Ready or Not, Here Comes 2010 ...

It's been a mere week since Barack Obama was elected president, but it's been busy.

He and his family paid a courtesy call on the White House. There has been much speculation about who will be chosen for Cabinet posts in the new administration. And Obama apparently wasted little time after winning the election before launching a new web site to communicate with the public.

But if you thought we were finished with campaigning for awhile, you can forget it.

The conservative Washington Times reports that the Dec. 2 runoff for the Senate seat from Georgia is being viewed by prominent politicians and their strategists as the "first race of the 2010 election cycle" — and "an early clue to [Obama's] clout and coattails."

It's still possible that Democrats could achieve the "filibuster-proof" majority of 60 seats in the Senate — that they so clearly desired and openly sought during the regular election campaign — if they also can win a recount in Minnesota and overtake the Republican when all ballots are counted in Alaska.

(The Times incorrectly suggests, by the way, that Alaska is holding a "recount." In fact, as the Anchorage Daily News has been reporting, thousands of ballots have not yet been counted there — although the tabulation of those votes should be completed, the newspaper says, by Wednesday.

(This may seem like a technicality to the Times — but you can't "recount" what hasn't been counted.

(Perhaps that's a subtle difference. Perhaps what the Times should have said — in trying to draw its distinction between what is happening in Alaska and Minnesota and what is happening in Georgia — is that Alaska and Minnesota are counting ballots that have already been cast while Georgia is preparing to hold a whole new election.

(The difference between Alaska and Minnesota is that Alaska is still counting the ballots for the first time. Because the initial outcome was so close in Minnesota, a recount is required by state law.)

Politicians like to draw favorable comparisons to history.

Like an eager lawyer who discovers a long-forgotten ruling that can serve as a precedent — and save a court case that was thought to be a lost cause — a politician who is perceived to be trailing inevitably will invoke the memory of Harry Truman holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune with the banner headline "Dewey Defeats Truman" — as if to say, "See? My cause isn't hopeless."

But there's a reason why such examples live in the public memory. The dream scenario usually remains in the realm of dreams, rarely venturing into reality.

And Georgia history, as the Times points out, does not have a favorable precedent for Obama or the Democrat in the race, Jim Martin.

Sixteen years ago, when Bill Clinton was elected president and the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, a similar drama was unfolding in Georgia.

In the 1992 general election, three third-party candidates combined for 3% of the vote and prevented both the incumbent, Democrat Wyche Fowler, and his Republican challenger, Paul Coverdell, from receiving a majority of the vote. Then, as now, a runoff was required by state law.

During the runoff, both Clinton and Vice President-elect Al Gore (who, unlike the Obama-Biden ticket, managed to win Georgia in the 1992 presidential race) tried to use their electoral popularity to help Fowler by campaigning for him.

The Times suggests that a "high-profile presence" by the president-elect in the 2008 runoff campaign would be a "potent demonstration of his clout."

But before Obama does so, he might want to review what happened in 1992.

Clinton and Gore's efforts did not succeed. Coverdell received 51% of the vote.

In hindsight, it's hard to say whether there was much that either Clinton or Gore could have done to help Fowler in that race.

As Michael Barone, co-author of the "Almanac of American Politics," observed in the 1994 edition of the book, Fowler "was in trouble because he was seen for what he was, a national liberal on most issues, with strong convictions and great political skills, blessed with a folksy rural manner, but also one of Majority Leader George Mitchell's chief lieutenants."

It didn't play well in Georgia.

Did Fowler's loss foreshadow what was coming in 1994, when Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took control of Capitol Hill? I doubt that. Yes, the Democrats lost a Senate seat in that 1992 runoff, but they lost it in the South, where Democrats have had problems across the board for decades.

And one could argue that things like the 1993 "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military and the 1994 health care reform efforts supported a growing public perception that both the administration and the Democrats in Congress were out of step with average Americans — and laid the foundation for the so-called "Republican Revolution."

Fowler may have sympathized with those policies and others, but they were not factors in the runoff.

A "filibuster-proof" majority was not on the line in 1992 — and it might not be in 2008, either.

It seems likely that, by the time the runoff is held in Georgia on Dec. 2, the final outcomes from Alaska and Minnesota will be known. If either Ted Stevens or Norm Coleman prevail, that 60-seat majority is off the table, no matter what happens in Georgia.

Or, for that matter, what happens with Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman, who has been caucusing with the Democrats for two years but supported John McCain in the presidential campaign — and some Democrats, reportedly, are eager to jettison him and free up the chairmanship of the Homeland Security committee.

There are those in the media, like Ezra Klein in The American Prospect, who openly urge the Democrats to strip Lieberman of his chairmanship.

"[I]t's about to be 2009 and there is no reason to keep an anti-Muslim bigot who believes the United States is being subverted by Muslims from within in charge of a committee that handles national security affairs," writes Klein.

With the domestic and foreign problems confronting the incoming administration, my feeling is that it's best for Obama to avoid becoming personally involved in the Georgia runoff.

Unless that "filibuster-proof" majority appears to be a real possibility, my advice would be to dispatch high-profile surrogates to Georgia — and save the political capital.