Bob's Place

...........In lively elections such as this the media usually run endless features on ‘angry white men’, a demographic to which they’re not notably partial. After ‘angry white men’ threw out the Democrats’ congressional leadership in the 1994 elections, Peter Jennings, the exquisitely condescending Canadian who anchors ABC News, sniffed that ‘the voters had a temper tantrum’. But this time round the angry white men are all on the Democrat side, and the media seem to think it’s perfectly normal...........

.......My sense is that the 2002 model is still operative, and that the Democrats and the media, talking to each other in their mutually self-deluding cocoon, have overplayed the Bush-bashing. Next Tuesday the President will win the states he won last time, plus Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Maine’s Second Congressional District to put him up to 301 electoral votes. Minnesota? Why not? Nudge him up to 311 electoral votes. Oh, and what the hell, give him Hawaii: that’s 315. The Republicans will make a net gain of two seats in the Senate, one of which will bring with it the scalp of the Democrats’ leader, Tom Daschle. Despite distancing himself from Kerry and running ads showing him and Bush embracing, Daschle’s floundering in South Dakota, and his lugubrious mien will be even more lugubriouser within the week. Look for a handful of Republican House gains, too. And Democrats tearing their hair out — or John Kerry’s and John Edwards’s hair, if they can penetrate the styling gel.....

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 2:14 PM