From the ArcaMax Publishing, Mark Shields Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/markshields/s-644101-655250
Right there on the front page of the Oct. 23 Washington Post, "senior
administration officials" attributed the predicted defeat on Election
Day -- then still a week and a half off -- of Virginia Democratic
gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds to Deeds' failure to seek and
heed advice from the Obama White House.
This can only be called a "pre-mortem," obviously intended to counter
any negative perception that President Obama's own popularity might be
slipping in a state he carried just a year ago by pinning the blame
for the defeat on the local guy.
But we already know, because the president's press secretary Robert
Gibbs told us, that in 2009 Virginia and New Jersey "voters went to
the polls to talk about and work through very local issues that didn't
involve the president." Just as we learned from the campaign committee
spokesman in 2001 -- after the candidates of the then-president's
party lost governor's races in those same two states -- that "these
(off-year) elections revolved around local issues and local
candidates. There were no discernible national trends."
All of these rationalizations and excuses are baloney, bunk and
bushwa. Off-year elections do matter, especially psychologically.
Victories help fundraising, help candidate recruitment and lift party
morale. Defeat can leave in its wake anxiety, even panic in party
ranks. As Bill McInturff, the trusted Republican pollster, told
reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, "You
cannot imagine the carnage of losing 54 House seats (the number
Republicans lost between the 2006-08 elections)."
If it's true that the three most important things about real estate
are location, location, location, then the three most important things
about Election Day are turnout, turnout, turnout. In the 2008 election
-- with much of the credit going to the Barack Obama candidacy -- a
voter turnout increase of 5 million over 2004 included 2 million more
black voters, 2 million more Hispanic voters and approximately 600,000
more Asian voters. The only age group that produced a statistically
significant increase was young voters.
But when it came to voter turnout in 2009, Obama's political coattails
turned out to be a cutoff tank top. In 2008, Obama's strongest age
group in Virginia, young voters (between 18 and 29), were 21 percent
of the electorate and his weakest age group, voters over the age of
65, represented just 11 percent of the electorate. This year in
Virginia, young voters shrunk to 10 percent of the total, while
over-65 voters increased their share to 18 percent.
In fact, given the demographic makeup of the 2009 Virginia voters,
even if Barack Obama had run as strongly as he did in 2008 among
Democrats, Republicans and independents when he won that state,
instead of carrying Virginia by 7 percent as he did, he would have
lost Virginia to John McCain by 4 percent.
But for the meaning of it all, nobody explains the political reality
better than respected Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who finds the
2009 election returns quite similar to those of 2008: "Then as now the
'In's' lost and the 'Out's' won, and the message remains the same: We
want change, and we are unhappy with what's going on."
What do the American people feel toward Washington? In Hart's candid
judgment, "disappointment and disgust." Instead of the new, fresh
approach promised in 2008, voters still "see the same, old Washington"
full of pettiness, partisanship and bile.
To compound the anger of citizens who, according to Hart, "are equally
hostile to Wall Street," the only groups they see being helped by the
government's economic policies -- at the expense of people who have
lost their jobs or average working families -- are large banks and
Wall Street investment companies. Those, sadly, are the final returns
of 2009.
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To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns,
visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com. Distributed
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