America Returns to the Center/Right Norm
Tags: 9/11, Democrats, Government, health care, History, MSM, Republican Party, Taxation, TEA Party, The One.
Click here to get Caucus of Corruption: The Truth About The New Democratic Majority by Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan.
Krauthammer gets it very right:
…November ‘08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ‘09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm — and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.
The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm — deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years — because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his “New Foundation” for America — from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.
Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama’s hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt — the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters — as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.
Some rump…
The stars aligned perfectly for the Democrats in 2008 – there was not one additional thing which could have been added to give them a better advantage. And yet their vote total, while a solid win, was fairly modest. The sort of result you’d expect from two evenly matched parties who slugged it out with enthusiasm. Actually, the GOP was in terrible shape in 2008 – short on money, lacking enthusiasm, with an unexciting standard-bearer; and yet, had just a couple things gone right, McCain would be President right now.
But Obama and his Democrats choose to treat their victory as a mandate for change – and not just a mandate for any, old change, but for very ardently leftist change. This in spite of the fact that one of the prime reasons they won was because they hid their leftist agenda behind a fog of centrist rhetoric and the MSM played cover for them. They didn’t win on a leftist platform, but immediately proceeded to govern on one. The reaction we’ve seen is completely natural – the people are not leftist; never have been, never will be. We’re Americans.
Added to this and intensifying the effect has been the stunning incompetence of President Obama. I was discussing this with a friend yesterday and our hope is that Obama is a puppet…because if he’s not, then he’s just a plain and simple idiot. If Obama is lucky, hardly anyone saw that presser in the wake of the Ft Hood attack – my wife saw it live and was just disgusted by it; listening to it on the radio later I was stunned at the complete obtuseness of the man. To talk up Indians while America is in shock over mass murder is, well, just the most amazingly dumb thing imaginable. But this isn’t the first time such things have happened. I’m actually a bit worried that Obama simply will not get the hang of being President and that we’ll be stuck with a moving disaster until January of 2013.
Be that as it may, the playing field has tilted back towards the center/right. But it has not tilted back towards the GOP. The Republican party still has a long way to go to earn the trust and respect of the American people – even though the GOP is likely to score some impressive gains next year, it won’t matter much unless the people actually trust the GOP to do the right thing, once back in power. The people are in the process of taking back their government – our job, as Republicans, is to simply assist them in this task and then carry out the long-needed reforms being demanded. We do that, and we’ll route the left for good in this nation.
Thank you for visiting Blogs For Victory. If you enjoy our content, please consider making a donation to help us cover the costs of our servers.Mark Noonan is co-author (with Matt Margolis) of Caucus of Corruption: The Truth About The New Democratic Majority. He also blogs at Nevada News and Views. Follow Mark on Twitter.
17 Responses to “America Returns to the Center/Right Norm”
Caucus of Corruption
The Democratics picked up a seat in the House from a super deep red district. The next time the Democratics win by 1 vote, think about that.
The two governorships, while interesting are not that important. And in the governorship the Democratics still have more states.
And thats just the way it is
magnum
once again you missed the point.
no sense he hashing facts to an ombabot kneepader.
magnum,
“Super deep red” districts didn’t vote for Obama last year. In other words, you’re full of poop and just wasting bandwidth commenting here.
Nah, losing two blue state governorships even with Barry trying to rally votes for them is merely of fleeting interest and of no great significance.
I mean, it can hardly indicate that The One We Have All Been Waiting For is losing some of his much-vaunted influence, can it? How silly to comment on the fact that if he had been able to energize a lot of those who were so enthusiastic about him just a year ago, the dems would have kept those two seats.
The point, as Mark just made, is that districts which voted for Obama last year ignored him this year.
But maggie has always just been an RRL shill and a waste of bandwidth
What I liked about Krauthammer’s article—besides the fact it was written by Krauthammer, who is great—is that he summed up the hubris and arrogance of the Obamunists and their oft-trumpeted claim that they were elected to do whatever they damned well wanted to do.
Object to plunging the nation into overwhelming debt just to implement a bunch of socialist agendas (and enrich a bunch of socialist hangers-on, including ACORN and the unions and Al Gore)? “Well, WE WON!!!” Don’t like having our president going on an international apology tour telling the world how awful we are and always have been? “WE WON!!!!”
And so on.
For a year now we have been told that Obaman was given a mandate to do whatever he wanted to do, and that is BS. 47% of voting Americans did not vote for him at all, and I am sure that a very large percentage of those who did expected him to follow the Constitution after he took the oath to do so.
