Cohen, Blackburn, Alexander Win Big
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- Cohen, Blackburn, Alexander
In the true spirit of "The Purloined Letter," the Poe story in which vital evidence was overlooked because it was right before the eye, the runaway wins of three congressional incumbents may have escaped proper notice.
Hence an overdue statement of the obvious. 9th District congressman Steve Cohen won big, so did 7th District congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, and so did U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander.
Although the Election Commission, all these hours after the polls closed, seems still to be having difficulty making numbers accessible, these are the relevant percentages:
Democrat Cohen demolished three opponents with nearly 88 percent of the vote; his closest runnerup among three self-styled "independents" was Jake Ford with 5 percent of the vote, eking out Dewey Clark and Mary Taylor Shelby Wright with 4 percent each.
Republican Blackburn overwhelmed her Democratic opponent, Randy Morris, by 71 percent to 29 percent, and Republican Alexander beat his Democratic challenger, Robert Tuke, 65 percent to 31 percent statewide. Alexander won all but one of Tennessee's 95 counties, losing only Haywood County to Tuke though his margin of victory in Shelby County was narrow, only 50.75 percent to 46.67 percent.
A fourth incumbent, 8th District congressman John Tanner, a Democrat, was unopposed.
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And where are the results for those absurdly worded referendums??
Zip, you musta missed it. They all won. The percentages were all in the 3 to 1 range. Strangely believe it.
Marsha Blackburn, Queen of Pork. http://bluecollarrepublican.com/blog/?p=614
As I followed the results of Tennessee's vote over a thousand miles away in my current home of Western Massachusetts, I was amazed that the bottom part of the Republican ticket did better in Tennessee than its top. To be sure, McCain carried the state, but by a much smaller margin than Lamar Alexander's or Marsha Blackburn's victory. A similar thing happened in 2000 when Albert Gore, Jr. barely lost to "W" Bush. Further down the ticket, Bill Frist, and House Republicans achieved far greater victory margins over their Democrat opponents than "W" did over Gore. To me, this seems the inverse of the pattern of other ex-Confederate states where the Republicans generally did better at the top of the ticket instead of viceversa. I wonder what this will mean for Tennessee. One more comment: I hope that the Republican victories in Tennessee won't mean the end of the more moderate wing of the state Republican party in a situation where the party's far right wing will try to muscle out the moderates and pragmatists from the party in a cocky effor to claim total credit for the state Republican victories. In the past, Tennessee has had quite a few moderate Republicans (and at one time, even a few liberal/leftist and dovish Republicans like the late Congressman Howard Baker, Sr. who helped defeat draconian male military conscription measures in 1952 during the Korean War in which Truman and the Pentagon tried to ram Universal (as opposed to Selective) male conscription down the throats of our male 18 year olds). Later on in that decade, Baker, Sr. refused to sign the pro-segregatonist Southern Manifesto and voted for the two major civil rights laws of 1957 and 1960 and still win re-elections to the Second District with landslide majorities. Baker, Sr. also supported Federal aid to education and occasionally sided with organized labor when it was unpopular for even many northern Republicans to do so. His son, Baker, Jr. also opposed Barry Goldwater's 1964 attempt to privatize TVA and to appeal to white racism. Twelve years later, Baker, Jr. supported Gerald Ford instead of Reagan's try for the 1976 nomination for the presidency. What will happen to these more moderate Republicans? Will Tennessee's GOP degenerate into another dogmatic extremist group like many Rocky Mountain and Deep Southeastern states with no room for moderates and other non-conservatives?
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