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American voters streamed to the polls on Tuesday in elections that will recalibrate the balance of power in Washington and in state houses across the nation, with Republicans poised to make big gains, particularly in the House of Representatives where they expect to seize a majority, and Democrats anxious to stem their losses and hold control of the Senate.

With polls showing the public disquieted over a weak economy and generally disapproving of how President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress are leading the country, Republicans seemed well within reach of capturing the 39 seats that they need to win a majority in the House, which Democrats now hold by a margin of 255 to 178, with two vacancies.

If they succeed, the Republicans would break the one-party lock that Democrats have held on Washington since Mr. Obama’s victory in 2008. They would also set new parameters for the remainder of the president’s term, potentially slamming the brakes on what has been, by any historical standard, a remarkably ambitious agenda, and forcing the administration to rethink many of its policies, especially on the economy.

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Even for a nation that is, by now, used to drinking in political news through a fire hose, election night on Tuesday could be a difficult one to absorb.

More than 500 House, Senate and governor’s races will be decided, if not by the end of the night, then over the course of the nail-biting days ahead as write-in ballots are counted and recounts are requested.

Beyond the individual results, the nation will be looking at the returns for answers to bigger questions: Was this election about President Obama? How powerful a phenomenon is the Tea Party movement? How will the new Congress address the still-weak economy? What will it mean for the crop of likely 2012 Republican presidential candidates? Did anonymous campaign money sway the outcome?

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The first big hint of what’s to come will be at around 5:45 p.m., when media outlets begin reporting partial exit-poll data about the makeup of the electorate. These news organizations actually receive all the exit-poll data that is available around the country at 5:00 p.m., but they don’t use it to call races until polls close in the relevant states. Yet they are willing to report the non-candidate data from the exits earlier in the evening–and, if you read it right, that information can tell you a lot about who’s going to win. Here’s what to look for:

”¢Partisan/ideological composition of the electorate: In terms of self-identification by voters, if Republicans outnumber independents, it will be a very good sign for the GOP. If voters are divided into Republicans and Democrats plus “leaners,” any plurality by Republicans will be significant. Similarly, if conservatives outnumber moderates, and/or if conservatives exceed 45 percent of the electorate, look for big GOP gains.

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In the first week of January 2010, Rasmussen Reports showed Republicans with a nine-point lead on the generic congressional ballot. Scott Brown delivered a stunning upset in the Massachusetts special U.S. Senate election a couple of weeks later.

In the last week of October 2010, Rasmussen Reports again showed Republicans with a nine-point lead on the generic ballot. And tomorrow Republicans will send more Republicans to Congress than at any time in the past 80 years.

This isn’t a wave, it’s a tidal shift””and we’ve seen it coming for a long time. Remarkably, there have been plenty of warning signs over the past two years, but Democratic leaders ignored them. At least the captain of the Titanic tried to miss the iceberg. Congressional Democrats aimed right for it.

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The website is here.

Of interest at present, the Republicans retaking the House is priced at about 93.5, and the Democrats keeping control of the Senate has slipped to 43.5

The final USA Today/Gallup measure of Americans’ voting intentions for Congress shows Republicans continuing to hold a substantial lead over Democrats among likely voters, a lead large enough to suggest that regardless of turnout, the Republicans will win more than the 40 seats needed to give them the majority in the U.S. House.

The results are from Gallup’s Oct. 28-31 survey of 1,539 likely voters. It finds 52% to 55% of likely voters preferring the Republican candidate and 40% to 42% for the Democratic candidate on the national generic ballot — depending on turnout assumptions. Gallup’s analysis of several indicators of voter turnout from the weekend poll suggests turnout will be slightly higher than in recent years, at 45%. This would give the Republicans a 55% to 40% lead on the generic ballot, with 5% undecided.

Read it all. We shall see–it is not over until it is over.

It takes an effort these days to recall the thrill that surged through the world when Barack Obama was elected America’s president. It was not only that he was the first black person to assume the globe’s greatest office. He seemed to be preternaturally thoughtful, dignified and decent; a man who could heal America’s wounds at home and restore its reputation abroad. Though too many were swept away in a collective longing to see hope triumph over experience, none of it seemed wholly unreasonable at the time. Yes, many thought, he can.

Two years later, the magnitude of the let-down is palpable everywhere; and at home the president is caught in a vice. To many on the left, he is a cowardly compromiser, whose half-baked plans to get America back to work have done little to help those who voted for him, and whose health-care and financial reforms were gutted at the behest of special interests. To many on the right, he seems a doctrinaire spendthrift who has squandered trillions of dollars on wasteful bureaucracy, mortgaging the future while failing to grapple with the present. To centrists who backed him, including this newspaper, he has been a disappointment, his skills as a president falling far short of his genius as a campaigner.

