then increasing taxes is the third rail of Democratic politics. No Democrat - outside of Berkeley - will say that we should RAISE TAXES to help with the deficit.

    • Second, the stock markets have (at least temporarily) reversed their slide. The Dow opens this morning at 8,322 which is about 1,100 points up from its low point of 7,181 just seven trading days ago. And, while the Democrats delight in speaking of the glory days of the NASDAQ at 5,000 - they forget that on the last trading day of the Clinton Administration it had already declined to 2,770.

    • The real implication of the Allen piece, is that there is a real chance - moving perhaps from possibility to probability - that the Republicans WILL gain control of the House, the Senate & the Administration on or about November 6.

    • All eyes have turned to South Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri and Arkansas as the balance-of-power states. And, as for New Jersey, even in a Newark Star-Ledger puff piece on Democratic relief pitcher Frank Lautenberg, the best that can be said for the current situation is: "Polls show him even or slightly ahead of his Republican opponent, Douglas Forrester."

    • The greatest irony of the last two weeks of this election campaign might well be the Democrats stealing a page from the play book of - Newt Gingrich!

    • At this point in the elections of 1996, when it became clear that Bill Clinton was going to easily defeat Bob Dole for the Presidency; Gingrich had the National Republican Congressional Committee - the campaign arm of the GOP in Congress - run a series of ads which implored the electorate not to give Bill Clinton a blank check by voting to keep the House in Republican hands.

    • So, for the seventy-fifteenth time since George W. Bush took the oath of office, the Democrats got what they thought they wanted. But when they got it, it wasn't what they thought it would be.

    • On the Secret Decoder Ring page, today, a link to that Washington Post story, a table showing the party split in the U.S. House over the past decade, an interesting Mullfoto, and photographic evidence of the growing split between Jeb and George W. Bush!

      --END --
      Copyright © 2002 Richard A. Galen

                                                                           

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