One can fantasize about headlines that might be used to describe the goings-on at the White House after tonight’s election results.
On the mood inside the Oval Office: “The Audacity of Mope.”
On being suckered into trying to flip the New Jersey and Virginia races to the Democrats: “The Audacity of Rope-a-Dope.”
On the voters and their view of Democrats running for office just a year after the Obama triumph: “The Audacity of Nope.”
You won’t see those headlines, of course. President Obama will probably never be cast upon the shoals by the media that invented him, carried him aloft upon their increasingly osteoporotic shoulders for two years and still adore him fiercely with a combination of parental indulgence and a suitor’s rose-colored-glasses ardor.
Don’t be suckered by the reverse hype. This was a dreadful night for the president and his party — and an unmistakable signal that voters are, at the very least, uneasy with Democratic political dominion in the United States.
Obviously, the worst news for the White House came in New Jersey, which has become such a Democratic stronghold over the past decade that nothing — not a governor’s installation of his boyfriend as a homeland security adviser, not a US senator’s sudden withdrawal due to rank corruption, nothing — could keep the state from going blue.
Now, despite the president’s aggressive personal-style campaigning in the last week, New Jersey has thrown an incumbent out of office and installed a Republican in Trenton.
Granted, Jon Corzine was poorly positioned to win himself a second term as governor, given the state’s parlous condition and his own weakness for excessive public spending. But Corzine wasn’t just defeated. He was dumped unceremoniously. He got 44 percent of the vote, and it seems clear that had the independent candidate Daggett stayed out of the race, Republican Chris Christie would have defeated Corzine by 10 points.
At the very least, the president’s role did Corzine no good. One might analogize his campaigning in New Jersey to his trip to Copenhagen to push for the Olympics in Chicago — if it had worked, it would have demonstrated his unmistakable power and authority. When it doesn’t, it demonstrates something else considerably less flattering.
But it’s really Virginia that tells the tale. It had been moving steadily into the Democratic column after a generation moving in the other direction. By 2008, it had two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor, and its statehouse had gone Democratic as well. Then Barack Obama took the state a year ago, for the first time since Jimmy Carter’s victory 32 years earlier.
Last night Virginia snapped violently to the right, with Republicans winning by an astonishing 18 to 20 points in three statewide races. A result of that sort can’t be attributed to the fact that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Creigh Deeds, was lackluster.
He was, but he also had the overwhelmingly powerful support of The Washington Post, which got him the nomination and then abandoned any pretense of fairness in its news coverage of the race after that. Even so, in the Virginia counties where the Post holds sway, Deeds could barely even hold his own.
Republicans need to be careful, however, to read these results as indications of a wholesale swing in their direction. It’s worth remembering that in 2001, Democrats won the governor’s mansions in Virginia and New Jersey only seven weeks after 9/11. The following November, with control of the US Senate in the balance, George W. Bush stumped aggressively for GOP candidates in five states and his party ran the table.
As for New York City, the closer-than-expected race offers only one lesson for Mike Bloomberg: Don’t be a cheapskate. Next time you want to buy an office, spend $200 million.
John Podhoretz, a former Post columnist, is the editor of Commentary Magazine.