The Midterm Elections

VIEW ALL ENTRIES

Dear Mark,

First, let's deal with your questions with dispatch:

1. Are you and the Post's other top political journalists working both days this weekend? Yes, of course, I will be working both days over the weekend, as will most people who have anything to do with the election at the Post. I am pretty well in the red in my domestic accounts these days. You have the soul of a romantic: Any ideas how I can get back in good stead after Tuesday?

2. Do you think the president thinks it is possible that Nancy Pelosi will become speaker? I wonder what Bush really thinks about the prospect of Speaker Pelosi. He's not irrational, right? So he knows it's at least a possibility. But he seems not to dwell on the possibility or its implications. It's one of the surprising things about covering any president, but especially this one. There are huge subjects about which we have only a fragmentary understanding, even after years of covering him. What Bush really thinks about his presidency and his present circumstances is one of the biggest mysteries.

3. When do the big brains at the Post think we will know who will control the House? We are guessing we will not 'til very late, though surely the direction will be clear early in the evening. We are not necessarily expecting to be able to call the House and Senate for the print edition of Nov. 8. We are having our mutual friend Mike Abramowitz—a fellow Karl Rove chronicler who has been mentioned previously in our correspondence—come in at 4 a.m. because we want a senior reporter writing the lead campaign story for the Web site that morning.

On to other topics:

It is odd that after writing a book together it still takes Jacob Weisberg's intervention to really illuminate a place where our views are in tension—contradiction is too strong a word. You see the plunge into freak-show values—extremist rhetoric, irrelevant and intellectually dishonest attacks, and all the rest—as a kind of cancer on democracy, a potentially lethal disease. I see it as more of a rash: an irritating condition that will recede in time (and perhaps flare up again on occasion). It is ugly but not fatal. My guess is that the angry blog culture that is attracting so much notice these days—and for which you and I, but especially you, have been such a target—will come to be seen like long sideburns and polyester pants in the 1970s. We will look back and wonder what the hell it was all about. In general, I think these angry sentiments always existed, but now there are more outlets to give vent to them, and more incentives to do so in the harshest terms. In due course, we'll develop a new kind of civic protocol, in which these voices will be more marginalized and the incentives will reverse themselves. Pretty optimistic, I guess, but that's my nature.

On the election, your predictions sound about right to me, with the proviso that everyone's predictions seem like varying degrees of bullshit. Someone will turn out to be right, and my money is on you.

Here's what I wonder if the forecasts about one or both chambers of Congress flipping come to pass. For much of the past six years, many of our Democratic sources have been looking on with envy at the Bush/Rove experiment in governing. They yearned to be able to stop worrying so much about swing voters, and go on the offense with unapologetic, ideologically charged rhetoric. They admired what they perceived as the White House's success in intimidating and marginalizing the Old Media. "We kissed your ass and they kicked it, and look how much better their way works. Next time we'll do it differently. ... "

For a while, this brand of politics and governance did indeed seem to pay dividends. Lately, it seems to have failed, and it turns out the White House has not in the end brought Democrats or the Old Media to heel.

Here's my question: On Nov. 8, will many Democrats still have Rove Envy? To put the question another way, Sidney Blumenthal e-mailed us this morning with his latest column in the Guardian arguing that Rove's strategy is about to be repudiated. His subject line asked us, "Is this wrong?" Your answer to Sidney?