In this posting, we would like to graphically display what we said by showing both the 2008 electoral map and the 2012 projected electoral map.

 Contniue reading at http://winwithjmc.com/archives/2203 

John Couvillon is a political consultant. His company is JMC Enterprises of Louisiana, Inc. with expertise in the data analysis aspects of political campaigns, such as poll sample development/analysis, development of targeted voter files for phone canvassing or mail outs, campaign strategy, and demographic consulting. See his site at WinWithJMC.com for more information.

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2010/1994 comparisons

The size of the GOP landslide was nothing short of massive – a net gain of 63 seats for the Republicans, which broken down involved the GOP picking up 66 Democratic held seats while losing three of their own seats (Note: a Democratic held seat on Long Island is still undecided at press time, but the Democratic incumbent leads by 235 votes). This is the biggest midterm election gain both overall and for the Republicans since 1938. It was even larger than the 52 seat GOP gain on Election Night 1994.

Continue reading at http://winwithjmc.com/archives/2086

John Couvillon is a political consultant. His company is JMC Enterprises of Louisiana, Inc. with expertise in the data analysis aspects of political campaigns, such as poll sample development/analysis, development of targeted voter files for phone canvassing or mail outs, campaign strategy, and demographic consulting. See his site at WinWithJMC.com for more information.

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But let me just say that after last night’s speech I have no doubt that he will do his duty as Speaker of the House as we’ve never seen it done before.  He will be loyal to the American people and the constitution because he truly believes in doing so.

When Boehner was ending his speech, you could literally see his collected, calm, and confident demeanor cracking under the emotion of the situation.  At first, I though he was faking it.  But he continued on, and I realized he wasn’t faking it.  He truly cared about what he was saying, and he was truly passionate about his job serving the American people.  You can see it in his eyes if you look.  That doesn’t lie.

I think the most interesting part of this speech was how in a mere 5 minutes, Boehner connected with the American people in a way Barack Obama never could over 2 years trying.  Obama, often praised for his excellent communication skills, has failed miserably at connecting with the people he claims to serve.  In 5 minutes, Boehner accomplished the task Barack Obama had been failing at miserably for 2 years.  I suppose great communication doesn’t necessarily correlate with success, and contrary to conventional wisdom it doesn’t seem to correlate with popularity 100% of the time either.  The Telegraph, United Kingdom news outlet, had an interesting and similar take on Obama’s failure to connect:

There was a general sense that his personality was over-controlled and repressed, and that this was perhaps a function of his self-invention: the effect of having made a conscious choice to adopt an identity and a history (the Chicago black activist) which was unconnected to his real past. It occurred to me that, in an odd way, he was a Gatsby-like figure who had reinvented himself but whose new persona could be sustained only with a tremendous act of will. This psychological analysis seemed not unconnected to the political one, which revolved around his peculiar inability to sense what most Americans would regard as alienating and contrary to their own values and culture.

Boehner, historically a strong man and unemotional, has shown his passion in the run up to the election with several tremendous speeches, climaxing with his speech last night.  He hasn’t talked specific policy yet, which is a point to note.  However, he didn’t have to, nor did he need to do so last night.  I think he made it quite clear he was committed to the conservative cause with his closing comments.  In that final 2 minutes, he accomplished what Obama never could: he dedicated himself to the America people.  Congratulations to him, and congratulations to us.

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“We need to face facts — our government is broke. Washington is borrowing 37 cents of every dollar it spends from our kids and grandkids. Given that, I think it’s reasonable to ask why Congress is spending taxpayers’ money to support a left-wing radio network — and in the wake of Juan Williams’ firing, it’s clearer than ever that’s what NPR is.”

As with so many things Boehner says and does, this is good – and as a policy statement it’s on point. NPR is a waste of taxpayer dollars at a time when the internet, cable TV, satellite radio and all the other mechanisms to deliver information abound. The need for public funds to support a media venture does not exist – if NPR’s content is worthy of listenership then it’s worthy of sponsorship as well. And if it’s not, then it’s time for the creative destruction of the free market to wipe out people like Nina Totenberg, who can say things far more objectionable than Juan Williams did on NPR’s air.

But just like many things Boehner says and does, it’s not great.

