Alright, I won't ignore Paul Ryan...

Your stats were good... and got me thinking. Perhaps what I should have said was that the Senate produces more Presidential candidates than either the Army or the House... especially in the last 125 years. The list of Senatorial candidates for the White House is long, indeed, and if you can't win a primary race in this country... you can't win the White House.

Since 1980, the last 8 Presidential election cycles have seen five different Senators in the races: Obama, McCain, Kerry, Dole and Dukakis, with another seven sitting in as VP on the tickets... Biden, Edwards, Lieberman, Gore, Kemp, Benson and Ferraro. That's just the last 30 years, people... with twelve out of a possible 16 names (I'm not counting incumbents) all holding active Senate seats at the time of the election. THAT is the statistics I was referring to when I said the Senate is the road to the White House, but what I should have said was that the Senate was the road to the road to the White House.

I'm not going to nit-pick words with you in regards to "moderate" or "average" or "independent" voters. Call them what you will, I am convinced that while the majority of Americans do hold traditional conservative values, and base their political views on the same, the vast majority of voters in this nation are not of the same political views as Limbaugh, Hannity or Beck (and I'm only using those names because they are the Big Three). There are issues in today's political arena that people feel close to, and there are others they couldn't care less about... that is simply a reality that never changes in American politics. What is as close to a constant in American politics is always the ECONOMY, though... and if you can't fix that, you're doomed at the polls.

I wouldn't think it would take a genius to show that nothing Obama/Reid/Pelosi has done over the course of the last four years has done ANYTHING to substantially fix the economy... but if someone can't get up and make the case effectively, then the incumbents win again, and we have four more years of progressive/liberal agenda to deal with.