Laugh At Me

The Democrats have been boasting about their renewed spirit in the midterm elections with three weeks to go in the campaigns. They insist that they can still hold the House, they're within striking distance in key Senate races, and that they have momentum on their side.

I must say, Democratic strategists are doing a good job honing their stand-up comedy skills. They have everyone laughing at them.

ON the PBS NewsHour, columnists Mark Shields and David Brooks answered the Democrats's recent talking points. Shields, a liberal pundit who once worked for Robert Kennedy, declared that if the party in trouble says they're "closing" the gaps in the polls, it only means they're not. Brooks, the thinking man's conservative (he writes for the New York Times), responded by citing all the polls he has checked, having found no evidence of momentum towards the Democrats in the final stretch of the campaign. And the pair had a good laugh.

Brooks isn't the only Times staff member to point this out; the nonpartisan number cruncher Nate Silver has said as much on the FiveThirtyEight blog. So, not only do ideologically opposed columnists - one, a liberal that commands respect from the right and the other, a conservative that doesn't make lefties want to throw something across the room - think the Democrats's claims of a comeback are worthy of laughter, so does one of the most objective and most accurate election forecasters in the business. What a laugh, indeed.

You know what makes me laugh? I get e-mails from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee asking me for money that show key Senate races as dead heats - among them, Democrat Joe Sestak versus Republican Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania and Democratic senator Russ Feingold versus GOP challenger Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. But none of the polls I've seen for these elections on news Web sites back up the numbers the DSCC is handing me. Funny, isn't it? Actually, it's hilarious.

But here's what merely split my sides. Republicans are sending e-mails to their supporters, urging them to donate money to their campaigns, because they insist the Democrats are catching up in the polls and, therefore, GOP voters shouldn't take the midterms for granted. The Democrats, of course, are using the same insistence that they're gaining to encourage their voters to show up and prove them right. The fact that we have two parties inflating a perceived Democratic advantage without much objective evidence to encourage two different sets of election results may be the greatest joke of all.