But there is still a clear trend. I've mentioned that even before Tuesday, Utah's incumbent Republican Senator Bob Bennett was denied his party's nomination because he voted for the TARP bailout.
In West Virginia, 14-term incumbent Democrat Alan Mollohan was defeated by a conservative Democrat who vowed that he wouldn't vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House. Mollohan was one of the "Stupak Democrats," who supposedly opposed ObamaCare because it didn't block government funding for abortions, then caved in and voted for it. Now, like Stupak, Mollohan won't be returning to Congress.
The congressional newspaper The Hill notes that recent election results have taken down members of the House and Senate appropriations committees: Bennett, Mollohan, Arlen Specter, and David Obey (who quit rather than run for re-election this year). In other words, voters have decided that the people who control the nation's purse strings deserve to be fired.
Over at RealClearPolitics, Jay Cost notes the Obama administration's attempt to dismiss these results as the product of a non-ideological "anti-incumbent" mood, which he dismisses as "just a smokescreen designed to get the White House through some tough news cycles."
I agree. This election is clearly about reining in out-of-control government—and punishing dishonest politicians.
The partial exception to this trend is Pennsylvania's 12th district, Jack Murtha's old district, which elected former Murtha aide Mark Critz over Republican Tim Burns. Partly this is a product of the social corruption produced by pork-barrel spending—of which Murtha was a leading practitioner. I think it was NRO's Jim Geraghty who spotted a quote from a Democratic voter who praised Murtha for bringing back "millions of jobs"—to a district with only 600,000 residents.
But John Fund also points out that Critz campaigned against ObamaCare and cap-and-trade, placing him firmly to the right of his old boss. Plus Critz portrayed his opponent as an advocate of tax increases in ads that said Burns supported a 23% national sales tax. This is a reference to the "FairTax"—though the FairTax proposal begins (in theory) with the elimination of the income tax, a fact that Critz deliberately omitted. The ad was scurrilously dishonest, of course, but I have to say that the FairTaxers deserve this one just a little bit. At a time when we desperately need to fight against an American version of the Value Added Tax, which is basically a national sales tax, a bunch of people on the right have been going around singing the praises of a national sales tax.
But PA-12 is the exception that proves the rule. Elsewhere, for example, Blanche Lincoln was forced into a runoff after she got only 44% of the vote. It is generally assumed that an incumbent is a known quantity, so if she gets only 44% of the vote, the remaining 56% are likely to go to her main challenger.
But the politician voters turned against the most fiercely is lifelong political opportunist Arlen Specter, the candidate of rubber who has flipped from one party to another and back again as political expedience required.
Specter got what he deserved. He switched parties to avoid a primary challenge—then got one anyway and lost. In this, note that the only people more cynical and manipulative than Specter were the political officials in the White House, who wooed Specter over to the Democratic side when they needed his vote for the health care bill—then lost all interest in him.
If you really want to know what's going on this year, however, contrast Specter's loss with the victory of Rand Paul, whom the New York Times describes (accurately, for once) as one of the first "tea party candidates" to be nominated—and for a Senate seat, no less.
It's not just that Paul stands for a radical pro-free-market agenda. It's the fact that he does, in fact, stand for something, that he does not seem to shade or hide his views based on political expediency. As proof of that, consider the trouble Paul got himself into by honestly answering a question about the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I happen to agree with Paul's position—more on that very soon—and James Taranto provides a good overview of what Paul has said. But Taranto describes this as a "rookie mistake," presumably indicating that a real professional politician would have smiled and lied. But I think the fact that Rand Paul was willing to tell the truth about where he stands, even knowing that the media would attempt to distort his statements and defame his character, is part of his appeal.
If you look at Paul's other views—on everything from Social Security to the financial crisis to the gold standard—you will be amazed at the fact that he has even a chance of serving in the United States Senate.
And there is, in all likelihood—more bad news coming for the Democrats. Their Senate candidate for Connecticut is Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who just got caught lying about having fought in Vietnam. He says he merely "misspoke" and is campaigning hard not get ousted—and it doesn't look like Democrats will replace him before November.
