The 2010 congressional and gubernatorial elections have barely passed, yet the speculation for 2012 has begun in earnest. Although some of that speculation can be found on the Democrat side, it would take a political earthmover to remove Obama as the candidate.

Interestingly, two Democrat pollsters, Doug Schoen and Pat Cadell, have urged the president to remove his name from contention in the upcoming election. I don’t think he’s going to take that suggestion seriously. Others continue to harbor hope that Hillary Clinton will reenter the fray. That’s highly unlikely at this point. Again, only an unforeseen event of significant magnitude could create that option.

The more serious pondering is on the Republican side. There are numerous names floating around as the potential nominee. High on everyone’s list are the three who seem to dominate the early polls among Republican voters: Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee. A second tier of candidates includes Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Then there are Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, South Dakota Senator John Thune, and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who, I believe, who comprise another—and lower—tier.

Among the second tier, Daniels has a solid reputation for fiscal sanity, as Indiana has done well on his watch. He did make a statement, though, that social issues need to take a back seat at this time. Personally, I’m bothered by anyone who wishes to separate the two. Can he reintegrate the economic and the social? They really do belong together, and he needs to understand that issues such as abortion and marriage are the glue that binds social conservatives to the Republican party.

Pawlenty served well as governor of Minnesota. Perhaps his greatest strength is that he was able to win and govern as a conservative in a state that’s well known for its liberalism. Not many politicians can claim that type of success. I have heard as well that he is an evangelical Christian, which is a key factor in my calculations. The one knock against him is that he’s not very exciting. On the one hand, being exciting is no barometer by which to gauge a person’s effectiveness as a leader. Yet it is true that the candidate will have to energize the voters. Can Pawlenty do that? The verdict is still out.

Gingrich was the leader of the Republican takeover of Congress back in 1994. He’s always been full of ideas and can be an electrifying speaker. He’s articulate and always focuses on the positive, pointing Republicans toward a future of economic growth. Lately, he’s also been more outspoken about his newly revived faith, having recently become a committed Catholic. As many commentators note, though, there is a lot of baggage with Gingrich. On the political side, he is sometimes considered a “bomb-thrower,” as his comments have led to problems in the past. Then there’s the fact that he’s abandoned two wives. His third wife, to whom he has been married for the past decade, had an affair with him while he was Speaker and still married to wife number two. Even if he has repented of that, can he really be trusted to stay the course morally with that kind of track record? It’s a genuine concern, as personal morals can undermine the best political agenda.

Barbour, Thune, and Santorum are long shots, but you never know in this atmosphere. Yet most of the attention belongs—rightly, I believe—on the top three: Palin, Romney, and Huckabee. I want to take time to evaluate them carefully in separate posts. That will be my goal for the rest of this week.

Some individuals, when they get a taste of power, have a hard time letting go. They develop the mentality that they deserve their position, regardless of how they’ve wielded that power. A case in point:

It’s also difficult to make the rest of the election losers realize their time is up. For instance, we have a congressional session ready to start shortly, with all the old congressmen and senators, many of whom won’t be there in January. Rumors are that they will try to ram through unpopular measures before they leave. Someone needs to remind them of their status:

Meanwhile, President Obama is still selling the same message, but its reception may be quite different two years after he first propounded it:

There certainly are problems that need to be addressed, but I don’t trust the current Congress to address them appropriately. I fear the remedies they will propose:

Of course, the new Congress that arrives in January has to be focused. The “marriage” between establishment Republicans and those heavily influenced by the Tea Party movement could be a little shaky. The establishment types are going to need some prodding:

It’s time to take our problems seriously and tackle them with viable solutions. We can begin by being faithful to the Constitution. The answers will flow from that faithfulness.

The common term for what happened on Tuesday is a Republican tsunami. Yet there were places unaffected by it. Not every state took part in this wave. They were kind of like the odd men out in the crowd:

Perhaps the most discouraging race was in Nevada where Harry Reid pulled it out, but the state most oblivious to the emergence of the Republican majority was California. Barbara “Call Me Senator” Boxer now has six more years at the public trough. California also decided to return to the inglorious Jerry “Governor Moonbeam” Brown days of yesteryear. The legalization of marijuana initiative failed to pass, but maybe that’s because too many of the voters were already smoking it when they went to the polls. The cartoonists have had a field day with that:

Then there’s this one:

And finally …

For the president, the path is clear, but what is not clear is whether he will take it:

For Republicans, there is also a well-defined path now that they have the majority in the House. Again, there is trepidation in some circles whether they will follow through:

For their sake, and for the sake of the country, now is the time to stay principled and firm.

