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Jeb Bush, the Outstanding Governor of This Decade, Should Run for Senate
Tweet Share on Facebook December 5, 2008 Comment (19)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Florida Sen. Mel Martinez's surprising decision not to run for re-election in 2010 has led former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to seriously consider running for the seat. This is very good news for Republicans: Martinez's poll numbers have been lousy, while Bush's are very high. Bush, in my judgment, was the outstanding state governor of this decade, for reasons that Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution sets out. (His leading competitor for that title, in my judgment, is Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat.) Operating in a state where liberal newspapers, teachers' unions, and trial lawyers maintained a continual barrage of criticism, Bush and the Republican legislature produced the nation's best education reform and major changes in healthcare, while Bush himself proved masterful in handling hurricane relief. One reason for the federal government's poor response to Hurricane Katrina was that the feds were used to dealing with Jeb Bush and Florida's competent local officials; dealing with the hapless New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco was quite a different thing.
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Ruth Marcus: Larry Summers Was Right About Men and Women in Math and Science
Tweet Share on Facebook December 4, 2008 Comment (8)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
The always interesting Ruth Marcus in her Washington Post column confesses, with some caveats and apparent unease, that Larry Summers was right when he made his controversial statements about men and women in science and math—statements that resulted in his ouster as president of Harvard. Marcus cites studies that show that men outnumber women by a wide margin among those with the very highest (and very lowest) scores in math and science aptitude tests. But she concludes by saying that Summers shouldn't have said what he said, even though it was right, presumably because in his line of work—academe—you shouldn't utter truths people don't want to hear. What an indictment of the academy! Academics used to pride themselves as fearless seekers of truth. Now, an academic is chided by a journalist who is a pretty good seeker of truth herself for telling an impolitic truth. Fascinating.
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Chambliss’s Win in Georgia Shows Obama’s Diminishing Coattails
Tweet Share on Facebook December 3, 2008 Comment (32)Saxby Chambliss has won the Georgia runoff by a 57.4 percent-to-42.6 percent margin with 97 percent of precincts reporting. That's a margin of 14.8 percentage points, far greater than the 49.8 percent-to-46.8 percent margin that Chambliss led by in the November 4 voting, and it's well above the 53 percent to 46 percent that was projected for the runoff on pollster.com.
Chambliss's victory over Jim Martin means that the Democrats will not get 60 seats in the Senate, even if Al Franken somehow manages to overcome Norm Coleman's circa 300-vote lead in the Minnesota recount. Franken's only apparent recourse is to the courts or to the full Senate; I doubt he'll get anywhere in the courts, and I doubt that Barack Obama will want the Democrats to take on a bruising partisan fight to get a 59th seat in the Senate (though labor leaders, eager to pass the card check bill and knowing that Arlen Specter voted to cut off the filibuster against it in the outgoing Congress, may press for that).
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Obama’s Win Is Not Necessarily the Beginning of a Political Realignment
Tweet Share on Facebook December 2, 2008 Comment (22)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Beneath the numbers in political polls, which suggest a certain continuity of opinion, are millions of voters who keep changing their minds. This is the finding of a series of Associated PressYahoo polls as laid out in this Associated Press story. The APYahoo poll tracked some 2,000 adults periodically throughout the campaign—a panel back in the lingo of pollsters—starting in November 2007. Overall, 17 percent of those who ultimately voted for Obama said they were for McCain in at least one of the 10 tracking polls, while 11 percent of eventual McCain voters said they backed Obama. In other words, 14 percent of all voters switched from one candidate to the other over a period of 12 months. As the AP story concludes, "Election polls that showed only gradual shifts in support for Obama and McCain were masking a much more volatile electorate."
