An interesting take...

[TexasTiger 13,016]

Market Update

Intrade -- my favorite on-line bucket shop -- has been making contracts on the odds that the Dems will win back the House and Senate in November. I noticed this evening that the House contract, which pays a buck if the Republicans win, has fallen below the 50 cent mark. Last price: 48.5 cents.

In other words, the market (meaning the London bookmakers) is now putting better than even odds on the Dems winning the House back in November.

I don't know if this has anything to do with Rover's reported indictment (please Santa, I promise I won't ask for anything else this Christmas) but it certainly conforms to the picture of a regime in political meltdown. On the other hand, the Intrade Senate contract is still trading at around 80 cents (80% chance GOP holds the upper chamber) so somebody still thinks there's life in the diseased old floozy yet.

On the third hand, though, the idea that the House elections will be nationalized while the Senate races remain local goes against the usual grain of American politics -- as several analysts have pointed out. My guess is that if the Dems win back the House, they'll also get the Senate, or at least come very close.

I've got to confess I have mixed feelings about this prospect -- even though I've put the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on a monthly allowance, like my kids, for the duration. The GOP political apparatus (which means the conservative rat******s, like Rove, who crawled out of the College Republican clubs of the 1970s) is completely geared to running against things, as opposed to running on the party's own policies and track record. If you had their party an their record, you know you'd do the same.

But having control of all three branches -- and a virtually invisible opposition party -- has clearly caused a major malfunction in the Rovian attack machine, which right now is spinning around like an heat-seeking weapons system without a target to lock on to.

A Democratic House would provide that much-needed target, and give the Cheney White House someone to blame for whatever disasters await us in the next two years (and you know there will be plenty.) While many in Left Blogostan are salivating over the prospect of investigations and subpoenas and sworn testimony, the reality is that the House is a relatively weak platform from which to launch such an assault -- especially if the Dems overreach by striking straight for the heart (impeachable offenses) instead of more methodically hacking off the beast's limbs by focusing on those areas (Katrina, gas prices, the Medicare drug scam) where the public is most likely to share the anger of the liberal base.

Grabbing the Senate would help, although the advantages -- in terms of having a more high-profile platform for investigations -- are offset by the increased attention it would bring to Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and (if he survives his primary) Joe Leiberman. To my way of thinking, any day those three aren't on television is a good day for the progressive movement -- and we don't have enough good days as it is.

The crux of the dilemma is that the legislative branch is deeply unpopular, and not just because it's currently being run by a gang of corrupt incompetents. These are deeply disfunctional, archaic institutions that are -- and are increasingly seen -- as being completely out of touch with the modern world. Inheriting the Congress means inheriting its ruined brand image, and we can expect the Rovians to make the most of that, with or without their captain at the helm.

If there are to be investigations, I'd much rather they were done by the Justice Department and/or by special prosecutors like Patrick Fitzgerald -- serious professionals who know precisely what they're doing and have the power to seek grand jury indictments, not just hog the microphone at a congressional subcommittee hearing. Having lived through the Iran-contra scandal, and seen how the joint investigation made it easier, not harder, for the likes of Ollie North and Elliot Abrams to avoid serious jail time, I guess I'm just prejudiced that way.

Legally as well as politically, it seems to me the best time to go after the regime elements will be when they are former regime elements -- when they no longer have control of the imperial executive branch and thus are relatively weak and leaderless. As I told a friend of mine recently, I want to see the neocons so busy conferencing with their lawyers that they won't be able to create trouble for a good long time to come. But that means winning the White House in 2008, not Congress in 2006.

Given the size and power of the forces we face -- the GOP machine, Big Media, the national security Leviathan, the corporate bribemasters -- it seems obvious that only a major upheaval, on the order of FDR's landslide 1932 election -- has any chance of changing the country's direction in a fundamental way. I'm not even sure that kind of change is even possible any more, but I'm reasonably sure it's not going to happen just because the Dems manage to win back a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives this November. Part of me thinks it would be better to stay completely of power until there is a tidal wave of popular discontent -- even desperation -- that will wash the GOP and the authoritarian right out of power for a generation.

All that said, however, I remember having similar thoughts during the Florida fiasco in 2000 -- that it would actually be better for the Democratic Party, and for progressives, if Gore lost, rather than win a tainted mandate and face a ferocious counterattack from the right. Six years later, I will readily admit that I was wrong -- boneheadedly so.

The moral of the story, I guess, is that a political parrty doesn't get to choose when and how it will take power, nor should it try -- because the future is fundamentally unknowable. The Dems have an collective obligation to fight the coming campaign to the best of their ability, and, if they win, to use their victories to advance the policies that they believe are best for the country. If that means giving the Rovians a target, so be it.

I still can't escape having a bad feeling about the political scenario shaping up. But if the polls and the markets are any indication, the Dems could get a chance to prove me wrong. The wave definitely appears to be coming for them -- ready or not.

http://billmon.org/archives/002442.html