Mickey Kaus does a public service by trashing Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum that “all politics are local.” As Kaus point out, all the congressional elections in recent decades have been nationalized.
I’d go one step further and say that, sure, all politics are local–if you’re Tip O’Neill and represent a ironclad Democratic seat in Congress. It’s easy to be smug about your political skills if you’re in a safe seat and have enough pull in state politics to avoid your district getting gerrymandered. Then you can sit there and sagely attribute your success to your continuing mastery of local politics rather than to whatever it took to get the seat in the first place.