Tsongas vs. Ogonowski-- until yesterday most of us would have assumed that this was the straight to video sequel to Ballistic: Eck Vs. Sever. If you follow political news, however, you know that it's the race that a bored press is avidly studying the entrails of, trying to determine if it holds any significance for 2008.

Basically, the debate falls into two camps:

1) Mild significance. (It's so slow for news even that qualifies as news.) Ogonowski, whose brother died as a pilot on a 9/11 plane, did surprisingly well for a Republican in Massachusetts, narrowly losing; Tsongas, whose late husband Paul was a senator for a couple of millennia from the state, did surprisingly poorly, narrowly winning. This suggests that all Republicans are not doomed in 2008, each race is its own race and their message and their better candidates have some traction when divorced from an unpopular president.

2) No significance. The Dem state machine did the next best thing to putting up Tsongas' corpse for reelection and still pulled off a win, which just proves that old hacks shouldn't be allowed to pick weak candidates, but even if they do, it's a Dem sweep in the making.

Coming from Illinois, where we follow Machine orders religiously and thus voted in the closest thing to a corpse (the stroke-enfeebled John Stroger) so Mayor Daley could then replace him with his son Todd Stroger (who came pretty feeble to start with), I tend to agree with #1. In the battle of the dead relatives for office, Ogonowski & brother did suprisingly well against Tsongas and husband and the machine, suggesting that Dems should not take '08 for granted and Repubs should not be laying in supplies of sleeping pills and razor blades-- yet.

Still, one can't draw more than the tiniest of conclusions from such an unusual race. I mean, a state election is one thing, but it's not like the Democrats, faced with a candidate with a 9/11 connection, would nominate for president some ex-officeholder's wife with little track record besides standing next to her husband and smiling, right?