Earlier this month, voters in my old backyard of Baton Rouge, La., fired the second warning shot aimed at Republicans desperate enough to use the politics of fear to win congressional races. Like the first one fired two months ago from former House Speaker Denny Hastert's constituents in Illinois, this warning from my friends on the bayou apparently fell on deaf ears.
Now the good folks in north Mississippi just fired their shot -- and it wasn't across the bow. It may have sunk the USS House GOP battleship for 2008. And good riddance.
Losing Hastert's seat in Illinois' 14th congressional district was hard enough for Republicans to swallow. Watching newly elected Democratic Congressman Don Cazayoux win in Baton Rouge two months later, a seat held by the GOP for more than 30 years, had them gulping with fear. Now they have lost Mississippi's 1st congressional district -- one of the most solidly Republican seats in America.
With the November elections coming fast and furious over the horizon, losing three consecutive ruby-red districts is simply catastrophic.
The stunning win by Democratic Congressman-elect Travis Childers over Republican Greg Davis was a shot heard around the world
of politics, loud enough to send shockwaves into the heart of every Republican candidate for the House. This latest GOP thumping (in a seat that wasn't even supposed to be in play) is a clear signal that voters everywhere are rejecting the Republicans' special-interests-driven agenda. Voters are delivering a mandate for change and a new direction in the nation's capitol.
Once again, Republicans tried to nationalize the House race by focusing their negative attacks on Barack Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Desperate in Mississippi, they stooped to conquer with a negative ad that tried to tie Childers to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Why try to link a conservative white Democrat with a northern liberal preacher? You guessed correctly: the old divisive politics of fear and guilt by associations.
For the third election in a row, the GOP was backslapped by voters too worried about having better jobs, more affordable health care and lower gas and grocery prices to fall for gutter politics. Intellectually bankrupt Republicans ignored these challenges in favor of throwing the kitchen sink -- and, for good measure, the muck that laid at the bottom of the garbage disposal -- at their opponent.
|
