This is written before the polls close, so I’m talking to a mass of folks who know a whole lot more than I know right now.
Just for fun, here are some quotes from pundits in the same boat, before the final counts.
First, assuming the Republicans take control of the U.S. Senate, “Dems have nothing to fear,” according to Veronique de Rugy, TheDailyBeast.com.
“The all-talk, no-action Republicans aren’t going to challenge business as usual. They never really do,” she wrote Nov. 1. “Despite airy Republican rhetoric, they are bona fide big spenders and heavy-handed regulators — albeit in a different way than Democrats.”
She then produced a list of telling examples: “No Child Left Behind, protectionist steel and lumber tariffs, Medicare Part D, the war in Iraq, the Department of Homeland Security and its intrusive and inefficient Transportation Security Administration, massive earmarking, increased food stamp eligibility, and expanded cronyism at levels never seen before. The massive automobile and bank bailouts were the cherries on top.”
As for growing growing federal power, she says, “Democrats might not be able to grow the state as much as they want in the near future. For that, they’ll just have to wait for another Republican to get to the White House or regain control of everything.”
That’s what I call turning sour grapes into bracing Democrat wine.
The New York Times’ token conservative addresses the voters’ verdicts: “But this harsh judgment probably isn’t explicitly ideological: The public isn’t necessarily turning neoconservative or pining for the days of Bush.
“Instead, it mostly reflects a results-based verdict on what seems like poor execution, in which the White House’s slow response to ISIS is of a piece with the Obamacare rollout and the V.A. scandal and various other second-term asleep-at-the-tiller moments. It’s a problem of leadership that reflects badly on liberalism but doesn’t necessarily vindicate conservatism. … What we’re about to find out is whether, amid that disillusionment, just being the not-Obama party is enough.” — Ross Douthat, NYT.
“How much damage is Barack Obama doing to the Democratic Party? According to the respected political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, the answer is quite a lot. According to Rothenberg, ‘President Barack Obama is about to do what no president has done in the past 50 years: Have two horrible, terrible, awful midterm elections in a row.’
“Mr. Rothenberg compares Obama to the worst midterm numbers of two-term presidents going back to Harry Truman.” — Peter Wehner writing in CommentaryMagazine.com.
Can’t leave out Ebola and the Middle East:
“What an American president thinks is always a big deal, even if — especially if — it is nonsense. On Ebola as on much else, we deal with our citizen-of-the-world president’s apathy — if not antipathy — when it comes to American national interests. Once again, the responsibilities of his office are subordinated to Obama’s post-American ideological agenda, this time by expending our funds, deploying our troops, and gratuitously endangering our homeland to burnish his legacy as an international humanitarian.” — Andrew C. McCarthy writing in NationalReview.com.
“American voters may be seduced every now and then by a would-be messiah but sooner or later they revert to their usual requirements in leaders: competence and sobriety. Republicans flunked that test during George W. Bush’s second term just as Democrats are doing them same during Barack Obama’s swan song.
“Republicans failed to learn the lessons of 2006 and sought to run in 2008 on the issues that had given them victories in the past and wound up losing again in 2008. Instead of pretending that more war on women talk will solve their problems, Democrats should realize that they might be repeating that pattern.” — Jonathan S. Tobin writing in CommentaryMagazine.com.
Another pundit has a take on “When ‘bumpkins’ are smarter than elites”:
“Elevating a politician to messiah status is naive, to put it charitably. The larger problem, however, is the oft-repeated suggestion that Obama is flailing because of his inability to be a hick. These days, if you aren’t fully on the progressive bandwagon, you’ll be regularly labeled as an anti-intellectual retrograde: a ‘bumpkin.’ This is hilarious, given the administration’s recent Laurel-and-Hardy Ebola mismanagement, our nation’s slow-motion Obamacare train wreck, and sizable portions of the Middle East going up in flames. It also, however, reveals a significant lack of self-awareness on the political left.
“Today’s most devoted ‘bumpkins,’ in other words, may not ride Harleys, frequent gun ranges, or live on farms. With progressive policies failing across the country, today’s ‘awkward and unsophisticated rustics’ may live, instead, in a state of deep denial. — Heather Wilhelm, a writer based in Austin,Texas.
Peggy Noonan has more on our intellectual betters:
“It must be noted that all this — the quarantine argument, the travel ban — is another expression of the deep, tearing distance between America’s professional and political elites, who operate as if they are estranged from common sense, and normal people, who are becoming more estranged from the elites, their oblivious and politicized masters.
That distance has been growing all my adult life, but the Ebola argument has brought it into sharper relief. The elites should start twigging onto it. They are no longer immediately respected, their guidance is not reflexively taken. They seem more immersed in political thinking — what is the ideologically enlightened position to take, where’s the boss on it? — than in protecting public health.” — Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal.
And how about race? We couldn’t skip this one:
“But the most important moment in the film (‘Dear White People’) is when Samantha White defines racism: ‘Black people can’t be racist,’ she says. ‘Prejudiced, yes, but not racist. Racism describes a systemic advantage based on race. Black people can’t be racists since we don’t stand to benefit from such a system.’ The treatment of white rioters and black protesters by the mainstream media is an accurate reflection of this definition.” — “After Ferguson, ‘Dear White People’ Arrives Right On Time,” Nathalie Baptiste writing in Prospect.org.
But a recent study reported by Ezra Klein at Vox.com, questions whether race is the most important issue:
“ … A recent study by Stanford University’s Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood … handed 1,000 people some sample student resumes and asked them to decide which deserved a scholarship. The resumes included clues to both the race and the political orientation of the applicant, as well as information about their grades.
“Race mattered. But political orientation mattered even more. Democrats and Republicans chose the resumes that shared their politics roughly 80 percent of the time. Of course, it’s the grades themselves that should have driven the decisions — but the activation of political identity made grades pretty much irrelevant. ‘We found no evidence that partisans took academic merit into account,’ the researchers wrote.
“Iyengar and Westwood’s conclusion is stark. ‘Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, and do so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race,’ they write. Think about that for a moment: at least under certain experimental conditions, our political identities now trump our racial identities.
“In fact, our political identities are now so powerful that they structure our reactions to racial controversies. — Ezra Klein writing at Vox.com.
Last word goes to a great English essayist:
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” — G.K. Chesterton, English writer of the early 20th century.
[Cal Beverly is editor and publisher of The Citizen.]