As a counterpoint to yesterday’s post, where I listed the politicians who most deserved to lose this year, today I’ll focus on the positive—those who really deserve to win. Now, that doesn’t mean they all will win, but the nation would be better off if they did.

I’m going to start close to home with Florida’s Senate race. No one, when the race began, expected Marco Rubio to gain any traction. He had been speaker of the Florida House, and many expected him to rise up in the future, but not now, not against sitting governor Charlie Crist.

What I admire most about Rubio is his commitment to principle, which is what led him to challenge Crist in the first place. He knew Crist was not a truly principled conservative, and he wanted Republicans to have a chance to vote for one. It was a hard task he took upon himself, yet he began chipping away at Crist’s lead. The chipping then turned into a full-fledged electoral demolition. A shocked Crist found himself behind the young upstart.

Now Rubio is leading in a three-way race with Crist as a so-called independent, and the Democrat no-hoper Kendrick Meek. National Republicans have diverted funds elsewhere, secure in the belief that Rubio will be the next Florida senator. He deserves to win.

Crossing the nation and making a sharp northern turn to Alaska, my next deserving candidate is Joe Miller, who surprised everyone when he won the Republican Senate primary against incumbent senator Lisa Murkowski. Miller is a true constitutionalist. He wants the federal government to be held to its constitutional limitations.

That outlook has apparently scared some sitting Republican senators who are far more comfortable with Murkowski—they refused to remove her from a leadership position when she rejected the voters’ choice and decided to run a write-in campaign to keep her job.

Polls show the two running neck-and-neck, with Miller holding a slight lead. If he were to be turned back now, it would be a stinging defeat for the forces of reform and devotion to limited government. This is a race worth watching for the future of the soul of the Republican Party. Miller should be that future; he deserves to win.

Sharron Angle, in Nevada, has the unenviable task of knocking off Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Yet she is proving equal to that task. Derided as an extremist by Democrats [and some Republicans], she has had to fight for the right to be heard. Last week, she not only held her own in a debate with Reid, but the consensus seems to be that she won that debate.

Like Miller, Angle is a constitutionalist who is in sync with the Tea Party movement. That by itself is enough to get one labeled an extremist in the mainstream media, but early voting indicates that more Republicans are casting ballots right now than Democrats. Will that trend hold through the actual election day? If righteousness and justice mean anything, Sharron Angle will be the next senator from Nevada. She deserves to win.

My next choice may be a surprise for some readers, particularly if you have fallen for a media hit job. Christine O’Donnell, running for Joe Biden’s old Senate seat in Delaware, has suffered a barrage of ridicule, but most of it has been manufactured. Whenever Bill Maher decides to inject himself into a race, you have to know something is rotten. An old tape of one of O’Donnell’s appearances on his show [which, I understand, actually never even aired], has her talking about a teenage flirtation she had with witchcraft. She makes it clear she never really got into it, but the media jumped on this as a sign that she was unfit for office.

Since when is the media concerned about witchcraft? I didn’t know it bothered liberals that much. I mean, aren’t they the tolerant ones? In fact, Christians have a better grasp of what happened here. Teenagers sometimes experiment and get involved in foolish ventures. Then they grow up. That’s what happened with O’Donnell.

A few days ago, she debated her opponent, Chris Coons. In the course of the debate, the media did it again. They portrayed her as not realizing the First Amendment includes the separation of chuch and state. But if you actually listen to what she said, she was questioning the phrase “separation of church and state” as not being part of the First Amendment. And she’s right. The words “separation,” “church,” and “state” are nowhere to be found in the Amendment. That’s simply the description liberals have used in their attempt to keep religion out of the public sphere. The First Amendment only says there will be no establishment of religion [i.e., no official state church] and that Congress cannot prohibit one’s freedom of religion.

O’Donnell was accurate in what she was saying, but you’d never know that by the press reports. The media is in the tank for her opponent. O’Donnell probably won’t win this seat, but you never can tell, especially if this turns out to be a Republican tidal wave. At the very least, she deserves to win.

