Let's parse last night's elections!

A disclaimer: I think that off-year elections, particularly those coming a scant 10 months into the first term of a presidency, aren't incredibly meaningful, and discussing them as such is really more akin to masturbation that serious analysis. Then again, you could say that about nine-tenths or more of contemporary political discussion and you wouldn't likely be wrong. I like masturbation, though. I also like politics, so let's do this.

The dominant spin from last night's elections is probably going to be that the Republicans taking the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey represents a Republican resurgence and a rebuke of sorts to the Obama Administration. Exhibit A of this line is Karl Rove's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today in which he essentially chalks up the Democratic losses to voter unease over the potential costs of Obama's health care reform proposals. I'm not sure that this argument holds water particularly, since it isn't like Obama decided to reform the health care system sometime in March of this year. It was a major part of his presidential campaign, and it didn't seem to dissuade a lot of people from voting Democratic then. It seems more plausible to me that the fact that there's been so little forward momentum on health care depressed Democratic turnout and created a lane for the energized Republican opposition, but I don't think that's what happened either.

Rather, I think people voted for the gubernatorial elections based on their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the governance of their state, rather than based on their antipathy or affection for Barack Obama. Chris Christie, newly elected Republican governor of New Jersey says that he's looking forward to "working with President Obama," not exactly words that will get him a headliner slot at any upcoming Tea Party rallies. It also bears mentioning that Jon Corzine is a Wall Street billionaire who bought his way into office, and "Wall Street billionaire" is a shade below "Roman Polanski" in the hierarchy of things people, let alone the Democratic base, are positively disposed to at present. If I lived in New Jersey, I sure as shit wouldn't take twenty hard-earned minutes out of my day to throw a vote Corzine's way.

As for the whole three-way ordeal in New York's 23rd district, I think more than anything it demonstrates that winning Congressional elections is basically a matter of convincing people that you're going to be fully dedicated to kicking loose those sweet, sweet federal pork dollars than your overarching allegiance to a philosophical theory of governance. From what I've read, Hoffman was running far more on the latter category and was notably weak in the former. It's not by accident that pretty much everybody in Congress gets re-elected for decades despite the fact that the voting public pretty much unanimously hates the House of Representatives as a collective entity. As such, I don't think it's really valid to draw a larger inference about the electoral future of the conservative movement from this one instance. However, I did come across a quote today from noted conservative intellectual Glenn Beck that gave me pause:

And here's what the ‑‑ forget about the Democrats. Here's what the Republicans should learn. The tea party movement, if you think you're going to run people that are going to be, you know, ACORN wannabes and they're just part of the corruption, part of the system, if you're going to run those people, you can expect a tea party guy to come out, and the tea parties, they'll help you lose every single election. Every single election. Because I for one am not ‑‑ if I believe in the Republican, I'll vote for the Republican. But if you're running somebody who's like part of the system, I'm not interested. I'm not interested. And I think that a lot of Americans are like that. So the Republicans have a choice to make. You can either spend a million dollars trying to destroy a third party accountant, or you could say, wow, this accountant probably would come in within three points of beating the Democrat if we combined our efforts, Republicans and Democrats, spent a fortune, had our candidate then drop out and campaign for the Democrats, we might be able to come in with about a 3‑point margin. You might want to just say, "Maybe we should go with the accountants. Maybe we should go with the regular people."

Remember two months ago when I suggested that the right was succumbing to fallacies that had long plagued the left by mounting strident and inane protest marches? What noted conservative intellectual Glenn Beck is suggesting here is literally a replica of the modern American left's worst idea, running ideological protest candidates to "send a message" to the mainstream party. Let's review the two most prominent examples. The first is successfully defeating Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut. Rather than ushering in a new wave of unabashed legislative progressivism, Lieberman just won re-election as an Independent, proceeded to campaign wholeheartedly for John McCain in 2008, and was most recently seen vowing to help the Republican minority fuck over any meaningful healthcare reform bill from being brought to a vote in the Senate. The second is Ralph Nader's presidential bid in 2000, which was aimed squarely at siphoning votes from Democratic nominee Al Gore. Despite a rather pathetic nationwide showing, Nader still managed to accrue more than enough votes to cover the small margin separating Bush from Gore in Florida, clearing the way for Bush to win both the state and the election ('win' of course, being shorthand for 'U.S. Supreme Court decision barring the completion of vote recounting', although I think Bush would have wound up winning anyway). Suffice it to say that the Bush presidency isn't exactly what the average Nader voter had in mind on his or her way to the ballot box in 2000. I should know, I was a freshman in college at the time and I was acquainted with quite a few of them. If there's a similar situation that forms on the right in 2010/2012 (or the Republicans nominate Sarah Palin for president), I don't imagine that it'll turn out much better. I'm somewhat skeptical that this will actually happen, but the idea's obviously percolating out there.

From my point of view, the only thing about last night that should inspire anger or fear among liberals is the narrow passage of yet another gay marriage ban, this time in Maine. Specifically, I'm extremely disappointed that Obama and/or the DNC didn't lift one finger to suggest that Democrats should turn out to prevent rights being stripped from gay citizens. I know that that Obama's against gay marriage and the Democrats as a national political entity have absolutely no spine when it comes to taking a stand for social liberties, but this is really fucking shameful. Legal discrimination against gays is the defining civil rights issue of our time. These state constitutional bans are not going to last forever. They're going to fall, either by being repealed by less-bigoted future electorates (which I'd prefer) or by federal action (which I'll accept, despite the fact that it'll kick off yet another generations-long political battle a 'la Roe v. Wade). And eventually, Americans will look back at these laws with the same revulsion that we (or: most of us) look back at Jim Crow laws today. I expect better of Obama than the half-assed thumb-twiddling we're getting from him on these kinds of issues, and I hope that I'm far from alone in that view.