WALL ST JOURNAL MARKET WATCH
The public fingers Republicans for most of the blame over the government shutdown, but that doesn’t mean the GOP faces grave danger of losing power in the House come the 2014 midterm elections.
Two articles, one from the left-leaning New Republic and another from the right-leaning Weekly Standard, see slim to no chance that Democrats will capture the House in 2014. And by some accounts, Republicans face not-insurmountable odds of taking control of the Senate.
Can it really be possible? The latest Washington Post poll, for example, shows that 70% of Americans disapprove of Republican tactics in the budget impasse.
Yet as both the New Republic and Standard articles point out, Democrats face a number of tall hurdles to winning the House. First and foremost, they haven’t recruited enough good candidates to challenge the most susceptible Republicans, most of whom are entrenched incumbents with moderate voting records.
Americans also have notoriously short political memories. So the fiscal fights of 2013 are likely to have faded in the minds of most persuadable voters by November 2014 — unless the more dangerous stalemate over the debt ceiling triggers an economic calamity.
Consider what happened in 1996. Voters only threw out three Republican House members just a mere nine months after an extended government shutdown for which conservatives were widely blamed. The GOP even won two Senate seats to extend its majority in that chamber.
Another hurdle for Democrats is the once-a-decade redistricting process that took place in 2010. Republicans controlled more state governments than Democrats and they used their influence to solidify the GOP’s grip on the party’s more vulnerable districts. That helps explain why Republicans only lost eight seats in 2012 even though Democrats won 1.7 million more votes nationwide in congressional races.
By far the biggest obstacle is history: mid-term elections heavily favor the party not in the White House. The opposition party has picked up seats in 24 of the 28 midterm elections since 1900, in many cases making big gains. Read Stuart Rothenberg on why the House is not in play right now.
More crucially, the president’s party has never won control of the House after being in the minority ahead of the midterms. [Both of the above links are must-reads--Esco]
Put another way, Democrats are trying to do what’s never been done before. They need to win 17 seats to oust Republicans, but even in the four midterms when the president’s own party did well, the gains ranged from just five to 11 seats.
To make history in the midterms, Democrats probably have to emerge from the latest budget standoff smelling like roses. Yet the Washington Post poll also offers a warning to the White House and its allies. A slight majority of Americans also disapprove of President Obama’s performance, while 61% disapprove of how Democrats in Congress are handling the dispute.
– Jeffry Bartash
What Else is New?
Amidst the chaos of a closed government, here comes another nomination process. President Obama is preparing to announce Janet Yellen as his pick to lead the Federal Reserve as soon as Wednesday. -
The off-duty undercover New York City police officer who rode with the biker gang that attacked a family in their Range Rover last month was arrested. Though he told investigators that he left the scene as soon as riders began attacking the vehicle, video of the incident showed the detective pounding his fists on the back of the vehicle. His arrest will mean automatic suspension from the Police Department. Four other men have been charged and police are actively searching for others.
One week after HealthCare.gov went live, the world hasn’t ended—but the website still has glitches. The White House insisted that it is working hard to fix the site where Americans can sign up for new coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The site has had an estimated 8.6 million unique visitors in the past week. But IT specialists told Reuters that the glitches could also be linked to flaws in the site’s architecture. White House spokesman Jay Carney insisted that although they are “increasingly moving more users through the system,” they are still “not satisfied with the performance.”
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Imagine a field of snow. A skier finds little resistance and glides easily across the snow.
A woman shuffles by on snowshoes and is slowed by the snow.
And a man in heavy boots plods along, slowed at every step.
While a bird flies over, untouched.
The Higgs field is like our field of snow.
Fan favorites win the Nobel. Britain’s Peter Higgs and Belgium’s François Englert won the Nobel Prize in Physics for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle that explains why elementary matter has mass. In a statement, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave credit for Higgs and Englert for discovering the particle that “describes how the world is constructed.”
The theory, elucidated in 1964, sent physicists on a generation-long search for a telltale particle known as the Higgs boson, popularly known (though not among physicists) as the God particle. The chase culminated last year with the discovery of this particle, which confers mass on other particles, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland. Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert will split a prize of $1.2 million, to be awarded in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
The finding affirms a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws — but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry.
According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.
Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.