Then there is the Democrats' Florida Senate candidate, Kendrick Meek, who is tied up with a crooked real estate investor, who helped one of Meek's aides to buy a house and "hired Meek's mother, former US Rep. Carrie Meek, paying her $90,000 in consulting fees and paying for a Cadillac Escalade for her to drive." According to the local paper: "Meek twice sought congressional earmarks to benefit the [developer's] project but has insisted that was unrelated to his mother's work for the developer." Which makes him the only politician with a less convincing excuse than Richard Blumenthal.
And while we're talking about scandals, Todd Stroger, Jr.—a semi-literate Democratic machine politician from Chicago and another one of these creeps who inherited a political office from his father, Todd Stroger, Sr.—got caught diverting the city's federal "stimulus" dollars to his cronies. I recognized the name, then realized that in mid-2008, Barack Obama abandoned a pro-reform candidate and did the bidding of the machine, endorsing Stroger for president of the Cook County Board, which gave the lie to all of that flim-flam about "hope" and "change."
Meanwhile, if Republicans do make it back into power, there is reason to believe that they will be stronger and more radical than before.
Conservative commentator Tony Blankley provides a good example of this trend on the right. The theme of his recent columns has been that all of the old rules about being cautious and seeking incremental change and not challenging the foundations of the welfare state—all of the things that have made Republicans timid and cautious in previous years—should be thrown out in order to deal with the national emergency of a headlong crash into socialism. In his latest, Blankley urges Republican Senators to throw out the polite rules the give the president a certain degree of deference on Supreme Court appointments.
The current rules are obsolete, having come into being at a time when the federal courts had not yet been consciously politicized. Today, liberal presidents attempt to use their appointments with the intent to systematically undermine—not uphold—the Constitution. And they do so because their vision of an ever more statist America is inconsistent with the Constitution's fundamental purpose: to limit the size and scope of government….As a conservative, I respect Republican senators who wish to venerate well-established traditions. But now, in the fateful spring of 2010, those senators need to consider which of conflicting traditions they intend to venerate. They can either venerate the traditional rules of confirmation or they can venerate the United States Constitution—but not both.
So the issue here is not just whether Republicans will get into office. It is how they will act once they get there—and the Tea Party movement could have a strong positive impact.
Larry Kudlow speculates that Rand Paul and others could form a "Tea Party nucleus" in the Senate, a group of five or six senators who would "unabashedly propose free-market reforms to replace the Obama welfare state and to finally curb the avalanche of debt creation."
This is similar to my suggestion earlier this week that Tea Party affiliated congressmen could form a Tea Party Caucus. Jack Wakeland thinks that this is not just a suggestion, that it is already a functioning, unofficial political alliance. He writes:
"I think the Tea Party Caucus idea is a done deal. Tea Partiers have so much in common, ideologically, that they will come together. Tea Party Caucuses will also spring up in many of the state legislatures. They will form an ad hoc voting bloc in the House and the Senate and in some of the states. Their voting bloc will be the swing vote on many issues regarding the size and scope and cost of government. The Tea Party caucuses will affect many different divisions of government as an honest, deeply-rooted, well-supported minority.
"The Tea Party caucuses will make embarrassing mistakes and act on the wrong priorities. The anti-immigrant feeling is deep right now and Tea Party candidates have it bad. Hopefully, Tea Party Caucus members will limit their legislative activities to passing the one immigration policy measure that is legitimate: the establishment of English as the official language of the United States, the sole language in which the American government conducts its official business. America cannot function properly if it operates in a multitude of languages any more than it could if it operated on a multitude of currencies.
"These problems aside, I expect the Tea Party caucuses, acting on the local, state and federal levels, to achieve more for liberty than was ever proposed during the 'Reagan Revolution' and the 'Republican Revolution' of 1994, combined.
"If the Tea Party Caucuses put in place a few strong, practical political reforms they will earn their place as an institution of the American political system. They will become a real, functioning, third party. If we have 4 or 6 more years of this grass-roots pro-liberty agitation across America, the Republican Party leaders will need to merge their party with the Tea Party, or they will wake up one morning to find out that their party has been absorbed by the Tea Party."
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