As my grandfather used to say, as the crow flies, we've got just one month to go - the 7th to the 7th - before election day. I don't have to guess that many of us are on pins and needles. I read about it all around the 'net and I hear it from my off-line friends every day. The chief worry: all this optimistic talk about a Democratic victory in the House and/or the Senate is going to turn to ashes just as did our hopes in '04. Karl Rove has another surprise prepared to spring on us before October is over. The polls are wrong. Democrats aren't working hard enough. They're focusing on the wrong issues. We're deluded if we think '06 will be anything like '94, or '80 or '74. On and on and on.

Along with this worry-wartism is the perspective of some that even if Democratic challengers get more votes, they won't take office because Diebold will intervene. And then there's the ultimate reason offered for not getting excited: even if the intervention fails, and Democrats manage to squeeze out a majority, this won't matter because too many Democrats aren't "really" Democrats and will vote with the Republicans anyway. Which translates into: There isn't a nickel's worth of difference between the Dems and the GOP.

Thus does despair seek to create its own empire of apathy.

I'm a Popular Front Democrat, so I'm full of criticism for the party. But, unless one's goal aligns with Rove's and Denny Hastert's, now isn't the time to complain that Democrats have no ideas, or principles, or spine. Later for that. Now is the time to kick Republican butt. Having succeeded, in January we can kick Democratic butt.

Now is also not the time to become paralyzed over what the Republicans may be cooking up in the next four weeks. Instead, however many hours you can spare, now is the time to be walking precincts, chatting up family and friends and neighbors and colleagues, working the phones or doing whatever other volunteer work a candidate near you needs you to do. Now is the time, if you can afford it, to put some money (or some more money) into a favorite campaign or two. Now is the time, if you haven't already, to get serious.

In particular, I think that the voter fraud bugaboo has been seriously over-rated. It's clear that there's been a concerted vote-suppression effort by the Republicans as part and parcel of their GOTV effort, but it's far less clear that there has been a lot of systematic voter fraud going on (although the potential for it with no-paper-trail machines is high enough for us to be very concerned). Still even if all the suspicions turn out to be true, these efforts depend on the actual votes being relatively evenly split between the parties. When that happens, when things are balanced on a fulcrum, a small number of votes suppressed or switched can throw the results one way or the other.

The problem for the Republicans is that signs are pointing rather strongly to this election not being that kind of evenly balanced affair. It seems rather than this is going to be much closer to a Democratic rout, and if that's the case (and I think it may be) then it's not going to be possible to change the results by moving a small number of votes. Instead, huge blocks of votes will have to change or be suppressed, and such activities are much, much harder to cover-up. That's why I don't think the voter fraud concern is one we need to be too concerned about, as long as the tea leaves still point in the right direction.

Now, what Rove & Company will do to counter Foley & Iraq & etc. is another concern altogether, and one we need to be prepared for.

Every one of their corrupt attributes is vividly on display here:

The absolute refusal ever to admit error. The desperate clinging to power above all else. The efforts to cloud what are clear matters of wrongdoing with irrelevant sideshows. And the parade of dishonest and just plainly inane demonization efforts to hide and distract from their wrongdoing: hence, the pages are manipulative sex vixens; a shadowy gay cabal is to blame; the real criminals are those who exposed the conduct, not those who engaged in it; liberals created the whole scandal; George Soros funded the whole thing; a Democratic Congressman did something wrong 23 years ago; one of the pages IM'd with Foley as a "hoax", and on and on. There has been a virtual carousel -- as there always is -- of one pathetic, desperate attempt after the next to deflect blame and demonize those who are pointing out the wrongdoing. This is what they always do, on every issue. The difference here is that everyone can see it, and so nothing is working.

That's right, and given that it's about sex and morality and personal responsibility (but mostly because it's about sex), people are paying close attention, which is why it (combined with all the other stuff going on) will bring down the Republicans.

As I've said before (in a comment to this), because the Republicans are both ideologically outrageous and fundamentally corrupt and incompetent at governance, the Foley scandal will keep on and on and combine with every other scandal and malfeasance already in the air, those in the past, and others coming down the pike (Iraq, the donut hole, Abramoff, voter fraud, Katrina, Plame, the denial of global warming, the continuing freedom of Osama bin Laden, torture, warrantless wiretapping, Social Security "reform") to create an atmosphere in which the Republicans cannot win.

But, really, without the coverup by powerful people of the creepy behavior of a man who lusted after young men, this "perfect storm" would never have coalesced. The sex angle is the catalyst, and the continuing revelations of the details of the attempted coverup and whitewash is the energy source that will keep the pot boiling. The best thing the Republicans could have done was to cut their loses and throw four or five people to the wolves -- the symbolic slaying of Hastert, Reynolds and everyone else responsible for not doing something about Foley might have quelled the furor, even if other stuff was to come out. By doing that, sacrificing some powerful people, they might have saved the party, but because they haven't done that, they're going to end up devastating it.

Update: Billmon, one of the smartest and most perceptive people I've read on the web, has another take altogether, as does my friend Roger Keeling, another very smart guy.

Update (10/8): Michael O'Hare has thoughts on why the Foley scandal is totally appropriate to the Republicans' behavior in the past 6 years.

Update (10/9): Publius has a nice post about why the Hastert/Foley scandal won't heal up any time soon, and another on why it's the chickens coming home to roost.

I'd like to see some real progress in this year's mid-term elections to be certain, and there's plenty of ground that still needs to be recovered, but it really does feel as if we've already seen the high-water mark of the fundamentalist / ultra-conservative / anti-rationalist / neo-con resurgence.

Now more than ever, I believe this to be true. The 2006 mid-terms will break the back of the right and deal a near-death blow to the Republican Party as now constituted. I don't think it will shatter entirely, there may be (barely) enough moderates hanging on to by their fingernails who will be emboldened and will take back the party, but, at least for the time being, the right's control of the Republican party and, through it, their hegemony over the Federal government will be just a very, very bad memory. Bush/Cheney will still be in power, and still dangerous, but the tide will have turned and they will no longer be able to rule in the same way.

The press smells blood in the water, and they will feed.


I think we can look forward to a very successful mid-term election, in which we'll have taken the first steps towards restoring democracy to the world's oldest democratic country, and putting things to right again.