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Conrad Black: A Republican Sweep

[Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.]

As we are now a month from the midterm elections, I will boldly predict their outcome....

The Republicans should win a majority of about 15 in the House, consigning the Pelosi era to the proverbial dustbin....

Harry Reid has been the least distinguished Senate majority leader since the trivia-question trio of Wallace H. White, Scott Lucas, and Ernest McFarland, who held the post for two years each between two of its storied occupants, Alben W. Barkley (1937–47) and Lyndon B. Johnson (1953–61), who both went on to national office. The campaign of his opponent, the peppy Tea Party populist Sharron Angle, has essentially consisted of emerging twice a day like a cuckoo clock to announce: “I am not Harry Reid.” He would be the only Senate majority leader to be denied reelection to the Senate since the above-named Lucas and McFarland, and his most memorable statement was the solemn declaration in 2007 that the U.S. had “lost” the Iraq War. Few of these races or the personalities in them are especially interesting. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington is defending her assertion that she was not sure if hiding under a school desk would be an efficient defense against a hydrogen-bomb attack, and the Illinois race for President Obama’s seat pits a Republican plagued with hallucinatory recollections from a career he did not have and a Democratic executive of a failed bank identified with some of the pelagic sleaze of the Chicago Democratic party that helped fund the president. If the Republicans fall a seat short, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut could be expected to suffer another case of the waffles and, in exchange for the chairmanship of an adequately influential committee, might undergo the grace of conversion to Republicanism....
Read entire article at National Review