On the Soapbox

Lincoln Chafee is certainly very graceful about his defeat. According to this article, "He said his loss may have helped the country by switching control of Congress." Wow. Not everyday you get a politician who thinks that his defeat might have been a good thing. He also penned a nice post-election NYT op-ed in which he laments the hard-line position that the GOP has taken with its movement conservatism. Interestingly, his op-ed mentioned Jeffords. I wonder, if he had managed to hold onto his seat, would he have pulled a Jeffords and switched sides in order to change control of the Senate?

I feel sorry for Chafee. He was one of the few decent Republicans in the Senate: a Republican of the old Eisenhower pedigree instead of one of the new Reagen-Bush abominations. He deserved to keep his seat. That, and CNN did a good job of picking a very effective "sad face" for their article's picture.

I have also been reading about the election margins. Apparently, House elections favored the Democrats by something roughly on the order of 5% while the Senate elections favored the Democrats by something roughly on the order of 13%. Interestingly, some liberals are complaining that because of the huge 13% senate margin, the slim Democratic victory in the Senate does not fully reflect the extent of the victory. Are these people forgetting that the long Senate terms and the staggered Senate elections were specifically aimed at making the Senate relatively stable and static? Besides, of the 33 Senate seats up for election, the Democrats won 24 of them, which is a seat-wise victory margin of 45% (the House seat-wise victory margin is between 6% and 7%, so it closely matched the electoral victory margin). Of course, a disproportionately high number of Democratic seats, many of them in "blue" states, were up this term, so this large discrepancy between 45% and 13% is to be expected.

And finally, Tom Toles: