The 10 Most Ridiculous Things about the Midterm Elections

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The Green Party’s Ads
I only saw two different TV spots for Green Party candidates this season, but both were uncannily terrible. Truly, the sheer god-awfulness of the production values of these repellent spots is too much to be a simple product of random incompetence—it’s as if a team of skilled producers were assigned the task of making the poorest-looking, least confidence-inspiring commercials they could, using only equipment that went to market before 1976. Any intern of median intelligence with a laptop and a rented camera could have done a much better job within the space of an hour. The Greens have an opportunity in the next two years, a chance to provide Democratic voters, when they inevitably become frustrated at the lack of progress in Iraq or any moves toward impeachment, with an alternative. But the first question that will come to mind for anyone watching these messages will be, if these people can’t put together 15 seconds of video that even approaches the visual appeal or message clarity of a local car dealership commercial, what business do they have trying to run anything?

America’s Anterograde Amnesia
The Mark Foley scandal, dropped strategically a month before the election, was almost entirely gone from the pubic consciousness when we voted. Neither Tom Reynolds nor Dennis Hastert was unseated. A month is literally too long for the average swing voter to remember being pissed off about something now.

Hillary’s Hoard
Hillary Clinton could have stayed home and watched the entire West Wing DVD set instead of campaigning for reelection this year, and she would have won easily. So why, instead, did she spend $30 million? That’s the most ever spent in a Senate campaign, $10 million more than the next priciest campaign this year, Republican pariah Rick Santorum’s. But Santorum was in real trouble, losing despite the cash and his endorsement from Jesus, while nobody in New York even knew who was running against Clinton. The motive, of course, is that Hillary’s already running for president. Some of the cash went to the campaign funds of other candidates (including Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman, for the same race in Connecticut), who will be sure to reciprocate Hillary’s largesse in ’08. But paltry political donations don’t begin to account for the tab (unfortunately, the senate managed to exempt itself from disclosing campaign expenditures without anyone noticing). It’s odd, considering that New York is a lock to vote for whichever Democrat scored the nomination for president. Maybe Hillary fears that hometown RINO Rudy Giuliani might threaten her empire state hegemony? Or maybe she just likes spending. There’s always more where that came from, and there’s still $14 million left in her senate campaign fund, which will be rolled over into her presidential campaign fund. It’s all good.

De-Rigger?
We all know it: if the Republicans had carried the day, a lot of us would be talking about voter fraud and touch screen voting machines. Now that the Democrats finally made some gains, we’re scratching our heads. Was all that stuff about Diebold just a loony conspiracy theory? Did gradually intensifying mainstream scrutiny of the issue have a chilling effect on nefarious vote-rigging plans? Or did such efforts prevent the Democrats from registering an even stronger showing? It’s hard to say. You can’t rig a race by much if you don’t want to get caught. If a candidate is up by 20% in the polls going into the election and he loses, people will want answers. And it is entirely possible to steal a few thousand votes, or intimidate a few thousand voters, and still lose. But whether vote fraud occurred is impossible to tell with paperless touch screen machines, which is itself a problem that badly needs to be addressed. Rev. Deforest Soaries, Bush’s first appointee to run the Election Assistance Commission, is the most recent member of the growing group of former Bush administration members to resign and condemn the president. Soaries now says that “Congress and the White House are involved in a conspiracy of neglect” on election reform, and that, with regard to e-voting fraud, “The problem is we don't know what we don't know…I can't with confidence assure you that it's not possible.”

Joe Lieberman
The guy is like a goddamn barnacle.

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