I’m returning to Florida now for my final candidate—Republican Rick Scott, who is running for governor. Scott’s upstart primary victory over longtime Republican official Bill McCollum startled many. The race was so intense that there was concern as to whether Scott could mend fences with the state GOP, but the fence-mending seems to be almost complete.

Scott’s Democrat opponent, Alex Sink, is following the same playbook McCollum used in the primary: depict Scott as a crook because the hospital chain he ran was fined by the federal government for Medicare fraud. I’ve done a lot of reading about that incident and have come away convinced Scott was not attempting to defraud anyone. A recent well-researched article from a source outside Scott’s campaign has explained the situation more fully than anything else I’ve read, and in my mind exonerates Scott from all those accusations. For those who are interested, you can find that article here. It is a little long, but it covers the issue comprehensively.

While CEO of Columbia/HCA, Scott created the best hospital chain in America, working closely with doctors and cutting costs. Later, when Obamacare came to the forefront, Scott started an organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, which effectively attacked the philosophy behind Obama’s quest for control of American healthcare. As governor, Scott would continue his cost-cutting measures to bring fiscal sanity back to the state and would maintain a principled  position against the healthcare takeover.

Additionally, Scott is an evangelical Christian who helped start a church in Naples, and who sits on the church board. He has worked with organizations such as World Vision. His faith appears to be genuine.

The latest polls keep bouncing around in this race, so it’s anyone’s guess who will come out on top. However, with Obama’s popularity at an all-time low in Florida, there is hope that Scott can pull it out. After all, in case you haven’t heard this refrain yet, he deserves to win.

Today, I would like to single out those running for office who are so unacceptable that they truly deserve to lose their races. Of course, if I tried to list everyone I thought should be included in that category, this would be an exceptionally long posting, so I’ve decided to concentrate only on those who have a chance to lose. Consequently, you won’t find individuals such as Nancy Pelosi in this list; she is a mirror image of her district. However, if things go as I hope they do, she will lose as well—her post as Speaker of the House.

We can start, though, with her counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Reid used to be pro-life. At least that’s what he claimed. As the premier pusher of the Obama agenda, he scuttled whatever small amount of credibility he had on that issue. He also famously declared the Iraq War lost—then came the surge, which he still refuses to recognize as having achieved a measure of stability in that country. Reid has shown himself to be insufferable in his constant comments—”only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good”—and the Rush Limbaugh name for him, “Dingy Harry,” seems rather appropriate. Nevada needs to divest itself of this national embarrassment.

Barbara “don’t call me ma’am” Boxer is trying for her fourth term as senator from California. She is about as prickly as they come, which led to that comment above to a military officer during a congressional hearing. She really loves being a senator and having the perks of the office. Boxer also secured travel for the radical group Code Pink to go to Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004 to give aid to the people who had killed 51 Americans that same month. Even the extremely liberal newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle, refused to endorse her this year due to her undistinguished record. Her opponent, Carly Fiorina, a pro-life woman who has experience in the business world, would be a welcome relief to Californians who have had enough of Boxer.

Let’s stay in California for the Retread of the Year Award. Yes, Jerry Brown is running for governor again. He already had that job back in the 1970s, following Ronald Reagan and ruining most of what Reagan had accomplished. He was known as Governor Moonbeam back then for his New Age philosophy. He hasn’t changed much. When California voters rejected a referendum on homosexual marriage, Brown, who is currently the state’s attorney general, made it clear he wasn’t going to enforce that vote. A real attorney general cannot make a decision like that. Brown as governor would be a disaster—again.

How about a Republican? Well, perhaps a Republican. It’s a little hard to tell right now. Her name is Lisa Murkowski, and she lost the Alaskan Republican senate primary to attorney Joe Miller. Only Murkowski refuses to believe it, so she’s now spearheading a write-in campaign because … well, because she wants to stay a senator. She doesn’t exactly have a solid set of philosophical beliefs that guide her besides wanting to be a senator. She’s not pro-life, so she dilutes the Republican side of the aisle on that issue. How did she get to be a senator in the first place? Her dad, who resigned from the Senate to become governor of Alaska, appointed her to take his place. She really earned that job, didn’t she? The main thing driving her now seems to be that she is a sore loser. May she remain one.