That NPR is a left-wing radio network is certainly bad, at least in the context that it’s funded by your tax dollars. But Boehner missed the mark. What he could have said was “Washington is broke, and we’re borrowing 37 cents of every dollar we spend. And we’re borrowing money to fund NPR, a network so far out of the mainstream that even Juan Williams, who is as reliable a liberal as you’ll ever find, isn’t left-wing and politically orthodox enough for them.

“Juan will, I’m sure, land on his feet. But NPR has proven it no longer deserves our funding, in my view, and as Speaker I’ll support efforts to make it stand on its own like everybody else in the media.”

Boehner’s on the right side. But what the American people are looking for right now is for him and the Republicans we’re about to make the majority in the House of Representatives to show the kind of audacity and determination that the Left showed when they jammed Obamacare down our throats.

It’s true that talking about de-funding NPR isn’t as effective as actually de-funding NPR, so if Boehner walks softly on the issue as he did for NRO today and then does the deed in January we have no quarrel. But we’re two weeks away from an election of colossal importance, and NPR’s firing of Williams is now the hottest topic of conversation in the country. It’s an outrage on both sides of the political aisle, and as such it’s one of those galvanizing “70-30″ issues politicians dream about. It’s just like the Ground Zero Mosque issue it spawned from in this regard.

And making the Juan Williams firing a campaign issue Republicans take a strong majoritarian position on is a winner in two weeks. A stronger statement from Boehner, one which doesn’t just ask questions but promise action, would have helped galvanize that issue for Republicans.

We’ll take what we can get on this one. But we’d like a good bit more.

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Much was made over the GOP’s Pledge to America revealed a few months ago.  There was criticism from both sides of the partisan divide about its legitimacy.  I tend to agree with Redstate’s criticism of the plan from a substantive perspective.  Here is an excerpt from their analysis:

1. The Pledge fails to address the single greatest threat to our nation’s long term fiscalhealth – the fact that we have precisely $0 set aside for the more than $106 trillion in unfunded liabilities staring us in the face for social security, medicare and medicaid. Instead, we get more of the same political rhetoric about seniors standing to lose Medicare because of Obamacare. MEDICARE IS BANKRUPT. SOCIAL SECURITY IS BANKRUPT. FOR GOODNESS SAKE, MAN UP AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

2. The Pledge blatantly fails to even mention earmarks, much less calling for a ban on them. The issue here isn’t about how much money we will save. The issue is about Congressional arrogance – and their naked addiction to using your tax dollars to try to buy off your votes back home.

3. The Pledge offers no significant, concrete plan to reduce spending such as a Balanced Budget Amendment or a Spending Limit Amendment, relying instead on gimmicks like weekly votes on spending cuts and hiring freezes, as well as nebulous promises to cap spending.

4. And perhaps most troubling of all, the Pledge adopts the nonsensical “repeal and replace” mantra for Obamacare – offering as replacement yet more federal government mandates regarding pre-existing conditions and lifetime caps on benefits, which begs the question: which mandates are unconstitutional and which ones are not, GOP? And, STOP WITH THE MANDATES. STOP IT. MANDATING THAT INSURERS COVER PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS IS JUST AS BAD AS THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE ON ITS FACE – BUT WORSE, YOU IDIOTS, IT WILL LEAD TO AN INDIVIDUAL MANDATE BECAUSE YOU CANNOT COVER THE ALREADY SICK WITHOUT MANDATING THAT THE HEALTHY PARTICIPATE. JUST STOP IT.

That being said, I feel like our conservative friends were a little bit harsh on the GOP here.  It would be one thing if the Pledge to America was a substantive document.  But it isn’t.  It’s a political ploy with little substance. It says all the right things to persuade voters to support the GOP.  It is an excellent production, but it is designed for political purposes, not substantive ones.

So, let’s dispense with the illusion that this pamphlet proposes any sustainable legitimate policy positions and see it for what it is: a clever political ploy.  Once you come to terms with that, then you can understand how ridiculous Obama sounds when he makes claims such as these about education:

Obama says Republicans would pay to keep a set of expiring tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans by cutting spending on education, an area where he’s investing billions of dollars from kindergarten through college.

“And when you ask them, well, how would you pay for some of this stuff, they don’t really have good answers,” Obama said Sept. 28 in Albuquerque, N.M., shortly after Republicans released the plan. “But one way they would pay for it is to cut back our education spending by 20 percent and eliminate about 200,000 Head Start programs, and reduce student aid to go to college for about 8 million students.”

