DON’T COUNT THOSE DONKEYS BEFORE THEY’RE HATCHED
By Don Erler

Fort Worth Star Telegram, TX
Oct 23 2007

After church last weekend, I remarked to my bride of 41 years that
Advent begins in six weeks. Yikes.

The succession of Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas will march
quickly by, with 2008 arriving before we finish exchanging those
not-quite-right gifts.

All of which means that the real presidential race — actual primaries
and caucuses, not mere polls and "debates" — will begin before our
New Year’s bubbly loses its fizz. And as Michael Barone pointed out
Oct. 16 in Dallas, few Americans will be paying attention to political
advertising during the holidays.

Major co-author of the Almanac of American Politics (a bible for
political journalists), senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
and respected print and TV commentator, Barone brings decades of
informed judgment to political analysis. He noted that predicting the
results of the Iowa caucuses will be especially difficult, given the
near-impossibility of polling only the caucus participants.

"We are in a period of political change," different in crucial respects
from much of our recent politics, he said. For the first time in 80
years, neither an incumbent president nor his vice president will be on
a major party ticket. By January ’09, the country will have experienced
two consecutive eight-year administrations, characterized by close
presidential races and what Barone calls "trench warfare politics."

But now we’ve entered a period of "open field politics," with voters’
church attendance no longer predicting their voting behavior with 80
percent accuracy. Barone observed that although Sen. Hillary Clinton
is the odds-on favorite to lock up the Democratic nomination, John
Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama appear to be close in Iowa.

The Republican side, he said, is "less clear all around." Although
he declined to predict a winner, Barone claimed that former New York
Mayor Rudy Giuliani has "an asset few in presidential history have
had": his performance in the 9-11 crisis, most closely analogous to
Dwight Eisenhower’s status in 1952.

As for the general election, few gamblers would bet against the
Democrats’ regaining the White House and strengthening their positions
in Congress next year. After all, a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal
poll revealed that Democrats are preferred over Republicans by a
margin of 49 percent to 36 percent.

But Republicans cannot be counted out — not yet, anyway. A Fox News
poll has discovered that nearly the same percentage of likely voters
who favor Democrats think that Giuliani would do a better job of
protecting the nation (50 to 36 percent). Thus, if national security
becomes the decisive issue, at least one Republican could win.

Moreover, last year the Democrats reversed the Republican majority
that was won in the U.S. House in 1994, promising to "drain the swamp"
of legislative corruption and end the misbegotten Iraq war.

But members from both parties continue to get caught with pants down
or hands in the freezer, pork continues to flow through "earmarks,"
and the Democrats have lost their nerve on surge-improved Iraq.

Even President Bush’s anemic approval rating appears gargantuan
compared to the disastrously low rating for Congress.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, having promised to secure a House vote on
a resolution to label as "genocide" the killing of Armenians by the
Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago, has backtracked. It appears that
several of the resolution’s 214 co-sponsors have heeded the prudential
warning that our close ally Turkey should not be embarrassed by such
a symbolic insult.

Clinton, like other leading Democratic presidential aspirants, has
outlined programs that, if enacted, would cost hundreds of billions
of dollars to implement. Taxing "the rich" simply cannot pay for them.

Even mathematically challenged voters can count, add and subtract. We
understand that counting Democratic proposals’ costs will add to an
already bloated national debt and subtract from our own families’
assets.

Such calculations counsel caution for Democrats who assume the
inevitability of their electoral success, which they expect to initiate
scant weeks from now.