Is this really as bad as it will get?

Writing at The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead suggests that the left may have peaked with the Obama administration.  He makes some good points, but I'm not quite as optimistic as he seems to be.  For one thing, Obama still has two years left in office with no threat of electoral consequences to prevent him from fully embracing the darker angels of our nature, so I expect things to get much worse still before they start to get better; the GOP won big in the midterms, but if they won't stop Obama from sidestepping Congress whenever he feels like it, then how much of a victory was it, really?

Mead is also much more dismissive of Elizabeth Warren's chances than I am.  Yes, she's a leftist kook with a practically nonexistent resume and a partially fabricated bio, but so was Obama; nobody thought anything of Obama either when he ran against presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton in 2008.  Mead thinks it was a unique set of circumstances (mainly Iraq and the financial crisis) that propelled Obama to the White House, but that theory doesn't really explain how Obama got reelected in 2012, does it?  I still think our problems as a country run much deeper than many of us would like to admit.

(Hat tip to @rdbrewer4 for finding Mead's article.)

Where do we go from here?

The midterm elections finally happened, and Republicans did pretty well for themselves.  Republicans retook control of the Senate, added to their seats in the House, and even won some governorships in unexpected places like Illinois and Maryland.  All in all, if you wanted to see the GOP stick its thumb in Obama's eye, Tuesday was a pretty good night.

So, now what?  Once the 114th Congress is sworn in on January 3rd, Harry Reid won't have a stranglehold on the Senate anymore.  Whether the new Senate Majority Leader turns out to be Mitch McConnell or some other Republican, I don't much care, as long as Harry Reid is finally pushed aside.

One thing you can count on is for Obama to be at his absolute pettiest over the next two years.  You think he's been petty so far?  You ain't seen nothing yet.  Whatever little concern he may have had before about electoral consequences is now completely gone.  He's already talking about sidestepping Congress and the new Congress hasn't even been sworn in yet.  Don't be surprised at all if Obama spends the next two years basically daring Congress to impeach him; expect Obama to take more and more executive action of increasingly questionable constitutionality, all while vetoing every single bill that Congress passes.  And the media will cover for him every step of the way, at least until he makes himself a problem for whichever candidate the media wants to nominate in 2016.

As far as 2016 goes, I'm hoping that Republicans will have enough sense to nominate someone who served at least one term as governor of a red or purple state and whose last name isn't Bush.  There are way too many people running who probably shouldn't be.  Ben Carson is a nice guy, and I respect the hell out of the work he's done as a neurosurgeon, but making Obama uncomfortable for two minutes at a prayer breakfast doesn't make you qualified to be president.  No matter how much you might like the speeches given by Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, neither of them has any executive experience.   It's no coincidence that Herbert Hoover was the last time a Republican was elected president without having first served as a governor, general, or vice president.  If Jeb Bush had become governor of Florida a little sooner and then run for president in 2000, he might've had a chance, but he doesn't have a chance in hell of being president now.

A mess in Mississippi

Mark Mayfield, vice chairman of a Mississippi tea party group , apparently committed suicide after being arrested and charged for conspiring to help Clayton Kelly photograph Thad Cochran's senile wife in her nursing home.  I'm not sure what the specific charge is; I'm no lawyer, but I'm not sure how taking that kind of picture can be illegal, let alone merely conspiring to do it.  Was it classless?  Sure.  Politically stupid?  Definitely.  But illegal?  That one seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

So now a man is dead, and for what?  I can't even imagine what his wife and kids are going through right now.

Rightly or wrongly, people already upset about the underhanded tactics used by the Cochran campaign to eke out a win against Chris McDaniel are going to see Mayfield as some sort of martyr.  I've already heard people accusing Cochran of having Mayfield's blood on his hands; I've even heard some really outlandish conspiracy theories about Mayfield being murdered.  I don't think this bodes well for Republicans in November.  I'm hearing way too many people tell me that they are completely done with the GOP over all this.  It's possible that some of them could just be blowing of steam; I hope so, because I'd really like to see Harry Reid gone, and that won't happen if every tea partier casts a write-in vote for the Sweet Meteor of Death in 2014.