This talking point is so worn out coming from Obama it almost makes the ears bleed.  When the subject of education comes up I can pretty much tell you what the president will say verbatim.  But is it true? No.  Nowhere in the 48 page document is there any mention of such a substantive proposal.  Probably because, as we’ve established, the Pledge to America is not a substantive document.  Here’s the source of Obama’s education mantra:

The White House says the claim is based on an analysis by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities of the Republicans plan’s proposal to return federal spending to 2008 levels. A White House spokeswoman says the administration also crunched the numbers.

The think tank says such a reversal would require immediate cuts of 21 percent, or $101 billion, in spending on programs unrelated to national security or veterans. The center chose education as an example and said a cut that size would trim more than $8 billion from K-12 funding, on top of cuts by state and local governments.

Brendan Buck, a spokesman for the House Republican leadership, said the analysis is faulty. While the pledge calls for deep spending cuts, it doesn’t specify where they should be made, he said.

The left-wing analysis makes its own calculations on how the GOP would implement the Pledge to America.  It comes up with a requirement for immediate cuts of 21%.  Stop.  Is this think-tank telepathic?  Does it have access to the thoughts and ideas of John Boehner?  I kind of doubt that.  So, immediately we run into the problem that the left is fabricating GOP policy-decisions.  But let’s say the 21% cuts are accurate.  I can buy that, and I think it is probably roughly accurate.  Then we get to the real malarkey.  Apparently, the White House knows for sure how those spending cuts will fall on education spending.  Really? How? Ridiculous.

To be honest, I’m relatively ambivalent towards a left-wing group producing a biased analysis of the Pledge to America.  What else would you expect?  But for the President of the United States to use absolutely fabricated facts to push his left-wing agenda is irresponsible and disturbing.  Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate, seems to think his elitist status and “superior intelligence” gives him the right to blatantly lie to the entire American people.  Well, Mr. President, not all of us graduated from Harvard, but unfortunately for you, that actually doesn’t make us a bunch of brainless zombies.  Yes, shocker, we know when you’re lying, and we really don’t like it.

Want some more? Here’s another education lie:

Obama said the tuition tax credit “could be repealed if Republicans take over. They’ve already proposed to cut education spending by 20 percent.”

The American Opportunity Tax Credit, worth $2,500 a year, was included in the $814 billion economic stimulus bill Obama signed into law last year. The tax credit is available for the 2009 and 2010 tax years, but is scheduled to expire at the end of this year because of how the law is written. Obama on Wednesday called on Congress to make the credit permanent.

So how does a law that is expiring in just over two months get repealed by a party that’s not in power?

If that makes sense to you, let me in on the logic.  Of course, I didn’t go to Harvard so I really probably wouldn’t understand it anyway.  I’d probably be better off just believing that blindly, right Mr. President?

The Pledge to America promises are just that: promises.  They are not substantive policy outlines.  They are vague promises that are intended to create GOP support for the midterm elections.  As much as people would like politicians run on policy, it doesn’t happen that way.  The politics happen first.  The policy follows.  And apparently, the lies just keep coming.

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So today, when we attempt to convince conservatives in the 2nd District to get out the vote to send Cao back to the House of Representatives, we’re bound to catch criticism from some quarters as hypocritical or “selling out.” We’ll address that, too.

On the surface, in the middle and at bottom this is not difficult stuff. Cao might not be much of a Republican, but he is a Republican. Cao’s opponent Cedric Richmond absolutely is not. If you’re a conservative, you’re probably a Republican and that would indicate you’re a Cao voter even though Cao is certainly no conservative.

But there is what looks like a small but potentially significant percentage of vote in the 2nd District which is leaning away from Cao. Not toward Richmond, but to independent 3rd-party candidate Anthony Marquize. Some members of the Greater New Orleans Tea Party are now pushing Marquize, in somewhat indelicate fashion at times. The gist of the attacks is Cao’s vote in favor of Obamacare the first time it went through the House – though he did vote against final passage.

Marquize is little-known and poorly financed. According to his last campaign finance report dated Sept. 30, he’s raised $7,700 and spent $5,600 in this race. He can’t win, because regardless of the quality of his message almost nobody in the district knows who he is – and with financials like that nobody in the district will know who he is by Election Day.

