The difference in ’94 is that we had a non-principled president who did not govern by conviction; he governed by expediency. Unlike Clinton, I don’t see Obama sprinting to the middle to engage in triangulation. Clinton co-opted the Gingrich successes as his own; remember Clinton claiming Welfare Reform as his own success? Remember Clinton declaring that HE balanced the budget? Newt gave Clinton every victory that Clinton can CLAIM.

I don’t see Axlerod counseling Obama to play ball with Mike Pence or Eric Cantor or John Cornyn or Tom Coburn — I just don’t see that happening.

Ivan

You took the words right out of my mouth.

I would like the end result of the 2010 elections to be a Dem majority 218 to 217 in the House and a 51-49 Dem majority in the Senate. There is no doubt the mainstream media will try to place part of the blame on a Republican House for continuing economic woes if the GOP regains control of the House in 2010. I want our 2012 presidential nominee to be able to run against Obama, a Dem House and a Dem Senate.

we did things that guaranteed Bill Clinton’s reelect.

Yeah, like nominate Bob Dole.

With McCain out of the way, we don’t have to worry about whose turn it is in 2012.

After that, we need to play for the long run by running genuine conservatives. An injection of a critical mass of genuine conservatives in 2010 is more important in the long run than a majority led by RINOs.

With their backs against the wall, the RINOs have voted no in 2009 (although they haven’t used every delay tactic in the playbook.) If the RINOs regain the locus of power, we can expect them to behave like RINOs again.

with the government shutdown. He ran into something that Republicans, especially Southern Republicans, had no experience with; Saul Alinsky. The Democrats and the government employee unions ran something right out of their strike playbook and Gingrich, et. al. didn’t know how to handle it.

These big public employee unions know they can’t sustain as strike. They can’t even get all of their members to go out at all and they can’t keep the ones that will go out more than two or three days unless the union can promise the employees won’t lose any pay; something hard for them to do as most don’t really have strike funds and such. So, they’ve invented the virtual strike. In concert with their friends in the media, they can make it look like the World has ended as soon as they go out. If they go out at 8AM, by the 6PM news there are starving babies, mommies with cancer who lost their health insurance, car repossessions, and home foreclosures headling on every newscast and on the front page of every paper the next morning.

That’s what they did to the Republicans and rather than do adequate PR to show that it is all just a lie, hard to do, but possible, or just maintain a stiff upper lip and stay the course, nobody likes government employees anyway, the Republicans folded and allowed themselves to look foolish in the process.

And, as somebody below said, nominating Bob Dole, even though it was “his turn,” pretty much guaranteed Slick’s re-election.

To retake the Senate, we’d need to flip 11 seats– well, 10 presuming Brown wins. While theoretically possible, it’d take a wave comparable to the Great Flood of Noah to pull that off.

The House, however, we can retake, and it would be good for us to retake the House. That way, in 2011 and 2012 we can pass good Republican legislation through the House– no matter that it won’t go anywhere in the Senate, we’ll be able to say ‘we’re not just the party of No, we’ve been passing all kinds of legislation that would benefit the country, but Democrats in the Senate and the White House won’t let it become law’. Plus, we’ll be able to put a decisive stop to the crap that Obama and the Dems have been trying to shove down our throat for the last year or so.

Then we can retake the Senate and White House in 2012, and get to fixing as many things that the Dems have broken as we can.

First, the logic of being in the minority will always be “true”—so we would never get a majority
Second, a closer Congress would result in bipartisonship, with lots of RHINO’s crossing the aisle, and blurring differences between the parties
Third, Republicans will get blamed for everything no matter what happens, so we might as well win
Fourth, a shutdown could occur with a strong plurality, and it would be even worse because it would be a minority party shutting down the government
Fifth, nothing beats winning

and *enormously* important.

I know we sometimes worry that they won’t have to sow what they reap, but this time they will. GWB got the blame for the first Fannie/Freddie meltdown, but there’s a bigger one coming and the inflation that’s coming with it will be a firestorm.

The deficit, along with the fed’s efforts to stabilize interest rate by purchasing bonds is going to trigger a wave of inflation and there won’t be any way they will be able to fob it off on GWB.

Proper grammar saves lives.

Let’s eat Grandma.
Let’s eat, Grandma.

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Activists Taking Action: Unified Patriots

Remember, last year the Republican brand was toxic.

A year is a lifetime in politics. Gingrich got the brand elected in 1994, then did things that played right into Billy Jeff’s hands. Got him reelected, too.

And yes, nominating Dole helped.