Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat, Connecticut, announced this morning that he will not seek re-election in 2010. This is probably a smart move on his part, as the polls are showing that he'd lose even if he were running against Osama Bin Laden. This drop in his popularity came about because his corruption has been exposed – he's been trading his powerful position on the Finance Committee for favors from the financial industry for years. The most notorious examples of this are the sweetheart (low interest) mortgages he received from Countrywide, and the multi-million dollar “cottage” some “friends” in the financial industry gave him. There's much, much more; it's now crystal-clear that Dodd is a corruptocrat of the first order. He deserves to go to jail, but getting him out of office is a reasonable start.
But Dodd's bailing out can also be seen as part of a larger pattern here: Democrats have been retiring at a prodigious rate. If I'm counting correctly, we're now up to 11 House members and 3 Senate members who are not coming back after 2010. If the Republicans were to pick up some of those House seats and just one of the Senate seats, the Congressional balance of power would be significantly shifted away from the Democrats. It would be a Congress much more conducive to complete gridlock – my favorite place for a federal government to be (because nearly everything they do is bad, so the less they can do, the better).
Some observers are predicting that the folks who have already bailed out are just the beginning of a tsunami of “retiring” Democrats. If that's true, that's just lovely – and a very hopeful omen for the outcome of the 2010 mid-terms...
I'm sure they are bailing to save the election for the democrats. These guys have kept their positions because their districts are solidly democrat. Almost no chance of losing normally. By throwing themselves on the sword, they open it for another, less tainted democrat to run and thereby maintaining the seat. Between that and the hundreds of billions in bailout money still sitting around to buy the election, I have little hope of seeing any significant swings. The biggest hope is they drop below the magic 60.
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