Cao’s record of attempting to placate the heavy Democrat vote in the 2nd District is deserving of some level of opprobrium among conservatives. There should be no problem with a debate on the Right about that tactic – one could argue that Cao’s 2008 election was a fluke in the first place, it could be taken for granted that he’s going to lose either this fall or as soon as the Democrats find a viable candidate to take him on and as such attempting to steer a narrow path to reelection by voting for leftist positions is a fool’s errand. Cao chose to attempt to represent his constituents, most of whom have disastrously stupid ideas about policy and the performance of President Obama, by hewing to their preferences as much as practicable. Either position you might favor can be supported in an argument.

But such an argument is best made in a party primary. If Cao had attracted a primary challenger, like Mr. Marquize for example, that would have been a healthy race and perhaps Mr. Marquize might have gotten some traction. If nothing else, Cao would have had to explain to the conservatives who turned out in force to help elect him in 2008 why he spends so much time cozying up to the President – which makes us break out in hives here at the Hayride regardless of the political efficacy of doing so.

In short, that would have been a worthy discussion. And Cao would have likely won it, seeing as though his fundraising prowess as a Republican who can get elected in a Democrat district would have buried an insurgent candidate in this cycle. But the point would have been made, and it would have been made without contributing to electing a candidate that conservatives and moderates alike despise.

And that’s the difference between supporting Cao and opposing Mike Castle. Castle lost a GOP primary, just as Cao may have lost one should Marquize have challenged him in that venue. There is a difference between losing on principle and slashing one’s own throat. And if you’re looking for a more practical difference between Cao and Castle, consider that Castle voted in favor of Cap and Trade and Cao opposed it. That difference alone means Cao has value to conservatives.

As things stand now, though, the small percentage of the vote that Marquize may get from disaffected conservatives (One percent? Three? Five?) could well be what Richmond needs to get elected. The Public Policy Polling survey last week which gave Richmond a 45-36 lead might be an outlier; the poll sample for that survey skewed more heavily favorable to Richmond than the electorate will be, and our estimation is that Richmond’s lead is probably closer to five percent. Whatever percentage of the vote which is contemplating pulling the lever for Marquize could be applied to narrow the gap and contribute to defeating the Democrat – if those voters are thinking practically.

Let’s remember that the opposition to Richmond isn’t just ideological. You could make the argument that a Cao who spends his time cuddling up to Obama and giving the President a friendly vote here and there renders him no different from a Democrat. But the one thing nobody has questioned about Cao is his integrity. He’s honest and he stays out of trouble. That can’t be said about Richmond, who lost his law license for a time after running for a New Orleans city council seat in a district he didn’t live in. Whose involvement in a non-profit scam looks like a classic execution of the Dollar Bill Jefferson family business. Whose association with unsavory characters, including a murderer, continues. And whose behavior in drinking establishments resulted in a police citation in 2007. It should be a priority of all voters unaligned with such a candidate on ideological grounds – and some who are so aligned – to prevent him from attaining congressional office.

Finally, Cao’s utility to the conservative cause in the next Congress will be satisfactory for the sole reason than a re-elected Cao would vote for John Boehner, rather than Nancy Pelosi, as the Speaker of the House. Once that vote is taken and Boehner wins thanks to a Republican majority Cao is part of, the kinds of left-wing legislation he angered conservatives by voting for will no longer be part of the landscape. He might be voting against good bills, but when no bad bills can reach the floor under a GOP majority Cao can’t do damage. And for that Boehner vote alone, Cao is the right choice for conservatives. Any other vote hands the Democrats a vote Nancy Pelosi can count on to remain as Speaker of the House.

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This can’t really be the plan. The fact that President Obama and his top strategists think their most effective argument in the final three weeks before Election Day is that they suspect, without evidence, that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is using foreign money to finance its most recent advertising campaign — that pretty much defines desperation, right?

To which a proper response might be…

“Do I really look like a guy with a plan?”

To really understand all this stuff, you’ve got to go back to Saul Alinsky and Rules For Radicals, which still appears to be Obama’s bible.

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

And this is what the President and his people have been attempting to do since he took office. Or even before.

Rush Limbaugh was the first picked/frozen/personalized/polarized target. But with three hours a day and an audience of some 20-odd million politically-engaged listeners, it didn’t work too well.

Then it was Dick Cheney’s turn. And that went even worse, because regardless of how badly demonized Cheney was in the media and how unpopular with the Left (and the general public as well in the aftermath of the Bush administration), the last thing you want to do is get into a debate on national security with Dick Cheney. Obama lost that one, and he reaped the unintended consequences of elevating Cheney’s daughter Liz, who is just as articulate and passionate a critic of the president as her father is, into stardom.

