A drowning man will cling to any spar. A drowning Democrat to any Critz.

There’s nothing wrong with clinging to spars when you’re shipwrecked in mid-ocean. It beats the alternative. But one should never mistake spars for lifeboats. As Eleanor Clift does in her May 21 Newsweek column “Firewall Around the Democrats’ House.” She might just as well have called it “Denial for Dummies: A Democrat’s Guide to Silver Linings.”

Let’s examine Clift’s mid-term election Pennsylvania blind side as she educates us, using the PA-12 special election in which Democrat Mark Critz defeated Republican Tim Burns, in the natatory art of political survival.

Democrats had a very good night on Tuesday, dampening, at least for now, Republican boasts about taking back control of the House… Republican hopes to regain the House took a big hit when they failed to carry Murtha’s district. It is the only one in the country that went from supporting John Kerry in 2004 to backing John McCain in 2008. Its constituents are heavily white, Catholic, blue-collar workers displaced from the steel and coal industries, a hardscrabble life that lends itself to expressing grievances against the Obama administration.

Adrift in the fog of Clift’s Critz mist, it’s easy to overlook three small words in her opening sentence: “very good night.” (more…)

The president of the United States is a “light-skinned” man “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”  That, at least, is the carefully considered opinion of soon-to-be-former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, quoted in a forthcoming book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change, about the 2008 election of Barack Obama.  The thing is, Hapless Harry meant it in a good way.

At least he did until now, when the news of the explosive statement found its way into The Washington Post and Politico.  Already reeling in his hopeless, doomed-as-Chris-Dodd campaign for re-election this fall, the Sage of Searchlight no doubt thought he was being complimentary in his usual clueless, white-guy-of-a-certain-age way.  After all, when Harry was growing up, “Negro” was the polite term you used to show you weren’t a racist, and as for light-skinned, well, we all knew what that meant.  Why, the next thing you know, Unhorsed Harry will be describing Obama as “a credit to his race.”

The authors write: “Reid was convinced, in fact, in fact,that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.”  Gee, that sounds a lot like what Geraldine Ferraro said, and her reward was practically being drummed out of the Democrat Party.

This isn’t the first time the scrappy little Mormon boxer has found himself on his keister over race.  He had some ‘splainin’ to do when the seat-warming, monument-building senator from Illinois, Roland Burris, explicitly charged him with racism for trying to block indicted Gov. Rod Blagojevich from appointing an African-American to replace Obama in the senate.  Watch and listen to Harry dance as David Gregory grills him on Meet the Press:

But there’s bigger game afoot than one pathetic little man’s attempt to cling to his rapidly diminishing power.  With Dodd and Byron Dorgan having defenestrated themselves, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, two of the nastier people in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, are busily greasing the skids for obvious Democrat losers like Reid, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and other endangered-species types. (more…)