No referendum
GOP victories not a trend+yet It is safe to say that the right-wing talkers and pundits who are hailing Republican gubernatorial victories in increasingly Democratic Virginia and very Democratic New Jersey as heralding the end of the Age of Obama could not pick Bob McDonnell and Chris Cristie, the respective victors in those contests, out of a police line up.
Rather than a referendum on the Obama presidency those elections reaffirmed the truth of the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s axiom, “All politics is local.”
McDonnell had an early stumble when a 20-year-old master’s thesis he had written surfaced that came down hard on working mothers, single mothers, gays and a Supreme Court decision legalizing married couples’ use of contraception.
McDonnell said that he had changed those views and avoided divisive social issues, choosing to hammer away at such mainstream issues as jobs, home values, crime and his pledge to unclog the state’s notoriously congested roads – without a tax increase, a neat trick if he can do it. He assiduously campaigned in the huge suburban counties outside Washington, D.C., aggressively courting their numerous ethnic voters. It was classic politics.
The campaign of his opponent, Creigh Deeds, never seemed to come into focus, and he got crushed, and the reverberations were felt all the way down the Democratic ticket.
In New Jersey, Gov. John Corzine was unpopular to begin with because of the state’s highest in the nation and still rising property taxes, the state government’s inability to balance its books and the flight of jobs.
Christie promised to cure these ills, without precisely saying how. Christie is a former federal prosecutor who made his reputation crusading against official corruption. It is said that his cause may have been helped since so many Democratic machine politicians are in jail or under indictment.
That is not to say the elections are not without cause for Obama to worry. His political aides have to be concerned that in the two gubernatorial races, the political independents, who were instrumental in delivering the presidency to him last November, went 2 to 1 for the Republicans in the two states. Obama’s fortunes in the 2010 congressional elections are likely to be governed by a bit of folk wisdom from Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Then we’ll have a referendum on Obama, specifically in whether the public trusts him to manage the economy.
If next year, the economy begins growing, especially in ways people can feel, like resurgent consumer confidence and stabilized home values, and unemployment is seen to be coming down, even if only modestly, Obama and the Democrats will come out of the election with only modest losses. If the economy isn’t seen to be recovering, all else is just atmospherics.
Scripps Howard News Service