Painfully awkward political theater, even by Debbie's standards. Here she is trying to trumpet the fact that President Obama is campaigning in competitive races around the country (he's so far stumped for two statewide candidates by my count, each in deep blue states, and neither running for Senate), even though he's largely been "benched" by the party she chairs. When pressed to name the Senate races in which O's been a player, Debbie does her thing:
Grimace-worthy, unresponsive rambling. Also known as a typical day at the office for DWS -- who commands exactly zero respect from the White House, as this eye-opening Politico piece made excruciatingly clear. Here's what she can't say: "Most of our candidates in competitive races don't want Obama around because his approval rating is underwater in all but six states." But that's the reality. In New Hampshire last night, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen tried to pretend the president's absence on her behalf was due to 'scheduling conflicts' or whatever, when in fact, he's simply honoring her polite behind the scenes request to stay the hell away. It's not that she opposes his agenda -- far from it -- but she can read the polls as well as anyone else. Another DWS point that deserves ridicule is her little tangent about how historically well-positioned Democrats are for a second term Congressional election. We might hold our losses to single digits in the House, guys! This is "good news," she explains, because the president's party typically loses a few dozen seats in these scenarios. But this tendentious analysis ignores the minor detail that the GOP won 63 House seats in 2010 in an anti-Obama backlash election, and retained most of their gains in 2012. Republicans near their historic ceiling in the lower chamber, yet they're still poised to gain seats. Great success, intones Debbie. Part of me will miss her when she's gone. Which she will be. See, again: The Politico story linked above, and please don't stop reading until you get to the part when she denies that the DWS in her DWS PAC doesn't stand for her initials. A perfectly Schultzian, comically implausible, lie. As for holding the Senate, I broke things down last night over at HotAir, using the Georgia race as a spring board:
Is Obama right that a Nunn victory would guarantee Reid’s Democratic majority hangs on to power? Not necessarily. It’s undeniably true that if the Democrats flip a red state into the blue column (the top prospects being GA, KS, and KY, the latter two of which Obama lost by more than 20 points), their power protection lift gets significantly lighter. But if — if — Republicans carry every seat in which their nominees currently lead in the polls (AR, AK, CO, IA, LA, MT, SD, WV), they could *technically* withstand losses in two of those three aforementioned races and still emerge with a 51-49 edge. I stressed ‘technically’ because let’s be honest: If Democrats pick off a pair of GOP-held seats in McCain/Romney turf this fall, the likelihood of Team Red sweeping the other eight races feels remote.
Remember, the only contests Republicans appear to have secured at this juncture are in West Virginia and Montana, plus (probably) South Dakota and Arkansas. Begich and Landrieu are definitely down, but they aren’t quite out; and while things are looking up in both Colorado and Iowa, those are still states carried twice by Obama where Democratic nominees are within striking distance. (On the other side of that coin, the same standard also applies to Thom Tillis and Scott Brown in North Carolina and New Hampshire, respectively). The point is that Republicans have multiple paths to get to (+6), so a Nunn victory wouldn’t single-handedly derail the GOP Majority Express. But it’d make those paths a lot narrower, and would likely indicate that 2014 did not turn out to be the big wave year Republicans were hoping for.
And in case you were curious, no, Michelle Nunn won't condemn this repulsive flier her party is passing around to manipulate and scare black voters. I'll leave you with this clip; try to stick around through the mindless talking points until the very end, and Wolf's follow-up: