Reflections on the Tues Vote

Both parties should be careful, the public may well be pissed at all politicians.

Peggy Noonan: The Rose Garden Path

"The White House has gotten bad at listening, and now it’s paying the price."

The voters are more concerned about jobs than the health care debate.

"The path the president and the Democrats of Congress chose has been called the big-bang strategy. In January 2009 they had the big mo and could claim a mandate. The strategy was to give their first year to 2008 domestic policy pledges: health-care reform, climate change, empowering unions, etc.But reality came in and stole the mandate, stopped the mo.

The reality is that over the past 10 months the great recession settled in, broadened its presence, and became part of the national landscape. It became the big bad thing for normal people."


and Frank Rich from the other side:

Op-Ed Columnist - The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down - NYTimes.com: "Unemployment ranked ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1 pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying the Obama administration must take more action.

The tea party Republicans vanquished on Tuesday have no jobs plan. They just want to eliminate all Washington spending — a prescription that didn’t go down too well in New York’s 23rd, where the federal government has the largest payroll. The G.O.P. establishment’s one-size-fits-all panacea is tax cuts — thin gruel for those with little or no taxable income. The administration’s answer is the stimulus, whose iffy results so far, it argues, can’t be judged this early on.

Fair enough. But a year from now the public will register its verdict in any event. Meanwhile, both parties have their own delusions, not the least of which is the Republicans’ conviction that Tuesday was a referendum on what Obama has done so far. If anything, it was a judgment on just how much he has not."

and

American elections: The shine coming off | The Economist:

"Two broad points have emerged from this election night. The first is that the Democrats are now considered to own the economy—trying to blame George Bush for the country's economic ills, as Mr Obama tried to do in New Jersey, will not wash with swing voters. In Virginia, moderates and independents warmed to Mr McDonnell's themes of reduced taxes. The economy will doubtlessly improve before next year's mid-term elections, but Mr Obama's ambitions for government spending trouble many centrists.

The other point is that Sarah Palin’s broadside against the Republican candidate in upstate New York has established her beyond doubt as the leading player in Republican politics, much to the chagrin of party grandees. There is nothing new about conservative insurrection in the party. The contest in New York is somewhat reminiscent of Pat Buchanan's rebellion against the party establishment in the New Hampshire primary in 1992, except that conservatives have ditched their pitchforks for iPhones. But the danger for the Republicans remains the same now as then; the pursuit of an ideologically pure conservatism will turn away moderates and independents. The Republicans lost the 1992 presidential election, and they lost the 23rd congressional district in upstate New York on Tuesday."