THE BULLPEN
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Robert Shrum
The Republicans won the midterm elections last week. In an unhappy accident of timing, however, the elections won’t be held for another year. Despite the GOP’s premature victory laps and the press’s predictable reaction, the outcome had almost nothing to do with next November’s contests for the House of Representatives, a third of the Senate, and statewide offices in 36 states.
From just two tea leaves, Virginia and New Jersey, conservative columnists who should know better brewed instant fantasies worthy of the teabaggers. Charles Krauthammer pompously proclaimed a defeat for "Obamaism," dooming the President’s once and future victories. Obama’s 2008 election, he wrote, was a "historical anomaly ... one shot, one time" and -- in case you still didn’t get the point -- "never to be repeated." Never?
Never mind that in Virginia the Republican challenger never once challenged Obama. In Jersey, incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine was a casualty not of the President who stumped for him as he closed a yawning gap in the polls, but of the Bush economy, which left a yawning gap in state revenues and precluded deeper cuts in property taxes. Corzine’s Republican rival Chris Christie featured Obama on his website -- not to scorn him, but to embrace his message of change. Nine successive times in Virginia and six successive times in New Jersey, the party that won the White House has lost the governorships there the following year.
Krauthammer’s misreading of the 2009 results may have been purple and Apocalyptic, but it was echoed, in somewhat muted terms, across the right-leaning landscape. It was as if the Right had found its promised land in Old Dominion and the Turnpike State. Former White House Speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote that the Republican victors faced down opponents who practiced the politics of "viciousness." (He should know; he worked for Bush.) "All politics is national," he went on, citing the slumping economy caused, of course, not by Bush’s near-depression but by Obama’s deficit spending.
(More here.)
You have read this article with the title The referendum on Obama. You can bookmark this page URL https://ogbcommunity.blogspot.com/2009/11/referendum-on-obama.html. Thanks!
No comment for "The referendum on Obama"
Post a Comment