Because its becoming a nightmare for the Democrats:
Kent Hancock can’t remember tougher economic times in the two decades he’s sold used cars in California’s Central Valley.
He brings home less than half the money he cleared a few years ago and has dipped into savings to keep his business open. Hancock, 41, blames politicians for doing too little to get the economy back on track and hopes they are “sweating it a little bit. They should. It shouldn’t be a guaranteed job.”
Hancock’s frustration is evident throughout the nation’s most populous state. Just a year ago, the Democratic Party looked at California as a base for adding to its majorities in Congress. Now, it could be a the place where it loses them.
Even Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, widely viewed just six weeks ago as a shoo-in for re-election to a fourth term, now faces the toughest race in her 28 years representing California in Congress…
…Republicans…have expanded their takeover list.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who’s recruiting Republicans to challenge incumbent California Democrats, said he has no worries that the GOP will lose any of the House seats it now holds in the state. Democrats, he said, will have to focus on keeping seats in perennially competitive districts in other states.
“They have too many of their own members playing defense and needing money,” McCarthy said.
Democrats were, of course, working from the assumption that their wins in 2006 and 2008 were a positive vote in favor of Democrat policies. The truth is they were a negative vote against President Bush and, far more importantly, against business as usual in Washington. Now that Bush is gone, the only thing people have to vote against is business as usual – Democrats had about a 6 month window of opportunity in 2009 to show they were going to change things.
They didn’t. All they did was show that they are even worse than the Republicans who were rejected. It is not now a matter of can the Democrats win in 2010, but whether or not they can limit their losses to something manageable – limit them to keeping a narrow Congressional majority, that is. It is getting ever more questionable that they’ll be able to do this in the House, and there are starting to be some road maps to a GOP Senate majority, though that is still a 10-1 against prospect (much better than the 1000-1 prospect it was even 6 months ago).
As I said, 2010 is all about The People vs The Powerful – or, to use Senator Brown’s better formulation, The People vs The Machine. Anyone who can cast themselves as the agent of reform in 2010 will win unless running against the most entrenched liberals in the most overwhelmingly liberal districts in the nation – the vote for the PATRIOT Act reauthorization told the tale on how many such there are: less than 100 votes against.
2010 is getting to be very fun…
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