Two cheers for the state of Georgia for returning Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss to the U.S. Senate by a landslide (59-41) margin in Tuesday’s runoff election.
But only two cheers instead of three because while good, this is hardly great news for the GOP. It reminds me of the man who was told how lucky he was that a gunshot wound he had received had not been three inches more to the right where it would surely have been fatal. “Lucky,” he replied, “if I’d really been lucky the damn bullet would have missed me entirely!”
Really, this was a seat and a state that should have been absolutely safe for our party and up to a month before the election, no political prognosticator thought that it wasn’t. It is an indicator that the Republicans have a lot to do to fire up the party base again, whose failure to turn out in 2004 numbers now appears to have been the main cause of John McCain’s loss and not the MSM myth of an immense turnout of young and minority voters for Wonder Boy.
