Wednesday, October 29, 2014

History

First, a couple o' 'toons from the Usual Source o' these things:




And then there's this, from a daily newsletter I get from the PBS Newshour:
Hardly an historical aberration: So what’s going on here? Is President Obama so toxic that he is unlike past presidents? Not quite. First, like we noted above, there are the fundamentals of this election. Despite being reelected in 2012, he lost the most competitive states where the hottest Senate races are being run by double-digits to Mitt Romney. Plus, there is truth to the so called six-year itch. Seven presidents have been reelected since the Great Depression, and in those second terms, a president’s party has lost an average of 26 House seats and seven Senate seats. The worst second midterm for any president since WWII was Dwight Eisenhower’s. And it’s a reminder that, even then, “small-ball” issues dominated news of the day and drove politics. Eisenhower’s “problems included influence-pedaling charges against his White House chief of staff, national frustration over Soviet gains in space and missile technology and a bitter economic recession,” notes the Senate Historical Office. The 13 seats gained by Democrats was and still is the single-largest gain by one party of Senate seats. That election gave Democrats a 64-36 majority and laid the foundation for the Great Society measures of the 1960s.
Six-Year Itch? Results for a president’s party since the Great Depression in a second midterm
1938 FDR -55 House, -6 Senate
1950 Truman -29 House, -6 Senate
1958 Eisenhower -48 House, -13 Senate
1986 Reagan -5 House, -8 Senate
1998 Clinton +5 House, No change in Senate
2006 Bush -30 House, -6 Senate
AVG: -26 House, -6.5 Senate
Let us hope history repeats itself this time around.

5 comments:

  1. It doesn't really seem like enough.
    We should be able to improve on that.

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    1. I suppose a TOTAL replacement would be too much to ask (and impossible in the senate, seein' as how only a third is up for election at any given time).

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    2. Well... I suppose if you're gonna do it legally (HSWHTPFIHC).

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  2. Hmm. Shouldn't we have had only 96 senators in '58 since we had only 48 states? (IIRC we added Alaska in '59 and Hawaii in '60). Must bee PBS accuracy again (or they only know stuff that happened after they were born).

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    1. Good catch, OF. I wonder if they'll correct that entry today.

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Just be polite... that's all I ask.