That is the “beauty” of politics?

Then she did her job.

Runoff elections aren’t about changing people’s minds/votes. They are about getting your people whipped into a froth so they will go back and vote.

Now that you got your boy elected, you can go back to hating him and hoping he loses in 6 very long years. Ummm…ok. At least I didn’t have to change my opinion so, I don’t have any work to do.

Does anybody really think that Palin influenced any undecided votes? Really? She drew huge crowds of the “true believers” and whipped them into a froth. Did it change a single vote? My guess is “nope”.

Here’s a timeline for those of you that have a hard time putting that one together:
Early vote: Saxby does really well.
Early voting ends, Sarah Palin visits.
Day of election: Saxby still does well, but not as good as the early vote.

So, if Sarah Palin is such an awesome energizer of the vote, how do you explain how well he did with early voters compared to those who waited until Sarah Palin checked in?

Chambliss: Palin ‘allowed us to peak’

From Politico

Fresh off his runoff victory Tuesday night, Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss credited Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin with firing up his base.

“I can’t overstate the impact she had down here,” Chambliss said during an interview Wednesday morning on Fox News.

“When she walks in a room, folks just explode,” he added. “And they really did pack the house everywhere we went. She’s a dynamic lady, a great administrator, and I think she’s got a great future in the Republican Party.”

Chambliss said that after watching her campaign on his behalf at several events Monday, he does not see her star status diminishing within the party.

The Republican also thanked John McCain and the other big name Republicans that came to Georgia, but said Palin made the biggest impact.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16162.html

If Palin is the conservatives’ answer, then you’re going to be licking your chops for longer than I had thought. If anti-science, anti-gays is your thing, then slid her in. The American public are rightly moving away from this dogma. Religious institutions simply do not hold the authority they once did. People are learning to think for themselves.

He isn’t.

He is a REPUBLICAN.

There is a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon between the two, now.

In all due respect how can Saxby have a high rating and voted for the following;

Highway bill

Farm bill

Energy Bill

No Child Left Behind

Drug Prescription bill

I would go further but that alone should wake you up!

Please help me understand?

Those ratings are generally pretty useless, since they only focus on the vote and not the reason behind the vote. Plus, just because they call themselves conservative does not mean they are conservative in a way that agrees with my definition of the word.

If I was in Congress, I would pretty much vote against any measure by the government that increases the size and scope of the Federal government, yet I would get dinged by these so called “conservative” groups because I would not vote to increase the size of government in a way favored by them.

Looking through their choice of votes, I do not see any in regard to farm subsidies or the behind the scenes influence a Senator uses to add pork to a bill to reward political allies.

As referenced by the American Thinker, Saxby has a lifetime rating of 95 by the American Conservative Union(see here). He’s a 95% Conservative, which all in all is pretty good.

People were mad at Saxby because of several high profile wanderings from the Conservative farm.

The trend, however, I would argue stems from Republicans successfully framing this campaign as a last ditch effort to keep Democrats from gaining ‘total control’ in Washington. That was an effective political strategy that kicked up base turnout to levels that rival the 2006 General Election. As a result, there was more enthusiasm for the GOP base to return to the polls, while Democrats were content (it seems) in taking back the presidency and gaining seats in both houses of Congress (and turnout that was substantially depressed compared to Election Day).

You toss in more high-profile visits from GOP surrogates, and it was just more inticing for the Republicans to vote.

I’d also assume that some of the voters who voted for Martin as a protest against Chambliss returned to the fold in the runoff (due to the threat of 60 votes in the U.S. Senate).

The national democrats had nothing and nobody who could energize the democrat vote.

Evidence: The defeat of Prop 8 in California. The massacre of the National GOP in the House and Senate over the last two election cycles.

Granted, Obama ran a brilliant campaign, bur where did conservative principals fail McCain, nowhere, McCain’s big thing over the years has been to compromise conservatism by throwing conservatives under the bus. The same with GWB.

It wasn’t Palin that came up with McCain/Kennedy, it wasn’t Palin who came up with McCain/Feingold, it wasn’t Palin soliciting, it was Foley. It wasn’t Palin rushing back to DC to muster the GOP into voting for the Bailout. It wasn’t Palin reaching across the isle for bi-partisan manure handouts. It wasn’t Palin that authored and voted for the largest deficit spending bills in history.

So, maybe the GOP needs to take a long gaze into the mirror. I’m with Plyer on thuis one, Saxby won because there was no where else to go.

This is insanity. I won’t argue for or against Obama’s win being a repudiation of Bush because, well, obviously it was to a very large extent … though that wasn’t the only reason he won (far from it). But to suggest that a Republican winning a runoff election in Georgia is a ’small step towards conservatism’ is crazy.

Georgia is deep red state. It has two Republican senators. The majority of our representatives are Republican. Republicans control both houses of the state legislature. We have a Republican governor, lt. governor, secretary of state and secretary of education.

Watching a Republican win a statewide race in Georgia suggests the same about the ideological mood of the country that a Democrat winning in Massachusetts would.

The bigger fact is that Chambliss even got into a runoff against such a ‘Leftist’ Democrat who pulled down 47 percent of the vote on Election Day and 41-plus percent in the runoff. That’s outperforming a well-known former Democratic official who ran for governor a few years back.

If anything, given changing demographics, I’d be nervous about the coming years.