Obama then returned to bashing President Bush, which was the central theme of his 2008 campaign, and he lost that one as well. Because Bush gave his successor the complete silent treatment, refusing to answer Obama’s attacks out of a sense of decorum. The voters have taken that as a show of class, which many believe Obama lacks. He’s suffered in comparison – particularly since Obama has generated no real progress from the end of the Bush presidency to now and a growing number of Americans actually say they’d prefer to have Bush back in office to the guy criticizing him.

While the Bush-bashing isn’t over, we next saw Karl Rove enter Obama’s crosshairs. But while lots of folks on the Left and the Right alike dislike Rove, the idea that an entire administration would engage in attacking a private citizen doesn’t really resonate with the public. And Rove, for all his faults, isn’t bad on TV. He can defend himself fairly well.

John Boehner is the most current individual target, and he’ll remain in the crosshairs for some time. But the problem with attacking Boehner is that nobody knows who he is. Now that he’s the subject of an unpopular president’s attacks, there’s a sizable risk that the public might decide it likes Boehner better than Obama once it gets to know him. Boehner is a little on the bland side, he smokes, he’s taken lots of money from lobbyists (just like every successful politician in Washington has) and he’s got a tan far, far too deep for a congressman from Ohio to have – but he’s also a good bit closer to mainstream America both personally and politically than the President is. So it’s risky to be targeting Boehner, even if it makes sense to attack the Speaker of the House when he or she is of the opposite political party (perhaps Bush should have gone after Nancy Pelosi a bit more in 2007 and 2008).

What is apparent from watching the administration attack individuals, though, is that Rule #11 doesn’t work when you have more power than the target does. Rather than advancing your cause by speaking truth to power, you just look like a bully.

So Rule #11 has been bent a little of late. The administration seems to have dumped the part about not attacking abstract corporations or bureaucracies in favor of a more general “they” – as “they” can’t fight back the way an individual can.

There have been a few examples of this – doctors who chop off feet or pull out tonsils for fun and profit, evil insurance companies, BP and so on. Now we’re on the Chamber of Commerce and foreigners.

The fact that the Obama administration has no room to talk about taking foreign contributions and that 43 percent of the Chamber’s donations this year have gone to Democrats doesn’t make them much of a “they,” either.

But if you’re an Alinskyite one-trick pony, you don’t have much else to go on. Alinsky teaches how to disturb the peace and destroy institutions; he offers very little on how to build or govern. Those things take useful knowledge, and probably some talent – commodities in acute deficit with the crew in charge of the country.

The American people are realizing this. They will punish accordingly starting on Nov. 2.

We take a different perspective, and offer our sincere and heartfelt thanks to the Obama administration for providing the hope and change this country sorely needed.

 


Throughout that campaign the administrative branch of the federal government was personified by George W. Bush as he attempted to invoke a kinder and gentler government, a “compassionate conservatism,” by growing entitlement programs and ignoring the impending bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare.  It was the Bush administration that offered the first Keynesian stimulus package, and both Obama and his Republican opponent abandoned the campaign to meet with the president in Washington to work together to sell the program to the American people and to push it through Congress.   Of course it met no resistance in that chamber, for, though America has forgotten and the populist media chooses not to remind her, that chamber was controlled by Obama’s party and had been for several years.  Spending in general, and generously funded entitlement programs in particular, were consistently endowed by the House of Representatives that actually controls the federal budget process and America’s purse strings.

Unfortunately, they were aided by Republicans also in that chamber who had abandoned any conservatism they’d ever harbored and had rather become party to the spending and wheeling / dealing of their Democratic brethren.

So Mr. Obama is not entirely wrong to point his finger at Republicans when asked to identify the party responsible for the economic meltdown he inherited from Mr. Bush.

All Obama did was make it worse!

Right out of the gate, Obama began pushing his policies of hope and change.  Cap and Trade legislation was proposed, and passed the House.  Universal heathcare was proposed, and a watered down version was passed “by whatever means necessary,” and against the documented will of the majority of Americans.  Gargantuan stimulus packages followed on the heels of the first Bush package, and funded bailouts of United Auto Workers Union members in the government’s support of the salvation of failing automobile manufacturers.

