Greetings from The Watergate where I will be through the weekend… I have a very busy sked these days so will keep this short. Trying to extract the Big Lesson from Tuesday’s vote is now a mass sport.  With advancing age I’ve learned (the hard way) to generally avoid making such sweeping conclusions. I’m willing [...]

Blogging might be light the next few days as Thursday I’m traveling to Washington D.C. for some work. Meanwhile… I spent two hours sitting in as analyst/kibbitzer this morning on a local public radio show and during its course had the opportunity to hear three congressional Democrats getting interviewed by the host:  Rep. Xavier Becerra, [...]

Ken Mehlman can kick a barn full of Kenmores into heavy duty cycle trying to wring what he can from Tuesday’s voting. But there’s no rational way to deny what’s come out in the wash: an historic repudiation of the Bush administration, the governing Republican majority and – above all—the war in Iraq. As we [...]

Among the grittiest litter getting swept out of congress tonight is one of the true, great blowhards of the House, six-term Arizona Republican Congressman J.D. Hayworth. Former Mayor of Mesa, Harry Mitchell has cleaned J.D’s clock and we can all say good riddance. Hayworth assumed an aggressively nativist, anti-immigrant advocate, penning a quickie close-the-border book [...]

8:20 p.m. Pacific The Democrats have apparently taken the House. By what margin remains to be seen. Indeed as the networks project the House as blue, the DCCC is holding back, unsure about the fate of a couple of southern incumbents. Anyway you cut it, the national political dynamic shifts from this point hence. The [...]

7:50 p.m. Pacific Best moment of the evening so far: Rick Santorum making his concession speech. His children around him, crying. Chris Matthews says: (paraphrasing very closely) “There are things out there worse than losing in politics. Things like war where you can lose your son or father. That war in Iraq was very much [...]

6:25 p.m. Pacific Holy Joe Lieberman has beaten Democratic challenger Ned Lamont in Connecticut. Those who had paying attention won’t be surprised. My colleague Bruce Shapiro issued this warning a few weeks ago. After Lamont pulled off his insurgent anti-war campaign snuffing out Lieberman in the primary, his feckless patrician side displaced the determined outsider. [...]

5:45 p.m. Pacific Republican hopes have now offiicially shipwrecked in the Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey senatorial races. What a wonderful America in which people are smart enough to dispose of such an embarrassment as Rick Santorum (you won’t see him no more, Mikey). The Virginia race remains, however, deadlocked. If Allen pulls this out, [...]

4:40 pm Pacific: I have no secret information but some others do. But the earliest of fragmentary returns suggests a very high tide for Democrats if not a downright wave. All reports converge: Turnout is much higher than expected. Voters are responding to national, not local issues. Corruption is as much on the minds of [...]

As polls close Tuesday night, I will be blogging here on my own site and also on The Nation magazine’s collective blog. Wednesday morning, I will be the guest analyst for a 90 minute post-election wrap-up on Southern California Public Radio’s AirTalk show on KPCC 89.3 FM from 10:00-11:30 a.m. PST. If you’re outside the [...]

My father, Sam Cooper, quietly passed away on Saturday after a year-long downward slide. He was 89. Former student body president and ROTC commander at East L.A.’s Roosevelt High School (class of ’36), he always wanted to be a psychologist. Economic pressures forced him to drop out of UCLA after a year and he spent [...]

Overshadowed by the overdue electoral debate on the war in Iraq are a host of other issues whose future course could be determined by the balloting. In Michigan, for example, voters will approve or turn down Prop 2 which would ban affirmative action programs used in unversity entrance. This vote comes ten years after a [...]

How do I know? I only know what I read. I sense, however, that next Tuesday’s election may conclude more as a catastrophe than as a simple defeat for the GOP. Big electoral waves tend to pick up energy in the closing days and hours of an election cycle. And the anti-Republican (as opposed to [...]

The lede on my latest L.A. Weekly column: While next week’s noncontest for California’s gubernatorial seat draws about as much public attention as a wall of drying paint, something quite significant for the state’s future is taking place beneath the surface. One of the richest and most powerful state lobbies has shifted allegiance from Democrat [...]

Perhaps the silver lining in the John Kerry Kerfuffle is that he has now so twisted himself up like a pretzel and so totally bleeding credibility that it will be impossible for him to run for President in 2008. After reacting defiantly, angrily to Bush’s demand that he apologize for his now “botched joke” and [...]

On the cusp of the mid-term elections, sleuthing out just who your congress rep is and who he or she is connected up to is more relevant than ever. My friends over at the Sunlight Foundation now provide an easy-to-use tool so you and anyone else can find out where their Congress members get their [...]