Mark,
So you don’t like the term magnum uses? Put it another way, the 23rd district hasn’t voted for a Democrat for over a century. So, join the legion of turd polishers.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-november-4-2009/indecision-2009—local-election-results
Go ahead and watch Ari Fleisher contradict himself in his response to Republican losses in 2001.
cam,
We disposed of the “GOP for a century” myth a couple days ago. You really have to keep up. And, really, Obama carried the district in 2008 – how “red” could it really be?
cam1,
here’s NY23 representation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York’s_23rd_congressional_district
Michael McNulty was the last Dem rep in 1993.
Mark, cluster,
Perhaps I am the one who “needs to keep up” but you are not helping.
Here is the link I found on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York’s_23rd_congressional_district
Oh, cluster, your link goes to a general article about New York, not anything specific on the 23rd.
cluster,
Looks like I had the same problem trying to paste that link. Bottom line here, that article seems to confirm what I said earlier. But you show me something different and I open to that.
Mark: the only counties in the country that voted more red in 08 than in 04 were in the deep south or appalachia. The only region of the country where Republicans hold the majority is the South.
You lose the Northeast, Midwest, and West, all by substantial margins.
Maybe we shoulda let you secede from the Union back when you wanted to….the USA would be a much better country, and your CSA would be the Mexico of an alternate universe: jobless, economy-less, with a few rich people reaping the benefits of slave labor.
GO REPUBLICANS!
cam,
Part of the problem is the redistricting. In the 1850’s, NY had 33 House members, today it has 29…but it wasn’t a straight decline. The highest number of NY House members was the period 1931-1951 when there were 45 Representatives. With all that re-districting, its really impossible to say that any particular district was held by any particular party for “X” number of years, even if the district number was held by a party for that “X” number of years. The real proof in the pudding here is that Obama carried the district – and remember there are 80 House districts carried by McCain which were won by Democrats in 2008…if a GOPer takes one of them in 2010, it won’t be that big a surprise…but if any House district won by Obama in 2008 and held by a Democrat in 2010 goes GOP, that would be a stunner…even if that Democrat were first term and was the first Democrat to ever win the seat.
Mark,
Population in NY was 3 million in 1850 and now it is 19 million. So why would the number of Representatives have declined?
Cam, the change in the total number of districts is based not just on the total number of people in NY, but the total number of people in all 50 states, and how they divide up percentage wise. You know, the changes in census counts?
But remember, ACORN rigs the census for the Democrats.
On election results: Obama’s win was fairly moderate, tis true.
Let’s look at the history of recent presidential elections:
Year- Candidate, Party: Margin of popular vote victory (in %)
60- Kennedy, D: .2%
64- Johnson, D: 22.6%
68, 72- Nixon, R: .7%, 23.2%
76- Carter, D: 2.1%
80,84- Reagan, R: 9.7%, 18.2%
88- Bush Sr., R: 7.8%
92,96- Clinton, D: 5.6%, 8.5%
00,04- Bush 2, R: Lost by .5% in 00, won by 2.4% in 04
08- Obama, D: 7.3%
Obama’s victory certainly seems middle-of-the-road, not comparable to Reagan’s mandate in 84, or LBJ’s landslide victory in 64, or Nixon’s victorious platform of lies in 72.
But it’s also much more substantial than Bush 2’s two elections, Carter’s election, or Kennedy’s election.
Obama’s victory is comparable to Clinton’s two victories, Reagan’s first victory, and Bush Sr.’s victory. (So, given this, he stands to win his second term by a fair margin (Clinton) a blowout (Reagan) or lose it (Bush Sr.)…wow, history is confusing).
But, looking more closely at Reagan’s first win, we see remarkable similarities between his first victory and Obama’s victory. Both were running against a party whose president was currently deeply unpopular. Both won by comparable margins. Here’s the thing, though. Reagan beat the unpopular president, while Obama beat somebody associated with the massively unpopular president. Given this, Obama should have had a harder time winning his, and, as we see, he did. (7% vs 9%)
The situation is certainly different now than it was then (Reagan did not inherit two wars, eg) but there are undeniable similarities.
Of course, Reagan then went on to lose the Congress…but won his second term. Given that I see no serious challengers for Obama coming from the right, the situation he faces may be much the same.
kjs,
Thanks for the info. I did not realize that the number of seats in the House has stayed constant since 1913 with a couple of exceptions when AK and HI were admitted.