[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
Obama Wars Title: The June 8 elections: A verdict on incumbents, unions, and Democrats The June 8 elections: A verdict on incumbents, unions, and Democrats By: Michael Barone Senior Political Analyst 06/09/10 3:02 AM EDT Eleven states voted yesterday in primaries and runoffs—the largest number of the year—and one way to look at the results is that no incumbent member of Congress lost his or her bid for reelection. So does this make 2010 less of an anti-incumbent (and anti-Democratic) year? Not really. I am put in mind of the story of the Teamsters Union business agent who was confined to the hospital. A bouquet was sent, with a note reading: “The Executive Board wishes you a speedy recovery, by a vote of nine to six.” Such was the voters’ verdict on incumbents on June 8. Consider Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, renominated in 2004 by an 83%-17% margin and reelected that November by 56%-44%. One big headline of last night’s news coverage was that she won her Democratic primary runoff over Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter. But her margin was only 52%-48%. And in recent polling she trails 3rd district Republican Congressman John Boozman by a 59%-34% margin. Her runoff victory and her “I’ll keep fighting” election night speech may close the gap a bit in Jacksonian Arkansas. But not by much. Or consider South Carolina 4th district Republican Congressman Bob Inglis. Elected in 1992, 1994 and 1996, he lost a Senate race to Democrat Ernest Hollings in 1998, then came back to win when his 4th district successor Jim DeMint ran successfully for Hollings’s seat in 2004 and won reelection in 2006 and 2008. So he’s represented the 4th district—Greenville and Spartanburg, basically, for 12 of the last 18 years. And on Tuesday he trailed Spartanburg County Solicitor (i.e., prosecutor) Trey Gowdy by a 39%-28% margin. That’s a devastating result for an incumbent in his own party’s primary: 100% know him and 72% voted for someone else. Inglis managed to carry his home base of Greenville County but by only 29%-24%. He lost Spartanburg County 60%-19%. Maybe he has a chance in the runoff since there are a lot more voters in Greenville County than Spartanburg County; but I doubt it. Gowdy’s winning tactic: he pointed out that Inglis has the most liberal voting record of any South Carolina Republican member of Congress (although only marginally more so than Senator Lindsey Graham’s), including voting for the $700 billion TARP bill in fall 2008. Note also that 3rd district Republican Congressman Gresham Barrett, who also voted for TARP, did not fare well in his race for governor. He did in fact make it into the runoff, winning 22% of the votes to 49% for state Representative Nikki Haley. But he carried only 4 counties in his congressional district and lost the other 42 counties in the state to Haley. I am told that almost all South Carolina Republican politicians detest Haley as a cheap shot artist who takes demagogic stands against all other incumbents (in the mode of outgoing Governor Mark Sanford, last seen on the Appalachian Trail heading to Argentina; Sanford’s estranged wife Jenny Sanford as well as Sarah Palin endorsed Haley). But I suspect that Barrett may decide that extending this contest into a June 22 runoff is a waste of his time and psychic energy. The insiders-don’t-like-her theme doesn’t have the timbre of a winner. Interestingly, Haley is the daughter of Sikh immigrants from India. If elected governor she would be the second Republican governor of a Southern state, after Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, to be the child of immigrants from South Asia. Who’d a thunk it? And when you’re putting your mind around that, consider that the leader in the Republican primary for the open South Carolina 1 seat relinquished by retiree Henry Brown is Tim Scott, who may be the most conservative and assuredly is the only black Republican in the South Carolina legislature. He led Paul Thurmond, son of the late Governor and Senator Strom Thurmond, by a 31%-16% margin; in third place with 14% was Carroll Campbell, son of the late Congressman and Governor Carroll Campbell. What would Strom Thurmond (born in 1902, allowed to parachute into Normandy in 1944 after getting leave for being too old, State’s Right Democratic candidate for president in 1948 as Trent Lott reminded us in December 2002) have thought of this? Or what would his father’s good friend and his own friendly acquaintance Pitchfork Ben Tillman (born 1847, governor 1890-94, U.S. senator 1895-1918, “censured by the Senate in 1902 for assaulting another Senator on the Senate floor,” as the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress 1789-1989 informs us) have thought? The mind reels. This is a great country and South Carolina, for all the trouble it has caused the rest of us, is a great state. Let me conclude, at a late hour and with the hope of addressing other results of the June 8 primaries some time soon, with some observations on the Arkansas Senate runoff. At the beginning of March, Senator Blanche Lincoln had no primary opposition. Then, suddenly, Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter entered the race. An Arkansas-born Democrat who like Bill Clinton won a Rhode Scholarship and who held an appointive job in the Clinton administration in the 1990s, Halter had started off running for governor in 2006, when Republican incumbent Mike Huckabee was not running for reelection; noting the formidability of incumbent Democratic candidate Mike Beebe and the ultimately fatal illness of incumbent Republican Lieutenant Governor Winthrop Paul Rockefeller (whose father Winthrop Rockefeller was elected governor in 1996 and 1969), Halter in March 2006 he decided to run for lieutenant governor instead. He was elected, but no path to higher office seemed open. Beebe, elected in 2006, seemed highly popular and unlikely to retire any time soon (Arkansas governors can last a long time: Bill Clinton held the office for 12 of 14 years from 1978 to 1992, and Huckabee held the office for 11 years from 1995 to 2006). Democratic Senator Mark Pryor, son of former Democratic Senator David Pryor, was strong enough that he was reelected in 2008 