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Hugely consequential
From Jeff Greenfield
Editor's note: In our Behind the Scenes series, CNN analysts, anchors, and correspondents share their experiences in covering news around the world. ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- What most intrigued me about tonight was watching how relatively small shifts in votes can produce hugely consequential events. This was not a landslide, but just enough of a shift in an evenly divided country that it will produce great and important political changes even though it happened in a relatively small percentage of voters. This will be covered, quite rightly, as a huge win for the Republicans, and it was. But if you look at it in terms of, say, real landslides, it wasn't. It constantly amazes me how sometimes -- it happened for the Democrats in the Senate in 1986 when they won a bunch of very close seats and took back the Senate, and it happened tonight for Republicans -- a party is able to move a small percentage of the population in enough places to produce a fundamental change. With control of the Senate moving to the Republicans, the president is going to resubmit a bunch of his more conservative judicial nominees and some of them will get through because they were blocked by a committee that the Democrats no longer control. And you will see a push on the part of more conservative Republicans who will say, "Now that we have control of everything, it is time to get our agenda done." In terms of how CNN covered the races, this was very different from 2000. Every projection held up. I think that a combination of caution and a back-up proved to be a very good thing tonight. I feel very good about that. Now that you bring it up, I had not really thought about the race for governor in Maryland that Democrat Kathleen Townsend lost tonight. She was Bobby Kennedy's eldest daughter and I had been close to her father, but when you cover an election like this, you detach yourself from that. I always thought that she was the Kennedy child most like Bobby in her approach to politics. I think that the position that she was in as lieutenant governor and her own hesitancy may have contributed to her loss. I think she may not have trusted her instincts enough to run like her father might have. I think her father would have just told her, "Just go and do it." I think there was a lot more political calculation behind what she did than a kind of spontaneous campaign. I also think that she was lieutenant governor under a very unpopular governor and she ran against a very effective opponent -- and this is what happened. What would her father tell her to do now? If you fall off a horse, get right back on it.
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