http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff11042009.htmlBigger Disaster Looms in 2010
Democrats Crash and Burn
By DAVE LINDORFF
It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.
Exit polls showed that many Obama voters sat out this election in New Jersey and Virginia, with turnout low in both races. In part that was because of local conditions, of course. In Virginia, Democrat R. Creigh Deeds ran as a conservative, and was attacked by the Republican candidate, former state attorney general Robert McDonnell, as a tax-happy liberal. With liberal voters in Virginia unenthusiastic about Deeds, and Republicans revved up, the loss was a foregone conclusion, even with Obama making two visits to campaign for Deeds, and with the national Democratic Party pumping in $6 million in campaign funding.
In New Jersey, incumbent Democrat John Corzine was wildly unpopular for raising taxes, so that even with Democrats holding an almost 2:1 registration advantage in the state (half of all voters are unaffiliated), he too had no enthusiastic backing from his former base. No amount of money poured in by the former Goldman Sachs chief executive could overcome the negative views of his record as governor.
But despite the lackluster candidates in both Virginia and New Jersey, I think it’s safe to say that there was also clear evidence that the losses, and the margins of the losses—huge in Virginia’s case, and significant in normally safely Democratic New Jersey—provide evidence that the Obama presidency, and the prevailing Democratic strategy of minimalist legislative initiatives on health care reform, global warming etc., expanded and unending war in Afghanistan, support for Wall Street and neglect of the one-in-five Americans who are unemployed or underemployed, are a political disaster in the making for Democrats in general and Obama in particular.
The president came into office on a wave of populist enthusiasm and high expectations for the “change” candidate Obama promised. No change has been forthcoming now for over nine months, and with the president now past the first-year anniversary of his historic election victory, the latest election results suggest that his presidency could already be headed for the rocks.
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