without serious primary or general election opposition. Senator Blanche Lincoln had been reelected to a second term in 2004 without difficulty. But Lincoln feel afoul of the barons of organized labor when she, after co-sponsoring the unions’ card check bill effectively abolishing the secret ballot in unionization elections in 2007 as every other Democratic senator did when the bill had no chance of passage, turned tail and opposed it in 2009. It was obvious to anyone in, say, the Wal-Mart or Tysons Food headquarters in Arkansas, that this bill had the potential to do to their companies what the United Auto Workers contracts did to General Motors and Chrysler. Blanche Lincoln, scion of a rice farm family in receipt of huge annual crop subsidies, understood this and acted accordingly. She wanted to win reelection and knew that card check was political poison in almost entirely non-unionized Arkansas. Big labor decided to teach her—and all Democratic members of Congress who were quailing at the prospect of voting for card check—a lesson. The lesson would be that, however much a vote for card check would reduce your chances of winning a general election, opposition to card check would result in your defeat in a Democratic primary. Their ready and willing instrument was Bill Halter, whose path to higher office seemed otherwise occluded. At the beginning of March he announced his candidacy and proclaimed himself the champion of the working man. Blanche Lincoln, in agonized response, proclaimed herself the target of outside interests. In a matter of weeks labor unions and moveon.org—originally formed to defend Bill Clinton against impeachment—sent millions to Bill Halter’s campaign. Lincoln, recently elevated to the Chairmanship of the Senate Agriculture Committee, sponsored a bill to shut off all derivative trading. The Obama White House carefully protected this bill from defeat while the primary and runoff contests were pending, while Bill Clinton campaign gallantly for Lincoln and against his appointee Halter. The Clinton intervention may have proved decisive. Although the Clintons have left Arkansas, Arkansas voters still have warm feelings toward them, as witnessed by Hillary Clinton’s 70%-26% defeat of Barack Obama in the 2008 Arkansas Democratic presidential primary—the biggest percentage win in her campaign. Lincoln won the runoff by a 52%-48% margin—hardly inspiring but a whole lot better than a defeat. It’s a huge defeat for the unions. White House political operatives are already complaining, as Ben Smith notes in Politico, that "Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise," [a senior White House] official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November." But the unions are not just interested in maintaining Democratic majorities. They’re interested in making sure that all Democratic incumbents will vote when bidden for card check. The message they wanted to send to Blanche Lincoln, and to all other Democrats, was: the minute you announce against card check, your career is over. Even in a state like Arkansas, with few union members and with all the major employers solid opponents of unionization, we can defeat you in the Democratic primary. You may very well fear likely defeat in the general election if your support card check. But we can promise you certain defeat in the primary if you oppose it. And to national Democratic strategists they could say this: Lincoln was going to lose the general election in any case. We just made her path to defeat more unpleasant. Bill Halter, who remained coy about his own position on card check, was the willing accomplice in this strategy. With not a lot to lose (the lieutenant governorship? give me a break; it was a nice office for a billionaire like Winthrop Rockefeller but doesn’t offer much to anyone else) and something to gain (maybe John Boozman would self-destruct in the general election for the Senate), this may have looked to him like a low-risk candidacy. His willingness to be the accomplice of the big labor unions might foreclose any future electoral career in Arkansas (although Bill Clinton’s rebounds after adversity might give any Arkansas Rhode Scholar hope for recovery). But there are other ways the big unions can help you advance. Blanche Lincoln’s (narrow) victory leaves the unions’ strategy in ruins. They can’t credibly threaten any Democratic incumbent who opposes card check with political defeat. Some, in states less anti-union than Arkansas, might be vulnerable to a challenge like Halter’s; but others won’t. And in some states or districts there won’t be an opportunistic challenger like Halter willing to go along with the strategy and well enough established to be a serious primary challenger. Give the unions credit for daring, and for putting their money (or the money of their members) on the line. They’re playing for high stakes—for the ability to plunder the private sector for dues money as they have successfully plundered the public sector (i.e., taxpayers) for dues money in states with strong public employee unions like New York, New Jersey and California. They just came up a little bit short. Obviously this is a case of a divergence of interest between the unions (which want to deter any Democrat from opposing card check) and the Obama administration political strategists (who want to maximize the number of Democrats elected no matter what their position on substantive issues). Which brings to mind the old saying about honor among thieves. When you’re trying, in different ways, to plunder a once productive private sector economy, you won’t always agree on how to do so. As you watch the videotape of Blanche Lincoln’s rather shrewd victory speech, you might want to keep that in mind. Read more at the Washington Examiner: www.washingtonexaminer.co...935064.html#ixzz0qMayn6iR
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Badeye (#0)
He'd have to recognize the migration into South Carolina from the North throughout the first decade of the millenium. Still no word on NJ where TP candidates got trounced.
#67. To: war (#48) Keep hiding behind the bozo, bozo. (laughing) You've always been a world class pussy. Badeye posted on 2010-01-14 16:12:48 ET Reply Trace
|
|
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|