President Barack Obama’s political clout was on the line Tuesday as Virginia and New Jersey chose governors in contests that could serve as warning signs for Democrats about the public’s mood heading into an important mid-term election year.
(LIZ SIDOTI, AP National Political Writer)
This quote reflects the dire warning that political pundits of every stripe have been propagating in the run up to these off-year elections. But it’s patent nonsense.
Frankly, it’s bad enough that these pundits hype mid-term elections, which are held midway through four-year presidential terms, as a referendum on an incumbent president’s re-election prospects. This, despite the fact that presidents have routinely defied the notion that devastating party losses in these elections portend their reelection doom – as Bill Clinton did in 1996.
Yet these talking heads have spent the last few weeks pontificating about what doom would follow for President Obama if his party’s (Democratic) candidates were to lose in the few, plainly inconsequential off-year elections that were held today – a mere year into his first term.
But – with all due respect to Virginia and New Jersey, where supposedly pivotal gubernatorial elections were held, and to New York, where one supposedly bell-weather congressional election was held – these off-year elections are no “test of Obama’s clout” whatsoever.
Actually, the politicians who won or lost are such bid players on the national stage that the only thing worth mentioning about today’s results is the fact that the billionaire mayor of New York City, Mike Bloomberg, spent over 100 million to be re-elected in a squeaker. He must really love his job.
To be sure, though, the relative rout by Republican candidates is a bad omen for congressional Democrats in mid-term elections next year.
Of undeniable (local and national) significance, however, is the result of the referendum on gay marriage that was held in Maine. Not least because similar referendums held on this issue in 30 other states have been defeated “by the people” – even in putatively liberal California.
Alas, now the people of Maine, who were presumed to be most sympathetic to gay marriages, have too. In fact, they voted in rather decisive fashion to deny gays and lesbians the equal civil right to marry – a right the rest of us take for granted.
So much for keeping alive the HOPE Obama inspired….
Related commentaries:
Court upholds California referendum banning gay marriage
* This article was published originally last night at 10:01. I have updated it to correct initial reports that Maine had upheld the gay marriage law.
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