Fight to the Finish.

On the day before the big show, many of the wonks predict Republican gains in the House. But, on the brighter side for the Dems, it’s looking like Erskine Bowles has an outside chance of stealing Jesse Helms’ seat from Liddy Dole.

Same as it ever was.

The Washington Post predicts the status quo will prevail on Tuesday, with the GOP keeping the House and the Dems holding the Senate. Hmmm…ok. I suspect had 9-11 not occurred, we’d be looking at a 1994-like landslide against Dubya and for the Dems. But if holding the line is the best we can hope for right now, so be it.

Regime Change.

Rolling Stone writer William Greider thinks the Dems need to get rid of Daschle and Gephardt. I always liked Daschle – in fact, of the current (admittedly lame) crop of Democratic presidential contenders he and John Kerry were my top two choices. But after the Majority Leader’s capitulation on the Iraq resolution, I’ve definitely soured on him. [As I’ve noted many times here, however you feel about the (all-too-)suddenly all-consuming issue of Iraq, it is Congress’s job to declare war, not the President’s.] As for Gephardt, he’s been trying for too hard, too long. Somebody should’ve told him years ago that, in the media age, a man without eyebrows will never be President. At any rate, I think Greider’s point here is essentially sound — The Democratic leadership needs to stop imagining themselves in higher offices and start drawing lines in the sand.

Hey, buddy, who asked you?

Dahlia Lithwick surveys Ken Starr‘s recent paean to the Rehnquist Court. “Starr’s ideology seeps into the book in other ways — ways that make him sound like he’s sometimes channeling Ann Coulter. He calls Justices Breyer and Ginsburg ‘Clinton appointees’ three times in three pages, as if by invoking their champion he might tar them as philandering perverts as well. So anxious is Starr about ‘liberals,’ the ‘cultural elites,’ and the ‘New York Times editorial pages,’ that the words are frequently thrown out, Coulter-fashion, to stand as self-explicating negatives.” Ok, thanks Ken…now please crawl back into your hole.

Crunch Time.

Down ten points with two weeks to go in the race for the New York governorship, the Dems threaten to cut Carl McCall off in order to work on removing Jeb in Florida. Hmmm…that’s a lot of ground to make up, particularly given that the sniper story has halted political coverage over the past ten days or so. If in fact the DC sniper was apprehended this morning, I wonder if the networks will get back in the business of election coverage. Somehow, I doubt it…and if they do it’ll be more about Saddam than the economy. Sigh.

Iraq and a Hard Place.

“Bush is moving fast these days. The commander in chief spends all his time waging war on Democrats. He should perhaps pause long enough to explain to those in Congress why he withheld the news about North Korea’s nuclear program from them for 12 days, making sure that the war resolution was safely passed without any distracting revelations.” Post columnist Mary McGrory tries to understand the difference for Dubya between Iraq and North Korea.