Newsweek's Eleanor Clift Mistakes a Spar For a Liferaft, and Goes Down With The Ship

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.”

To a dry man on shore, that’s an odd way to characterize the following concatenation of events that occurred in Tuesday’s elections: eye-doctor outsider Rand Paul tea-partying his way to victory in Kentucky; veteran Blanche Lincoln dragged into a run-off election in Arkansas; Obama-baptized Arlen Specter getting pink-slipped by Joe Sestak.

While those were Senate races and PA-12 a House contest, nevertheless it begs this question of Ms. Clift: what would a bad night have looked like for the Democrats?

Leaving the ocean for the desert momentarily, Clift is like Hope and Crosby in The Road to Morocco. Parched from days of desert heat, they start seeing mirages of belly-dancing Arabian beauties and crooning “Moonlight Becomes You”–only to wind up with a mouthful of sand.

As for the content of Clift’s Critzian oasis of hope, no one has exposed the fallacy of her logic better than Real Clear Politics’ real clear thinker Jay Cost in his excellent morning-after elucidation “Is PA-12 a Bellwether?” Clift-boating Eleanor’s Pollyannaish dream of holding the House, the Cost analysis gives the true picture. Cost’s column is far too detailed to be done justice here–it needs to be read in its entirety–but suffice it to say Cost makes three salient points in turning Clift’s (and other brine-bound Democrats’) lifeboats back into spars:

1. The closed nature of the primary meant that a voter had to be a Democrat to vote in the special election.
2. Unlike in Kentucky, Virginia and other states, self-identifying Democrats still vote vastly democratic in Pennsylvania. With a two-to-one Democrat-to-Republican ratio, Burns actually did fairly well by winning approximately one of every five Democrat votes–roughly the same percentage Scott Brown garnered in his January 20 recapture of the Gergen-dubbed “Ted Kennedy’s seat.”
3. The Sestak-Specter primary, occurring the same day, brought out additional Democratic voters and kept the Dem message front-and-center in this heavily Democratic district, undoubtedly giving Critz a fair number of unexpected bonus votes.

This is not to suggest that the Republicans and Tea Party members have not been guilty of irrational and as-yet unearned exuberance. While criticizing Democratic exaggeration, Cost also urges Republican sobriety:

The fact that the GOP did not win this special election is evidence that 2010 is not going to be some 1938-style tsunami where the majority party sheds 90 seats. If the Massachusetts Senate race tantalized Republicans with the idea of boundless political opportunities, the PA-12 special election should remind them to keep their imaginations in check. But Martin and Mahtesian need a reality check, too. They are arguing way beyond the facts to suggest that the district had a “level playing field,” that it “couldn’t have been more primed for a Republican victory,” and that “the outcome casts serious doubt on the idea that the Democratic House majority is in jeopardy.”

And of course, one must remember that Seabiscuit Burns will face War Admiral Critz again this November. The Depression-era underdog won the hearts of many in that 1938 Pimlico stunner.

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No doubt Burns and his campaign team have their work cut out for them. Pollster Frank Luntz (Friday on Your World with Neil Cavuto) recommended a more straightforward ad campaign than the Right Change creative, if to some tastes too frivolous, “Attack of the 50-Foot Pelosi” spot. Still, who’s to say that in this near-Depression, neo-Rooseveltian, new New Deal dark age, Seabiscuit can’t thunder out another surprise upset?

We’ll have to wait till November to find that out. But there’s no line to find out what the Democratic overplay of the Critz election is. Look no further than Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift. Just temper it with a healthy dose of Jay Cost.

Where Clift sees belly dancers, Cost tastes sand. Or to go back to the sea one last time, the Critz victory on Tuesday is not only not a lifeboat for Democrats. It’s not even a life preserver.