Pundits are wallowing in the unexpected largesse of last Tuesday’s history-making midterm election. Seldom do the chattering classes get so much meat to chew on. Conservatives – the handful who get air time – are reveling like the Osbournes at a wrap party, while Democrats are alternately wailing like they should have at Paul Wellstone’s funeral or putting on a game face and pretending their unprecedented losses don’t matter. In the end, Republicans made political gains in the House of Representatives, and retook the Senate. These are stories to warm the cockles of hearts on the Right, and give a generation of Leftists tales with which to frighten their children
But significant though the national election was, there is an equal, perhaps more telling, tale told on the state and local levels. For example, Republican Bob Ehrlich defeated Kathleen Townsend Kennedy for the Maryland governorship. Now, Maryland is not a particularly influential state, nor an incubator for political trends. But Maryland hasn’t had a Republican governor since Spiro T. Agnew in 1964. It has been a bellwether state for the socialist march, ratcheting ever leftward for decades. Furthermore, its liberal candidate was [genuflecting] . a KENNEDY! You know, of the House of Kennedy? Yet in a left-leaning state, a scion of that anointed liberal clan was defeated by a relative newcomer in a midterm election where conservatives held the White House. This isn’t just notable; it sends tremors through the whole left-wing power structure. And it’s just one of many.
The GOP banner hangs in the Georgia governor’s mansion for the first time since the 1870’s. And defections from the Has-Been Party have now turned that state’s senate Republican as well. This in the heart of Dixie, where the phrase “yellow-dog Democrat” was born.
All along the liberal Northeast – Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island – the sinister erosion was halted. Hawaii elected its first Republican governor in 40 years. Florida remained solidly in Republican hands, despite a siege by Clintonites and the focused efforts of the Do Nothing Committee (the DNC).
And liberal lighthouses blinked out all over the referendum reef. In Nevada, the citizens defeated a proposal to legalize marijuana, and banned same-sex marriage. Similar pot proposals failed in Arizona, South Dakota, Ohio, and the District of Columbia. Massachusetts voters discarded the state’s bilingual education provisions, demanding that public school classes be taught in English only. Jury nullification was struck down in South Dakota. All around the country, sales and income tax increases were soundly defeated, along with bond issues for questionable “public works” projects.
The country is in a Republican mood.
This election should show, more than anything, that the frivolous days of the Clintons’ eight-year Mazola party are over. America has serious business to transact, and the time is not right for childish indulgence. Perhaps when our borders are safe once again and we can stroll our parks and parking lots without fear of being murdered by religious fanatics, perhaps when we’ve reasserted control of our far-flung economic interests and re-invigorated our own marketplace, perhaps when we once again know the pride of being American, we can lower our sights to such trivia as homosexual unions, animal rights, and whale-saving. Sometimes it takes a crisis to point out the sheer paucity of the liberal platform, its embarrassing paltriness, and the Left’s patent inability to handle anything more demanding than protecting pregnant pigs. But right now, we’ve got bigger enemies to contend with, and we’re not in the mood for pranks.
It’s becoming axiomatic that when times get difficult, the GOP is the party to turn to. Democrats throw a heck of a kegger, but you wouldn’t want one driving your pregnant wife to the labor room. In a predictable political irony, the Left, which once masked its socialist agenda behind such rhetoric as “Down with the Establishment,” BECAME the Establishment, and has been in Bunker Mode for the last 25 years. The butterfly chasers from the Summer of Love have infiltrated the power structure and still think they can solve the world’s problems by sticking daisies in gun barrels. The party that shunned the status quo has built bulwarks of its own intransigence. Daschle’s Democrats have redefined the word “reactionary,” proposing nothing of their own but obstructing virtually every measure the administration has endorsed.
On Tuesday, in villages and boroughs from Teaneck to Tucumcari, voters demanded that the roadblocks come down. While the Democrats were busy circling the wagons, the rest of the country moved on.
Tuesday demonstrated the fragility – and obsolescence — of dynasties like those of Kathleen Townsend Kennedy and Walter Mondale. It heralded a new day for moral responsibility and self-discipline. And it tolled the death knell for a philosophy that was born in the turmoil of Viet Nam and never grew up. As the most famous balladeer of that age sang, “The times, they are a-changin’.” Woodstock is finally over.