Not that it is ever good to lose a vote for the Speaker of the House, but that was lost already when Parker Griffith announced this summer that he would not be supporting Pelosi in the next Congress. So, Griffith’s party switch really means very little in terms of the relative power ratio in Congress. However, it’s not good to see how toxic the Democrats have become in Alabama. We’ve also seen a couple of retirements in Tennessee recently. On the one hand, we don’t have to spend a bunch of money defending these seats. On the other hand, these seats are probably lost for the foreseeable future. I’m a little bit surprised and disappointed by this development. I knew that Obama had done particularly poorly in Appalachia, but I hoped that the people there would see that all the Palinite’s crazy talk about the Kenyan socialist looking out only for black folks would lose its saliency once Obama got into office and did a credible job. It appears that the crazy just keeps building, and now it is eroding the Dem majority. I don’t cry for lost Blue Dogs, but I am concerned about what this tells us about the modern South, especially in the interior of the country.
What’s in a Defection?