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Two years after America voted overwhelmingly for change, polls, analysts and an angry election season suggest its voters are about to do so again.

Amid universal expectations of big Republican gains in Congress, Tuesday’s balloting is also likely to tip the scales of power in states across the country, and with them, partisan prospects for the elections of 2012 and the balance of the century’s second decade.

In Pennsylvania, the high-profile, high-spending races for governor and senator have been unavoidable to anyone with a television or radio. Both are at the top of the national parties’ priorities. But in an election in which the GOP needs 39 seats to wrest the speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi, a spotlight has also cast Pennsylvania’s U.S. House contests in sharp relief. In a chamber in which 90 percent of incumbents typically win re-election, nearly half of Pennsylvania’s seats feature competitive contests.

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A number of you know I (a) like politics and (b) follow it quite closely. From time to time it crops up as an element of focus on the blog, and the midterm elections 2010 is one of those times. There is no flawless indicator, but my favorite as some of you may remember is Intrade, since it involves real people and real money (and it has a very fine track record). By far the most revealing graph I have found is this one:

What does this mean? Think anti-incumbency and a disgust with business as usual in Washington at a minimum–KSH.

Over the next two years, Obama will have to show that he is a traditionalist on social matters and a center-left pragmatist on political ones. Culturally, he will have to demonstrate that even though he comes from an unusual background, he is a fervent believer in the old-fashioned bourgeois virtues: order, self-discipline, punctuality and personal responsibility. Politically, he will have to demonstrate that he is data-driven ”” that even though he has more faith in government than most Americans, he will relentlessly oppose programs when the evidence shows they don’t work.

… Obama will need to respond to the nation’s fear of decline. The current sour mood is not just caused by high unemployment. It emerges from the fear that America’s best days are behind it. The public’s real anxiety is about values, not economics: the gnawing sense that Americans have become debt-addicted and self-indulgent; the sense that government undermines individual responsibility; the observation that people who work hard get shafted while people who play influence games get the gravy. Obama will have to propose policies that re-establish the link between effort and reward.

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Two packages containing explosive devices originating in Yemen and bound for two places of Jewish worship in Chicago set off a global terror alert on Friday. One package was found at a FedEx facility in Dubai, and another was found early Friday morning at an airport in Britain, sparking a day of dramatic precautionary activity in the United States.

Speaking at the White House Friday afternoon, President Obama called the packages a “credible terrorist threat against our country,” and confirmed that they “did apparently contain” explosives. Earlier reports had said that the device found in Britain did not.

The wide-scale alert spread to the United States on Friday morning, when officials isolated two cargo planes at airports in Newark and Philadelphia and searched them for packages originating in Yemen, and New York police searched a delivery truck in Brooklyn. None of the shipments reaching the United States from Yemen were found to contain explosives.

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Having served in Congress for 16 years, I can attest from personal experience to the perverse influence that money has in our democratic process.

It isn’t just a question, as Mr. [David] Brooks advocates, as to whether money is the deciding factor in election outcomes. The effect of the money flow on influencing the way members of Congress vote on issues that motivate campaign donors to give is tremendously pernicious. Few members will bite the hand that feeds them.

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Bank of America may be trying to bring down the curtain on the foreclosure furor, but there were numerous indications Tuesday that the problems would not move off-stage so quickly.

A day after the bank said it would once again pursue defaulting borrowers in the 23 states where foreclosures were overseen by the courts, judges in Florida said they were expecting even more challenges from defaulting homeowners.

The White House is convening a meeting of regulators and administration officials on Wednesday to review federal investigations into the foreclosure crisis, while state law enforcement officials emphasized their inquiry into flawed foreclosures was continuing.

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In some cases business leaders say they have been more ignored than harmed. IBM said it would analyze health-care spending, at no cost to the government, to hunt out fraud, Sam Palmisano, the company’s CEO, said at a conference in New York on Sept. 14. The White House wouldn’t sign on to the plan.

“We offered to do it for free to prove a point, and they turned us down,” Palmisano said. “Our recommendations weren’t aligned with the priorities of the administration. Their priority was not to reduce fraud and improve productivity. It was to increase coverage.”

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The United Methodist Church’s public policy agency can advocate on causes beyond alcoholism and temperance without violating the terms of its endowment, a District of Columbia judge ruled on Wednesday (Oct. 6).

Superior Court Judge Rhonda Reid Winston’s decision is the latest twist in a long-running debate in the UMC about how its General Board of Church and Society is funded and the positions it takes on political issues.

“This matter has been an enormous, unnecessary distraction,” Jim Winkler, the board’s chief executive, said in a statement. The board has for decades fought “predatory enterprises” such as alcohol, tobacco and gambling, he said.

