So much for my prediction that there would be scarcely any change in the US Senate! I gave too much weight to all those claims that it was getting harder and harder to unseat an incumbent. Pollster Jay Cost, in an article engagingly entitled
"Why I jumped the shark" says,
Theoretically, the mistake I made here was to presume that the incumbency advantage that obviously exists (this year's incumbency reelection rate is still about 95.2%) is automatic. Incumbents are in a good position to insulate themselves. But they are not automatically insulated. They must actually do the insulating.
For America, that's cool. While the specific policies the Democrats will now foster over there are mostly bad, incumbents
ought to run scared.
For the rest of the world, Iraq in particular... pity.
Pity is both a noun and a verb in the imperative mood.
Via Clive Davies, I found this depressing prediction from Frederick Kagan of the likely results of a withdrawal from Iraq.
Snappier version by Daryl Herbert in the Volokh comments:
The disaster that would follow an American pullout--collaborators would be tortured/murdered on a massive scale and no one would ever cooperate with Americans again--would be a tremendous benefit to al-Qaeda. America would never again be taken seriously in the Middle East or elsewhere as more than a tornado: we can temporarily pass through and smash anything that's out in the open, but in short order we're gone.
Liberalism would be discredited among Arabs. It would be seen as a great way to get killed: best case scenario, if your political movement succeeds, the liberal conditions you create will be fertile ground for a terrorist insurgency.
I don't despair. Perhaps
the horse will learn to sing. But I can't help remembering that the irrepressible thief who said that was under a suspended sentence of death.
posted by Natalie at 11:06 AM
