By John Hood

Still trying to chase down results in key legislative races around the country, but at the moment it looks like this:

• Going into the 2010 elections, Democrats held 60 partisan legislative chambers and Republicans held 36, with a couple of ties.

• It looks like the GOP has picked up an astounding 20 chambers, including both houses in Alabama, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Wisconsin and additional chambers in Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

• In total legislative seats, it is possible that after all the results are posted, Republicans will have won a nationwide majority.

• Republicans haven’t enjoyed this much power in state capitals since the 1920s.

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By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

We will learn in November just how angry the public is about a lot of things, from higher taxes to massive unemployment. But the popular uproar pales in comparison to the sense of humiliation that we Americans are quite broke.

In 2008, the public was furious at George W. Bush, not because he was too much of a right-wing tightwad, but because he ran up a series of what were then thought to be gargantuan deficits.

The result was that under a supposedly conservative administration, and despite six years of an allegedly small-government Republican Congress, the deficit nearly doubled from $3.3 trillion to $6.3 trillion in just eight years.

Barack Obama apparently never figured out that he had been elected in part because that massive Republican borrowing had sickened the American people.

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By STEVE MOORE

During a recent press conference, President Obama blamed George W. Bush for the nation’s fiscal condition. “When I walked in,” he declared, “wrapped in a nice bow was a $1.3 trillion deficit sitting right there on my doorstep.” Earlier this year he asserted that “we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade.”

Neither statement is correct, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). True enough, the outgoing Bush administration bequeathed big deficits to Mr. Obama. The expected 2009 deficit was $1.19 trillion, not $1.3 trillion, however—and the actual deficit for 2009 came in at $1.41 trillion, meaning that the new president added some $220 billion to the total.

Far more significant, however, was the president’s misstatement that Mr. Bush and the Republicans left the country with $8 trillion of debt over the next 10 years.

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