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Bad news isn’t always a surprise. But knowing it’s coming doesn’t always help, either. And now that, as expected, South Carolina now faces a huge new bill due to Obama-Care, our state faces a terrible dilemma.

The president and his allies in Congress promised that their massive health care overhaul would extend coverage to roughly 30 million previously uninsured Americans. The bill’s critics, including S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford, warned that the states would have to cover large new tabs due to the bill’s vastly increased number of people eligible for Medicaid.

The critics were right. Tuesday’s Post and Courier reported that the ObamaCare Medicaid mandate is projected to cost our state “nearly $1 billion over the next decade, even with the federal government covering at least 90 percent of the cost.”

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As Obama administration officials put into place the first major wave of changes under the health care legislation, they have tried to defuse stiffening resistance ”” from companies like McDonald’s and some insurers ”” by granting dozens of waivers to maintain even minimal coverage far below the new law’s standards.

The waivers have been issued in the last several weeks as part of a broader strategic effort to stave off threats by some health insurers to abandon markets, drop out of the business altogether or refuse to sell certain policies.

Among those that administration officials hoped to mollify with waivers were some big insurers, some smaller employers and McDonald’s, which went so far as to warn that the regulations could force it to strip workers of existing coverage.

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The U.S. healthcare reform law will worsen a shortage of physicians as millions of newly insured patients seek care, the Association of American Medical Colleges said on Thursday.

The group’s Center for Workforce Studies released new estimates that showed shortages would be 50 percent worse in 2015 than forecast.

“While previous projections showed a baseline shortage of 39,600 doctors in 2015, current estimates bring that number closer to 63,000, with a worsening of shortages through 2025,” the group said in a statement.

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The U.S. government will face pressure to bail out struggling states in the next 12 months, said Meredith Whitney, the banking analyst who correctly predicted Citigroup Inc.’s dividend cut in 2008.

While saying a bailout might not be politically viable, Whitney joined investor Warren Buffett in raising alarm bells about the potential for widespread defaults in the $2.8 trillion municipal bond market. She said state and local issuers have taken on too much debt and that the gap between public spending and revenue is unsustainable.

“People will think the federal government will bail these states out,” Whitney, 40, the founder of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group Inc., said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop.” “It’s going to be an incredibly divisive issue.”

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Bob Moon: What’s the rush? That’s what investment consultant Chris Whalen was asking today at Institutional Risk Analytics. He says the government seems to be in a hurry to get the word out that it’s aiming to start unloading its $49 billion in AIG shares within the coming year. Whalen warns the market isn’t ready and won’t support it.

Chris Whalen: We’re trying to do a public offering of shares in a company that can’t stand by itself, that has to have government support. That’s not going to work.

Flooding the market with shares, he cautions, is a money-losing proposition. He says it’s the same catch-22 the government faces with General Motors, and has already run up against trying to sell its Citigroup shares. Gauging by AIG’s total market capitalization — the value of all outstanding shares — he argues the idea of taxpayers making all their money back is pie-in-the-sky.

Whalen: The market cap of this company is single digits. They owe us $100 billion, right? So what the market’s telling you is that the company is worth, today, a tenth of what they owe us.

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If there is one area where the Obama administration and the American people seem in fundamental agreement, it is in their contempt for Washington.

Not, presumably, for the actual place of schools and neighborhoods and monuments but for the conceptual Washington, the symbolic city. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, with typical delicacy, calls it “[expletive]-nutsville,” a judgment that earthier Tea Party activists might share. Senior adviser David Axelrod has announced his spring departure. “I think he’s not having fun,” says a White House colleague. A recent profile claims that Axelrod’s idealism was disappointed by “a ferociously stubborn, possibly irredeemable system.” And Barack Obama himself constantly complains about the “politicking” and obstructionism of the capital city, where they “talk about me like a dog.” Much of the White House senior staff seems to long for a purer, simpler, more wholesome kind of politics . . . in Chicago.

The tension here is obvious. Even while depicting Washington as a flawed, fractured, hopeless mess, the Obama administration has sought to increase the influence of Washington over America’s economy and health-care system. In the Obama era, Washington helps run auto companies, oversees some corporate salaries, imposes an individual mandate to purchase health insurance, and seeks to rationalize the health-care system with a profusion of new boards, offices, agencies and commissions — estimates vary from 47 to 159 new bureaucratic entities.

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The US says it is “disappointed” by Israel’s decision not to extend a ban on West Bank settlement building.

US Middle East envoy George Mitchell has been sent to the region in an attempt to salvage direct peace talks that were restarted earlier this month.

The 10-month moratorium came to an end at midnight (2200 GMT on Sunday).

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Federal prosecutors in New York have opened a criminal probe of one of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s brothers, raising the stakes in Washington’s sometimes-contentious dealings with the Karzai government.

