Before the Grand Old Party overdoes its grand new celebration of Tuesday’s election results, and the political realities return like a hangover, a few caveats:
– The party out of power almost always comes back in off-year elections.
– None of the Republican winners had to face a permanent floating campaigner as smooth and tireless as the current president of the United States. The GOP needn’t start picking new drapes for the White House yet, or even for the Capitol.
– The Republicans’ margin of victory in decisive battlegrounds like New Jersey and New York City varied from thin to razor-thin. If the GOP is this month’s Comeback Kid, it wasn’t by much.
– The mercurial nod of a passing election can favor an opinion or a candidate, but it cannot justify an idea or ideal, a principle or policy. Much will be read into this vote, as usual. (There’s a lot of air time to fill and there are a lot of words to be written.) But this election was but one more reading of the always shifting winds of public opinion, or just public fancy.
Ergo: Tuesday’s vote was a narrow vindication for Republicans, conservatives, moderates and the more thoughtful liberals who have had it with knee-jerk gliberalism.
For that matter, it was a triumph for the New Democrats, that is, the old Harry-Truman-Scoop-Jackson Democrats, rather than the ideologues who hide behind the title New Democrats, and who aren’t very new.
Tuesday’s vote was a broad vindication of the conventional wisdom: After the president of one party is elected, the pendulum of public opinion swings in the other direction.
Having duly recorded these cautions and reservations, let us move on to some sober analysis and objective evaluation of the results, to wit: HOORAY!
The message delivered at the polls Tuesday was far from unanimous, but it was consistent, whether in Virginia, New Jersey or New York City.
Tuesday’s vote in state after state came like a healthy message of hope for something better than the same old same old.
The American people are simply not willing to accept what the Powers That Transiently Be are now serving: a mix of upbeat rhetoric and off-key performance, served with the assurance that, honest, this is change and it’s the best there is.
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Well, the people aren’t buying. Their ballots say:
We think America deserves better, and is capable of better.
We do not think this is the best it gets.
We will not be taken on a national guilt trip and told the only way to redeem our sins is to vote for the same old collection of mediocrities.
We will not endorse defeatism and call it realism.
We will not accept broken promises and blind economic theories that begin and end with Tax More.
We will not accept the outrageous level of violence and fear, the alarming level of social pathology, in our once great cities, and call it normal and unavoidable. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one U.S. senator actually capable of some insights, has called this tendency “defining deviancy down.”) And, no, we will not simply assume that our cities are ungovernable and abandon them.
The politicians we elect may not be better ones, the promises they make may not be fulfilled, but we refuse to go along with the notion that we can’t do any better than these same old snouts at an ever wider public trough.
We will change things, even if there is no assurance that what we get is change for the better. Because we are not about to give up and accept these shoddy, Clintonesque substitutes for thought, for action, for reform or for leadership.
We will keep hope alive.
End of message from the American voter. Beginning of a better political climate.