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November 7, 2009 in Opinion
Obama’s ’08 fluke is over
Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday’s elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.
In the aftermath of last year’s Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics – most prominently, rising minorities and the young – would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed “The Death of Conservatism,” while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.
This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.
Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia – presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in ’08 for the first time in 44 years – went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 – a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus 15 Democratic in 2008 to minus 4 in 2009. A 19-point swing.
What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they’d gone narrowly for Obama in ’08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.
White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the ’09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it’s Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.
The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African-American president.
November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm – and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.
The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm – deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years – because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his “New Foundation” for America – from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.
Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama’s hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt – the Tea Party demonstrators, the town hall protesters – as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.
Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the “rump” rebelled. It’s the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election – and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed – is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009.
Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.
Don’t fudge fish standard 
wurman on November 07 at 10:29 p.m.
It would appear as if Krauthammer is necessarily a close relative of someone in charge of this paper because it’s hard to believe that actual journalists would allow this blithering drivel to appear in print.
Krauthammer wrongly and stupidly states that “conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent)… .”
This sorry, ignorant clown has fabricated a phony statistic from an actual Gallup Poll (larivefacets.blogspot.com –-
/2009/06/conservative-percent-by-gallup-2009.html). The poll notes that 73 percent of Republicans call themselves conservative as do 22 percent of Democrats, and likewise 34 percent of independents. This rounds away to about 40 percent of the poll subjects describing themselves as the more conservative of their specific subset. Krauthammer makes this even more idiotic by extrapolating it to the electorate, which has recently been shown to contain only 20 percent GOP voters and the conservative 73 percent of them is about 15 percent of US voters.
It is truly, astoundingly ridiculous that Krauthammer is incapable of distinguishing between folks who are conservative GOPers, the self-styled conservative Dems, and the Indies who see themselves as conservative within that party.
Krauthammer is pathetic. Hilariously, if 40 percent of the Socialists (who never seem to be pollled by anyone) described themselves as the more conservative members of that totally left-wing party, then doofus Krauthammer would lump them in with the other 3 political mobs as if there were some parity among the groups.
Krauthammer is nutz. Yuppers! he thinks that anyday now them thar’ conservative republicans, democrats, and independents are all gonna’ get together and elect a genuine conservative president of these h’yar states—mebbee that there center-right candidate Caribou Barbie Palin or, shucky darn, that fine ol’ preacher man St. Michael Huckabee.
C’mon Review managment, put Krauthammer’s file in the garbage and print some plausible opinion pieces. The fool can’t even read a Gallup poll.
rterrylynch on November 08 at 3:49 p.m.
I’m sorry if Mr. Krauthammer touched a sore spot by Mr. Wurman but facts are facts. The facination of Mr. Obma by the national media pushed his 2008 win of 7%; the hype of anti-George Bush didn’t help much.
Now the voters are learning what “change” means. It has become a costly experiment, frankly a repeat of the FDR programs that it took WWII to move us out of. I sincerely hope that in next year’s elections for Congress in particular, we have learned our lesson. We cannot build a country on the backs of the middle class by higher taxes. Some day we have to learn that 10% contribution is 10%; the fact that the number result is higher for some and lower for others only means their base of factoring was smaller.
In the Nanny State of Washington where you count elections until you get the result you want if you are in power we have to learn to stop the corruption.
CheckingItOut on November 08 at 9:45 p.m.
Bush had eight years to screw up the country, and he used ever second to do so.
Obama has had less than a year in office to address Bush’s multiple messes, and it is sure to take several before real change is measureable. At least give him one term in office before you make judgments about how effective he is at dealing with Bush’s two terms of ineptness.