U.S. officials said Mahmood Karzai has become a focus in a corruption probe handled by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, an office that has a history of charging, extraditing and trying suspects in far-flung parts of the world, including Afghanistan.

ny move to indict Mahmood Karzai, who is a U.S. citizen, carries huge risks for American officials, whose anticorruption efforts have often provoked sharp backlashes from President Karzai.

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Throughout this volume, the Obama administration is depicted as deeply divided and riven with suspicions: the president feeling boxed in by the Pentagon, members of the military battling the White House and one another. In addition to the well-known putdowns of the president’s national security team by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the commander of forces in Afghanistan (which appeared in Rolling Stone magazine and led to his firing last June), and the much-chronicled tensions between senior military officers and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Mr. Woodward recounts a cornucopia of conflicts and adversarial agendas ”” and much pettiness, in-fighting and score-settling that stand in awful contrast to the sobering realities of a nearly nine-year-old war that has already claimed more than 1,000 American lives.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former campaign strategist Mark Penn is described as urging her to take the job of secretary of state because, in Mr. Woodward’s words, “if she did the job for four years, Obama might be in trouble and have to dump Biden and pick her to run with him as vice president.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is described as trying to withhold a “hybrid option” ”” requiring a fewer number of troops ”” from consideration, and even knocking heads with Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the commander of the United States Central Command, over a memo about prospects in Afghanistan.

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Winston Churchill once moaned about the long, dishonourable tradition in politics that sees commerce as a cow to be milked or a dangerous tiger to be shot. Businesses are the generators of the wealth on which incomes, taxation and all else depends; “the strong horse that pulls the whole cart”, as Churchill put it. No sane leader of a country would want businesspeople to think that he was against them, especially at a time when confidence is essential for the recovery.

From this perspective, Barack Obama already has a lot to answer for. A president who does so little to counter the idea that he dislikes business is, self-evidently, a worryingly negligent chief executive. No matter that other Western politicians have publicly played with populism more dangerously, from France’s “laissez-faire is dead” president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to Britain’s “capitalism kills competition” business secretary, Vince Cable (see article); no matter that talk on the American right about Mr Obama being a socialist is rot; no matter that Wall Street’s woes are largely of its own making. The evidence that American business thinks the president does not understand Main Street is mounting

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“It’s like the American dream in reverse.” That’s how President Barack Obama, ten days after taking office last year, described the plight of Americans hit by the faltering economy. His catchy description fell short ”” the dream has turned into a nightmare for tens of millions.

So much so that an opinion poll this week showed that 43 percent of those surveyed thought that “the American Dream” is a thing of the past. It “once held true” but no longer does. Only half the country believes the dream “still exists,” according to the poll, commissioned by ABC News and Yahoo against a background of dismal statistics on growing poverty, inequality, unemployment, and Americans without health insurance.

Before turning to the gloomy numbers, a brief detour to the meaning of the phrase “the American Dream,” long a familiar part of the U.S. (and international) lexicon. The survey defined it as “if you work hard, you get ahead.” That’s neat shorthand for the concept that the American social, economic and political system makes success possible for everyone….

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On paper, I should be a progressive voter. I am an agnostic. I am a woman in my 20s with an Ivy League graduate degree and liberal arts background.

But I’m a conservative. I vote for Republicans because I believe they have the best strategies for where the country should be headed fiscally, militarily and culturally.

Secular conservatives like me are in a bind. We want to work with religious conservatives because we agree with them on most issues. We respect the ethical contributions from many faith traditions, which inspire millions to seek the public good. But we’re troubled by the religious right’s dominance over the conservative movement, a trend that repels rational, independent-minded folks who see religious zealotry as anathema to the Founding Fathers’ pluralistic vision.

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It is a very scary picture.

The problem with the business cycle under this analysis, you’ll notice, is not the bust ”” it’s the boom. That’s when the bad investment decisions are made, largely because political influence in the markets (housing policy, tax breaks, artificially cheap money and other interest-rate subsidies, risk subsidies, etc.) distorts economic calculation.

Which brings us back to the entitlements. It’s easy to say: Well, we’ll just raise the retirement age, or cut benefits, or means-test them, or raise taxes on the wealthy who receive them (which amounts to means-testing, but Democrats like that version better). And, yes, that probably is what we will do, eventually. But that does not get us out of the economic pickle: People have been making decisions for years and years ”” decisions about saving, investing, consuming, working, and retiring ”” based at least in some part on what are almost certainly faulty assumptions about what sort of Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits they will receive when they retire. When those disappear, a lot of consumption is going to have to be forgone ”” and a lot of capital dedicated to producing those goods and services for consumption will be massively devalued. Businesses will have to retrench, probably in a way that is more disruptive and more expensive than the housing-bubble recession necessitated.

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