Well, well, well. Looks like the moderate wing of the GOP is still desired by the People. I present as evidence one Governor-elect Chris Christie of New Jersey. He's no right-winger, but he is the winner. And that Hoffman dude in upstate New York that Sarah Palin endorsed? He lost. All that bru-ha-ha and all he's left with horseshoes and hand grenades.
I cannot wait to hear how Glen Beck spins it. Probably along the lines of "...it's better that the Democrat won than the GOP-endorsed candidate." Man, that tact is getting to be redundant. And it doesn't work, except to give Beck and Limbaugh a never-ending reason d'etre. Oh, that's maybe the real goal, ya think?
Anyway, I spent the evening watching the returns on MSNBC because, well, I wanted to see if anyone cried or freaked when the GOP started winning in New Jersey and Virginia (they have a new GOP governor, too, one who is a bonafide conservative but his focus is jobs and the economy, and it's indeed telling that he played his campaign to appear to be as moderate as possible). It was highly entertaining, lemma tellya.
The moment the NJ race was called for Christie, Howard Fineman became speechless and called it stunning. I was stunned at how quickly he and Lawrence O'Donnell went into mop-up mode, blurting out like a half dozen times how polls showed this was not a referendum on Obama. Oh, okay. Don't you folks know by now that people are not going to admit to any dislike of Obama because they don't want to be tattooed as racists? Which means that his favorable ratings are probably inflated, too. But, I digress because this wasn't any kind of criticism on him, oh no.
MSNBC was johnny-spot at excusing away any meaning in last night elections. Except for Chris Matthews, God love him. He blurted out what I just said about people telling pollsters what sounds good and nice and fair, stopping O'Donnell dead in his tracks as he repeated the poll findings for the 100th time. It was great.
The really ugly part, however, was how MSNBC, once they knew that Corzine had lost to Christie, proceeded to trash and denigrate Corzine as a candidate that was so bad nobody could help him. You may have heard that Obama and Biden made 3 trips to campaign for Corzine. I guess Corzine got thrown under the bus, huh?
And then of course all the Repugs think it's the beginning of the Second Political Coming, which isn't right either. To me, this was the infinite wisdom of the People saying no to the Obama-Pelosi-Reid spending spree that is leaving too many unemployed and worried about the enormous debt and size of government. And since there are only two choices at the ballot box, it's a game of tennis. Back and forth until somebody starts acting right. That means the ball is in the GOP's court but does not guarantee a victory or even a score. They'll get the same treatment if they screw up.
See, right-wingers are not the only people who can enact some Tea-partying. They don't hold a patent on it. They made a lot of hay this week saying the whole situation in New York proves that the party should not be big-tenting and reaching out to moderates. But the truth was that the national GOP's only crime was trusting the local NY GOP people, who were the real idiots for thinking they could run a copycat candidate instead of a real Repug. Dede Scozzafava, that's her name. And she wasn't even chosen by a primary of the people up there. The local party bosses chose her, and she was truly left of the Democrat running.
My point in all this is that the right-wingers scooped this up and made it out to be a national reflection on moderates. Wrong. That was completely a local F-up of trying to outwit the witless. So do not be fooled. And this incident proved that Palin knows how to swoop in and do a *Rush* job on people, too. That's upstate New York. What is conservative to them is heavy Leftie anywhere else.
That's not to say that those NY'ers aren't ticked off at the way things are being run either. Hoffman came pretty close to winning being that he was a last-minute 3rd party candidate. I forget the exact percentages, but Dede still got like 6% of the vote and if those had gone to Hoffman, he'd have won. What that says is that more poeple voted GOP than Dem. Which is all part of that anger and tennis volley.
Be on the lookout on MSNBC and on Fox at how the two sides try to play the election results. Because Matthews has it pegged, I think. He explained how when the right-winger runs he is defeated. When the moderate runs, he wins. That was true in NJ, faux-true in VA (the GOP winner went to great pains to paint himself moderate and downplay his right-wingedness), and true in NY, obviously. Even out in CA, in the race to fill Ellen Tauscher's seat, the conservative right wing GOP candidate was behind as I type this, and that district is one of those rarities in CA in that it's not liberal.
Let me hammer home my point here: if the country was clamoring for right-wing leadership like Beck, Rush, Laura, Sarah and Ann are jabbering about, then Hoffman would have won, the VA winner could have outed his right-wing self, and Christie in NJ would have had a harder time (cuz you know some of those right-wingers are happy to stay home and not vote). Don't buy the B.S. explanations. BOTH parties have a lot to be worried about and frankly, I hope it stays that way. Heck, even Bloomberg barely won re-election and I'd say he's pretty dang popular.
Oh and P.S. -- the younger voters who elected Obama totally crapped out. Did not show up. That was icing on the cake to me. I can only hope it means they've wised up about voting for a novice just cuz he be cool. {EYEROLL} But actually, it probably means they still have no clue what it takes to be a serious, responsible voter.
The Mirage of a Congressional Thermo-Fix:
The Left wants us to believe that all scientists of any merit are solidly behind the theory of manmade climate change being something that needs to be aggressively solved now and that Congress has the guts and brains to do that. Turns out that one of those guys who won a Nobel for this kind of thing is trying to tell us that ain't necessarily so:
BILLINGS- As debate over climate change legislation heats up on Capitol Hill, the Director of the University of Montana’s Climate Change Studies Program, and a co-author of a Nobel Prize winning report, says cap and trade legislation could ruin the US economy.
During a Wednesday morning interview with statewide radio talk show host Aaron Flint on “Voices of Montana,” Dr. Steve Running said any climate change solution needs to involve all nations.
“We have to have all the major nations in agreement on future progress,” said Running.
Running is a co-author of the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and founder of the Climate Change Studies program at the University of Montana.
He added, “If the US passed a cap and trade and other countries did not, it wouldn’t work. It would ruin the US economy and it wouldn’t save the climate either. So this is a global issue, the global climate statistics are global in nature, global carbon emissions are global in nature, and we really have to have an international consensus of what to do. That is going to stretch our international diplomacy to its limit, there’s no doubt about that.”
This is Reason #2,901 why Congressional reform efficacy will just be a mirage.
