So looking at this thread in light of Tuesday’s results:
–Hoffman, the Teabaggers’ Teabagger, lost NY-23, giving the seat to a Democrat for the first time in ages.
–The Republican who won his close Gov. race, Chris Christie in NJ, is consistently described as a moderate.
–Same-sex marriage was voted down in Maine, showing that the traditional “values” Republicans are still as relevant as ever.
(I don’t know where Virginia fits in. Mid-south gubernatorial races are always wildcards, and the story there seems to be that the Democrats just didn’t turn anybody out.)
I think it’s silly to extrapolate national trends from this handful of oddball elections, but you certainly can’t spin it in favor of a new Libertarian or Teabagger resurgence. There’s been a lot of talk in the last few weeks about the Teabaggers pushing out GOP moderates in 2010, and the NY-23 race might have given them some momentum to do that if Hoffman had won, but he didn’t.
The motto at Daily Kos, almost since its inception, has been “more and better Democrats”. But it’s hard to get both at the same time, as seen by the fact that we can’t get a ridiculously compromised health care bill passed with a 60-seat Senate majority. Maybe the Republicans are right to go for “better” before “more”, but it’s going to be an either/or proposition.
This is an absolutely insane ‘translation’. The economy was the number 1 issue on people’s minds a year ago when we decided to elect Obama. McCain was never likely to win but his horrid handling of the financial meltdown in September and the impending recession at large was the nail in the coffin for him. Even his own top aids have since admitted that the day he declared that the economy was fundamentally sound was pretty much the end of things for him.
I’m about as big an Obama supporter as one can be without blindly supporting everything he says, and the economy is my number one concern too. It was my number one concern when I voted for Obama too. I’m so glad that as much as Obama and the Democratic congress are far from perfect, at least the country has realized the Republicans are terrible news for the economy.
People were extremely worried about the faltering economy. People voted for Obama because they trusted him to improve the economy. A year later, we’re still worried about the economy. Polls show we approve of Obama. Therefore, people hate Obama’s plan for economic recovery? Really really astoundingly bad analysis. Just awful.
If you take this election on face value it seems a more accurate introduction would have been “First, the GOP now must recognize it can either lose without conservatives or lose with conservatives.” You’re right that they’d have reached the same conclusion either way, but you have to give them credit where it’s due. The right wing extremists did defeat Scozzafava and losing the election doesn’t take away from that.
The conservative victory was in destroying the moderate Repub candidate, and in succeeding to get the Republican national leadership to basically repudiate her. The actual election was secondary – more or less a casualty of war.
IMO, this entirely eliminates Sam’s opinion in his OP, and entirely validates mine in my first post in this thread. The conservatives have no interest at all in forming a third party – their interest is in eliminating the moderates within the Republican party.
It shows Bush deficits totaling maybe $2 trillion.
However, between 9/30/01 and 9/30/08, seven years that were all Bush, the national debt went from $5.8 trillion to $10 trillion.
I’ve heard it said in various places that Bush moved a lot of his spending off budget, and used other accounting gimmicks to keep his deficit numbers down. I don’t know the truth or falsity of that, but it’s hard to see how else $2 trillion worth of annual deficits could have added $4.2 trillion to the national debt.
Then there’s the FY09 budget, which was basically Bush’s budget plus the portion of the Obama stimulus spending (maybe 40% of $800B, or about $0.3 trillion) that fell into FY09. (Half of it is supposed to fall in FY10.) So $1.5 trillion of the FY09 deficit is Bush’s.
Josh Marshall reports that Maine and Washington both had Taxpayer Bill of Rights referenda on the ballot, and both lost. They’re the sort of thing that anti-tax, limited-government types love. Meanwhile, referenda on Teh Gay went pro-gay in Washington, and anti-gay in Maine.
So if the GOP’s showing yesterday was about limited government and all that, the results demonstrated that in funny ways.