Election 2010: The Post-Mortem

I know this is going to sound crazy coming from me, but the results of the 2010 U.S. midterm elections are not as bad as they seem. Granted they were bad overall. But it could have been a whole lot worse.

Here are some of the things I noticed:

To the right, march! Republicans won sixty seats in the House of Representatives (the biggest shift sine 1948) to take control of the lower chamber, and the ripple effects of the Tea Party promise a much more conservative agenda.

To the left, march! The Democratic minority in the new House is much more liberal than the Democratic caucus of the outgoing House, largely because many moderate Democrats were turned out of office.

Experience doesn't matter. Many of the moderate House Democrats voted out of office included veterans such as James Oberstar of Minnesota and John Spratt of South Carolina.

Neither does military service. Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut did not serve in Vietnam. He said so. But he will serve in the Senate, as will Republican Mark Kirk of Illinois, even though both misspoke about their military service. But a stellar military record wasn't enough to help Democratic Senate candidate Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania.

Some progressives who fought for their beliefs lost. Speaking of Joe Sestak, he fought hard for a liberal agenda in his bid for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania, as did Elaine Marshall in her bid for a Senate seat in North Carolina. Both lost. So did Alan Grayson, the one-term leftist congressman from Florida.

Conservatives won by not specifying what they're going to do. The Republicans didn't win the House. The Democrats lost it. Republicans never offered an agenda other than promising not to do what the Democrats did in the previous two years. They know what they oppose; what do they support? Don't ask me.

Some Republicans have a vision. Two of them, at least. Senator-elect Rand Paul of Kentucky and Representative-elect Nan Hayworth of New York are eye doctors.

Rock star charisma doesn't help you, even if you are a rock star. Just ask former Orleans frontman John Hall, who lost his House seat to Nan Hayworth.

Everything old is new again. Jerry Brown repeated history by being elected to succeed an actor as governor of California. And he got something his father Pat, a onetime California governor, never got - a third term.

Big money doesn't mean electoral success. This was borne out by Linda McMahon in Connecticut and by the California Girls - failed Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina and failed gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman - in their respective losses to Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown.

But it does help. How else could Republican Ron Johnson have defeated incumbent Democratic senator Russ Feingold in Wisconsin?

Democrats beat the odds in the Senate. It's not that Harry Reid won re-election to the Senate from Nevada by five points, or that Joe Manchin won by an even bigger margin in West Virginia. It's that the Democrats are likely to lose six Senate seats rather than seven or eight, depending on how the results sort out in Washington State in the contest between incumbent Democratic senator and her Republican opponent, noted professional candidate Dino Rossi.

Tea Partiers are not bigots overall. Would bigoted voters have sent Hispanic Marco Rubio in Florida to the Senate? And Nikki Haley proved in South Carolina, like Bobby Jindal in Louisiana before her, that Southerners are open to electing governors of southern Asian decent.

Unless they're Democrats. Alex Sink did just that - sink - in her unsuccessful bid for the governorship of Florida.

The results couldn't have been that bad. I have three British friends living in the United States, and not one of them has threatened to move back to the mother country.

Not yet, anyway.

Please note that I never mentioned Christine O'Donnell or her victorious concession speech.