What about the other side?

Hiya,

Do you want to read what people in other parts of the country are thinking?
How about outside this city?

Durand

from The WSJ, Nov 5th 2009

Rebooting the Democrats

Voters fear that liberal policies are endangering economic recovery.

Tuesday's GOP gubernatorial sweep revealed an electorate deeply anxious about jobs, the state of the economy and the wider Obama agenda. We realize we sound like St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, but if the Democratic establishment wants to avoid a repeat in 2010 they'll dump their current ambitions and start over.

In New Jersey and Virginia, the Republicans campaigned on lower taxes and more disciplined government as a way to boost growth and jobs. With unemployment brushing up against 10% even as gasoline is nearing $3 a gallon, voters were obviously sending a message about Washington's Great Reflation bet. This was particularly true for independents, who voted in droves for President Obama but broke for the GOP this year by more than two to one in both states. Suburban voters, too, went for Bob McDonnell 55% to 44%, and 51% to 43% for Chris Christie, according to exit polls.

These elections should signal Defcon 2 for the 49 Democratic Congressmen who come from districts that John McCain carried in 2008, as well as Senators like Arkansas's Blanche Lincoln and Indiana's Evan Bayh seeking re-election in 2010. New Jersey's budget, with its surging taxes and structural deficits, looks remarkably like Mr. Obama's—and even the President's all-out "Weekend at Bernie's" campaign to prop up Jon Corzine couldn't save the former Goldman Sachs executive despite a huge Democratic voter-registration advantage.

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Associated Press

President Barack Obama

In Virginia, which has been trending leftward and Mr. Obama took handily, voters in the Washington suburbs of Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties all went heavily for Mr. McDonnell on their anxiety about high taxes and the expanding federal government. The former state attorney general played down his social conservatism in favor of a bread-and-butter economic message.

In New York, the national media focused on the narrow (49%) Democratic victory in the 23rd Congressional district thanks to a Conservative Party challenge to the liberal Republican nominee. But even in the blue bastion of the Empire State, the three-term Democratic Westchester County executive was ousted, while Republicans captured the Nassau County legislature and almost won the county executive seat too. Michael Bloomberg nearly lost his third term as New York City mayor to the inept and unknown comptroller Bill Thompson, which shows that it's not a good time to be an incumbent even if you have an acceptable record and billions of dollars for TV ads.

Some rejections of national liberal priorities were far more explicit. Virginia's southwestern ninth district, long represented in Congress by Democrat Rick Boucher, went 67% for Mr. McDonnell—largely over the prospect of a cap-and-trade energy tax that will obliterate the coal production that underlies the region's economy. For the first time in decades one part of this United Mine Workers stronghold also elected a Republican, Will Morefield, to Virginia's House of Delegates.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already forced House Democrats to walk the cap-and-tax plank, adding to the policy uncertainty that is helping to depress what ought to be a more robust recovery after a long and deep recession. The White House and its liberal allies believe government can drive prosperity. Yet the costs that cap and tax would impose—whether through Congress or via the activist EPA regulation that the Administration is pursuing—is part of the political uncertainty that is slowing the revival of risk-taking and job creation.

Democrats are imposing wage controls and continuing to embrace a phony populism against Wall Street, while the new liberal industrial policy has annexed the auto sector. The Energy Department is now the largest venture capital firm in the world and is redirecting capital that could be devoted to more productive uses than green energy gambles. Private lenders to college students are being run out of the market.

Mr. Obama campaigned on a pledge to spare 95% of Americans from tax increases, but the American middle class is slowly figuring out that it will eventually be asked—that's the polite way of putting it—to pay for all of this. These looming bills, and not only from the $787 billion stimulus, are clouding the investment outlook.

Nowhere is this more true than on health care. The House bill is the very definition of a job killer, funding another entitlement program with a payroll tax equal to 8% of wages on businesses that don't offer insurance even as it inflicts a huge 5.4-percentage-point marginal rate tax hike on those earning over $500,000. The Democrats' own Joint Tax Committee says that one-third of the $460.5 billion this is estimated to raise over 10 years will come from small businesses that create most new jobs.

The tragedy is that while ObamaCare is running into ever-deeper problems among moderates and sinking in the polls, Democrats could easily shift gears and build a genuine bipartisan health reform. The compromise worked out earlier this year by Bob Dole and Tom Daschle is not our policy ideal, though it would address some of the cost drivers created by the tax code and maybe garner durable political majorities. Even the bill released this week by House Republicans, and quickly trashed by Democrats, would hand out $50 billion in "incentive payments" to states that reduce the number of uninsured. Once upon a time in Washington, $50 billion counted as a lot of money—and it still does to most voters.

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Democrats entered this year well positioned to get political credit for a recovering economy, whether or not their policies had much to do with it. Yet a year later their willy-nilly expansion of government is creating fear and uncertainty that are inhibiting the animal spirits crucial to job creation—and, as Tuesday showed, endangering their political ascendancy.