Then there’s Massachusetts icon Barney Frank. He first hit the national radar many years ago as one of the first outspoken homosexual congressmen. Shortly afterward, the House ethics committee had to investigate accusations that a prostitution ring was operating out of his D.C. townhouse. Those accusations turned out to be true. Frank’s response? Gosh, I had no idea that was happening! A mere slap on the wrist later, he remained in the Democratic leadership. He’s been back in the news as one of the key proponents of forcing banks to give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, thereby triggering the massive econonic crisis we’re still experiencing. He also, along with Sen. Chris Dodd, has been the main supporter of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, blocking any real oversight of those corrupt lending institutions—which still march on uncorrected today as he helps derail any legislation that would hold them accountable for their actions. For the first time in his political career, he actually has a real race to run against a genuine opponent. Will Frank’s many sins catch up to him this year? It’s still a long shot, but it would be one of the most gratifying of all the races if he were to go down to defeat at last.

Let’s go to my current state of Florida for the final two who deserve most to lose. How can I neglect to mention Congressman Alan Grayson, the most obnoxious man in Congress—and that’s going up against some pretty stiff competition. I had an entire post on Grayson not long ago, so I won’t try to repeat everything again. If you don’t remember him, you can remember one of his most arresting moments when, on the floor of the House, he concluded that the Republican healthcare plan was for people to die quickly. May his tenure in Congress suffer the same fate.

Last, but not in any way least, is the winner of the Chameleon of the Year Award, Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Forcefully declaring himself to be a Reagan conservative who was proud to be a Republican and who would never leave the party to run as an independent, Crist thought he had clear sailing into the open Senate seat. Then he ran into a buzzsaw named Marco Rubio. When it became painfully obvious to Crist that he couldn’t win the primary, he cut his ties with the Republicans and ran as an independent. Over the past couple of months, he has changed his position on almost every issue as he attempts to get Democratic votes to go along with independents who are scared and not thinking clearly [thanks to President Obama for that brilliant insight]. Now he’s trailing Rubio badly in the general election. This may be Crist’s swan song; for the sake of all Floridians, and the nation at large, let’s hope it is.

Well, that’s my list of those who most deserve to lose. If they all do lose, America will be the winner.

This election season is turning into a nightmare for Democrats. They were promised that if they jumped on board the healthcare express, their reelection was assured. All of America would be rejoicing over the wonder of this legislation. Well, it hasn’t materialized; in fact, the opposite has happened. So what’s an incumbent Democrat supposed to do?

While commentators like to debate the affiliation of the Tea Party with Republicans and anticipate how that link is going to hurt Republican chances, they don’t spend nearly as much time meditating on the Democrats’ dilemma, which is far more noticeable:

Instead of voting to extend the Bush tax cuts, they seem more focused on something else:

Of course, Republicans won’t mind if Democrats choose to self-destruct. We saw some of that in the Congress just last week:

Let’s review the political highlights from last week. Economic advisor Larry Summers announced he is leaving the administration, making him at least the third high-level economic advisor to seek greener pastures. Of course everyone who leaves says they would be doing so regardless of the current economic situation, which remains a quagmire. Are they actually running away from what they have created?

But not to worry—there are still great minds the president can lean on for economic advice:

The one with the mouse ears might not be too bad; he seems to be doing well here in Florida.

The Republicans came out with their Pledge to America, which is already being trashed by President Obama. Cutting spending? Lowering taxes? How ridiculous. Giving people back their own money and being responsible for a balanced budget are just old-fashioned ways of approaching an economy. Even when the Republicans offer a plan, Democrats continue to repeat the mantra that they are the party of “no.” It never was a very credible complaint; even less so now.

In an effort to undermine the possible next Speaker of the House, John Boehner, the New York Times printed an accusation that he had an affair. As of today, there doesn’t seem to be any corroboration of this accusation. It’s reminiscent of the same accusation aimed at John McCain during the 2008 campaign. It went nowhere because there was nothing to take anywhere.

Ah, the joys of journalistic integrity.

Finally, comedian Stephen Colbert appeared on Capitol Hill to testify before a congressional subcommittee. I must admit I was rather harsh on this appearance in an earlier post. Given the nature of the Congress, I will now step back from my previous comments. In fact, I think Mr. Colbert was right at home.

I can hardly wait to see what this week will bring.