Dr. K. points out that the real issue coming this Tuesday will be whether Obama will be in position to be reelected in 2012. After the Republican tsunami of Nov. 2, 2010. Obama will not read the results properly but describe his defeat to “angry white men” and “misinformation”.  He will double down and go full steam ahead on Obamacare and Cap and Trade as it is not in his temperament to pull back or ever admit even to himself that he made a mistake. The Republicans will try to slow down the Socialist Express but what they really need to do is take back the White House in 2012. We hear pundits  and politicians bemoan “gridlock” – however in this case for the good of the nation  the most we can hope for is gridlock until we have a chance for a new president. Mitch McConnell is right – what the Republicans need to do is not bi-partisanship (which means agreeing to become co-captains of the Titanic), but work to defeat Barack Obama. The coming election of 2012 is about the direction of the country probably for the rest of our lives.

by Charles Krauthammer

In a radio interview that aired Monday on Univision, President Obama chided Latinos who “sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.’ ” Quite a uniter, urging Hispanics to go to the polls to exact political revenge on their enemies – presumably, for example, the near-60 percent of Americans who support the new Arizona immigration law.

This from a president who won’t even use “enemies” to describe an Iranian regime that is helping kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. This from a man who rose to prominence thunderously declaring that we were not blue states or red states, not black America or white America or Latino America – but the United States of America.

This is how the great post-partisan, post-racial, New Politics presidency ends – not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a desperate election-eve plea for ethnic retribution.

Yet press secretary Robert Gibbs’s dismay is reserved for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and the “disappointing” negativity of his admission that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

McConnell, you see, is supposed to say that he will try very hard to work with the president after the election. But it is blindingly clear that nothing of significance will be enacted. Over the next two years, Republicans will not be able to pass anything of importance to them – such as repealing Obamacare – because of the presidential veto. And the Democrats will be too politically weakened to advance, let alone complete, Obama’s broad transformational agenda.

That would have to await victory in 2012. Every president gets two bites at the apple: the first 18 months when he is riding the good-will honeymoon, and a second shot in the first 18 months of a second term before lame-duckness sets in.

[….]

On Nov. 2, a punishing there will surely be. But not quite the kind Obama is encouraging.

My prediction: The Dems lose 60 House seats, eight in the Senate. Rangers in seven.

Read the rest The Great Campaign of 2010