America became furious, and the Tea Party movement was born.  True conservatives who had sat quietly on the sidelines during the Bush years were awakened by an internal call to action.  Many became active in the governance of our nation for the first time in their lives, choosing to do much more than simply vote occasionally. 

A dormant majority is dormant no more.  A new generation of Republicans has been identified which truly carries the mantle of the conservative cause.  Established “old school” Republicans are livid, but frightened, as most of them reside in the Senate where many have two to four years left in a six year term.  They sense the loss of their base, and are fearful that the “insurgent” Tea Partiers will not become dormant once again as the most immediate election, the 2010 “mid-terms,”  approach, then pass.

We must assure that their fears are well founded.  We cannot be satisfied with electing a new generation of conservatives to Washington and return to our lives of complacency.  The Lindsey Graham’s and Mitch McConnell’s of the Senate will still be there, and John McCain, selling himself as a “born again” conservative, will get elected to another six year term.

But Harry Reid will no longer be majority leader of the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi will be terminated and replace by John Boehner, a true conservative.  He will be supported by the “young guns” of the Republican Party, Messrs. Cantor of Virginia, McCarthy of California, and Ryan of Wisconsin, and others of similar mindset, the likes of which the Democratic Party and the old school Republican Party have not seen for generations.

In them rests the hope that Barack Obama has brought to the United States, and with them is represented the change that is so sorely needed.  We owe it to the Obama campaign and administration for having brought this hope and change about.

But it’s a hope we must not allow to die.  The 2010 elections are just the half way point, so the hope must be kept alive through the 2012 election cycle and beyond.  By keeping it alive, we can truly and significantly change this nation for the better for generations to come.

So the next time you hear someone scoff sarcastically about Obama’s hope and change, point out to them that he is indeed responsible for the changes that are occurring in our country, and the hope those changes promise.

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But there was one section of his speech that brought to light an undesired and much ignored truth about the state of national politics:

“It’s time to focus on doing what we were sent here to do. The ultimate measure of whether we have a functioning house is not bipartisanship.  Our focus shouldn’t be on working across party lines for its own sake.  The true test is whether our ideas, policies, and values are able to stand the test of a fair debate and a fair vote.  And sadly, that’s something we have not seen in the House for some time.”

People rant and rave about Democrats and Republicans not being able to cooperate.  They complain constantly about the ineffectiveness of government due to gridlock caused by a partisian alliance structure.  Why can’t Republicans and Democrats get just get along, geeze?

Well, people,  Mr. Boehner just told you the answer you really want so badly.  Because the the problem all along is that the question was wrong.  It shouldn’t be: Why can’t we all just get along? Because we can’t.  Republicans and Democrats have different worldviews, different competeing interest groups, and different constituences, thereby causing them to support different policy and stick to that policy. 

 The question is: Why can’t we get things done in congress? People assumed the answer to that question was the gridlock between the worldviews of Democrats and Republicans.  But then they got their bipartisanship: Tom Castle and Lisa Murkowski to name a prominent couple.   The tea-party movement is the backlash of America against bipartisanship, against what they thought they wanted but really didn’t.  The tea-party is fundamentally opposed to “RINOS,” the description of which is a bipartisan Republican.
Boehner puts in right on the money with this statement.  Why cross party lines just for the sake of a mediocre policy that doesn’t make anyone, Democrats or Republicans, happy?  Let’s get out of this idiotic political correctness and face the facts that what we really want are not politicians of weak ideals who work to compromise, but strong minded politicians who work for progress based on the confidence of their worldview.  And if that means less passed legislation, so what?  What it will mean is that the legislation that is passed is strong, pointed, and effective.

The vote to adjourn was 210-209.

Boehner pleaded with House members not to adjourn. “Vote no on this adjournment resolution. Give Congress a chance to vote on extending tax rates,” he said. 

Among the 39 Democrats voting not to adjourn was Louisiana’s Charlie Melancon.

Pelosi’s office put out a rather peculiar North Korea-esque statement in response to Boehner after the vote. “After listening to House Republican Leader John Boehner’s speech on the House floor today, it is clear that Americans face a choice: keep moving America forward—or return to what Republicans themselves call the ‘exact same’ agenda of failed ideas that favored corporate special interests, pushed us to the brink of economic disaster and left the middle class and small businesses struggling,” it read.

One Congressman who did manage to create an advantage out of today’s dispiriting events was Indiana’s Mike Pence, who probably didn’t hurt his likely 2012 presidential bid with this speech today: