I live in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, in Virginia’s 6th District, where I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in 2012.
Every month I am on the radio, talking politics on WSVA, a powerfully-broadcast AM station out of Harrisonburg, VA. It’s a three-way discussion where I join the show’s host and a conservative to provide balance (except, because this particular conservative is a principled person, he and I have agreed more than we’ve disagreed during this Age of Trump and the Trump Party).
This month’s show was scheduled deliberately to be the day after the election so that we could discuss whatever the outcome turned out to be.
The show can be heard here. (With the ads and the news taken out, I think it’s only about twenty-couple minutes long.)
What I had to say had a lot in common with what I said here a week ago in a piece titled, “If the Dems Lose in Virginia, It Will Be the Doing of Manchin and Sinema.”
When my fellow discussants started talking about the shortcomings of Terry McAuliffe (of which there are some) and the strategy of Glenn Youngkin (which was pretty well executed), I had the evidence also of New Jersey to point to.
It’s evidence that shows that there were national winds blowing that — over the last month of the campaign — simultaneously blew McAuliffe away from his consistent pretty good lead in the polls to losing by a couple of percent, while also driving Governor Murphy in his still-bluer state of New Jersey from his “shoo-in” victory to his apparently very narrow victory over a Republican.
What the evidence says pretty clearly to me is that the conduct of Senators Manchin and Sinema,
- making the Democrats look ineffectual, and the Democratic President in particular look weak,
- depriving the Democrats of some truly historic accomplishments that the polls show are desired by a large majority of Americans,
- disappointing many independents who voted Democratic last year with hopes for what they could deliver for them,
- focusing the political drama in Washington on the failure of the Democrats to get their agenda over the goal-line, rather than on the indefensible refusal of the Republicans to do squat to move the nation forward
- exploiting the power the situation gave every Senator, but only these two were arrogant and selfish and perhaps corrupt enough to use, to defeat the intentions not only of the President of the United States to deliver on what the American people elected him to do, but also of all their Democratic senatorial colleagues,
has earned them a bold page in the history of Infamy.
I can only hope that the damage stops here, and that they will at last vote for the measure that’s already plenty compromised in an attempt to satisfy them, in their arrogant use of veto power.
But I feel less than confident about that. I notice that the futures markets seem to be saying there’s better than a 1 in 3 chance that after all the concessions they’ve extorted, they’ll kill the thing.
I commend the discussion to your attention: wsvaonline.com/…