Posted by
Bullfrog on Wednesday, November 04, 2009 5:39:49 PM
I found it interesting to read the spin from the press today on the election results. Unlike POTUS, I wasn't pretending last night to be so uninterested that I was watching a basketball game. I didn't have staff slipping me the current tallies during the commercial breaks. FoxNews was my source of coverage, and I watched it live.
As a former resident of NJ, I watched with fascination as Corzine lost. Of course I could no longer vote in that election, but I'd voted with my feet earlier this year, and moved to a state with lower taxes, both income and property. Morris County has been solidly Republican for as long as I can remember, but the rest of the state usually outvotes it, so for decades, I voted in all but an occasional local school referendum vote, and suspected my vote was worthless. I really thought Corzine was going to pull it off, despite his widespread unpopularity. So, evidently, did the Democrats. NJ is almost as well known for corruption and voter fraud as Chicago.
Still, the warning signs that Christie might win were there. Obama had pretty much already thrown the Democratic candidate for the governorship of VA under the bus, and made several last minute appearances in NJ to stump for Corzine meant the White House was a little more worried about losing than it would admit.
Predictably, the press and Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, are downplaying the damage. Pelosi herself considered last night's results to be a victory.
From Politico:
Most House Democrats tried to put a good face on Tuesday's election
results, saying they picked up two more votes for a sweeping health
care bill that could be on the floor as early as Friday.
[. . .]
Of course, the speaker, who told POLITICO recently she's "not big on
showing weakness," brushed aside questions about how the Democratic
gubernatorial losses in Virginia and New Jersey would impact her final
tally and instead trumpeted the two special election House wins.
"From our perspective, we won last night," the California Democrat
told reporters during a Wednesday photo op. "We had one race that we
were engaged in, it was in northern New York, it was a race where a
Republican has held the seat since the Civil War. And we won that seat.
So, from our standpoint, no, a candidate was victorious who supports
health care reform, and his remarks last night said this was a victory
for health care reform and other initiatives for the American people."
There are several things wrong with that. I could be wrong, but I think those two gubenatorial elections were tied, at least in part, to voter displeasure with Democrats, including Obama himself. Ms. Pelosi has a point, in that no state governor can vote for any of her house bills, and Owens (NY-23) can. But, even he's against a public option in the "health scare" bill, and it would probably be political suicide for him to vote for it. Besides, he's up for re-election next year. Regarding "picking up two votes," the other Democrat who won a house seat was a liberal from CA who replaced another liberal from his district, so I don't see how that counts as an additional vote. The last time a Democrat from NY-23 won a seat was in 1993. Evidently, Ms. Pelosi learned history about as well as she learned math.
The most interesting piece I read was from Paul Mulshine of The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ). He and his paper endorsed Tim Daggett, the spoiler candidate, when the polls showed him getting some traction with voters, but his article read like sour grapes.
As a result, Christie can’t claim a mandate. That’s not just because he
won by such a small margin in what should have been a runaway. It’s
also because you can’t win a mandate to do nothing — which is what he
promised to do.
A five point margin for a Republican governor in a state that is about as solidly Democratic as they come, is not that small a margin. For NJ, it's pretty big. What it means is that Independents voted for Christie, en masse, and that Corzine couldn't buy himself a third election (Senate first, then governor, twice). Christie never promised to "do nothing," which invalidates this journalist's major point.
From what I read of the exit polls, voters weren't thrilled with any of the candidates, but voted out Corzine. I consider that to be success.
Whether that will translate into election wins next year, I can't predict. But I do like last night's results.