Lawrence O'Donnell: A Permanent Majority?

[Sapphire Blue]

A Permanent Majority?

I haven't had the time to type a word for HuffPo since the election because I've been too busy gloating on TV. Having predicted every Senate election correctly as well as the outcome in the House and the governors' races, I have been taking every opportunity on MSNBC and the McLaughlin Group to say a few self-congratulatory words and sit back and watch my Republican counterparts' befuddlement.

In my latest round of this, Joe Scarborough asked why I knew who was going to win the elections and Karl Rove, the genius, Karl Rove, "Bush's Brain," didn't know. By the way, how smart do you have to be to be Bush's brain? I didn't want to give up my secret for election predicting. I like being one of the few pundits to accurately predict all the Senate races. Fellow geniuses Eleanor Clift and Mark Shields got it right too, but they're not the gloating type and they never appear on MSNBC, so I was hoping to create a sort of Rove-level genius aura for myself, at least among MSNBC talking heads. You know, maybe "Olbermann's Brain," something like that. But I couldn't come up with a Rove-like rap about metrics because I had never actually used the word in a sentence, so, to avoid the horror of dead air, I went to my fallback position--the truth.

I admitted that the secret of my election pundit genius was public polls. Any study--okay, 'study' is too strong a word--an occasional glance at the publicly available polls during the two weeks before the election told you exactly who was going to win. When a challenger like Claire McCaskill was running a tie at 47 or 48 against incumbent Jim Talent, that poll is telling you that the challenger is going to beat the incumbent. It helped that I happen to know that Talent never polled above 50 against McCaskill and it helped that I had seen McCaskill campaign and knew she was a great campaigner. That's what provoked me to predict she was going to win months ago. But the rest of the predictions I made were based on nothing but public polls.

The MSM loves the image of Rove as genius almost as much as Rove does, but, showing no embarrassment for their years of dutiful transcribing of Rove's notion that he was building a permanent Republican majority, they are now moving on to the first-woman-Speaker story in which the word genius has yet to appear. Which brings me to my next big prediction in answer to the question of how long will the Democrats hold the House?

(snip)

But if Pelosi keeps Hastings and Murtha at bay and runs a smooth ship for a few years, the new Democratic majorities in the statehouses could deliver the kind of gerrymandering--I mean redistricting--after the 2010 census that the Democrats need to get another generational hold on the House. Not forty years like last time, but twenty years is not out of the question. I'm not talking permanent majority here. Only a genius like Karl Rove could get anyone to buy an idea like that.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-odonnell/a-permanent-majority_b_34114.html

[LSparkle]

1. Anyone else heard about Rove's plan post-election

to gather a panel of Rethug political scientists to prove how the polls could have been so WRONG (on his assumption they'd retain control of Congress)? I'm ASTONISHED this isn't getting more play -- I think I saw a crawl on MSNBC yesterday that this was reported in Newsweek ... ??

[Sapphire Blue]

3. Like how the polls were so wrong in '04?

[CatWoman]

2. K&R

:kick: