Under “Smackdown from the ‘Burbs,” we have our loyal home frog and a visitor arguing the “Tuesday’s elections mean nothing, the American troops will never reach Baghdad” line as applied to the political fate of one John Corzine.
Visitor Thurman Hart sums up the position as follows:
Corzine was defeated in New Jersey for three reasons: 1) NJ has the highest taxes in the country and Corzine had actually raised them again; 2) NJ has a horrible problem with political corruption and Corzine was seen as tolerant of it, if not involved in it; and 3) He had had a net unfavorable rating for well over a year.
Conservatives will tend to reply along the following lines:
Frankenstein-Igor '09
Neither Mr. Hart nor his comrade fuster seem to understand that there’s no essential contradiction between Howard’s “smackdown of Obamaism” argument and their “it was all local, local I tell you” counter. The local is the global, and, while we’re putting things in vaguely New Age-y terms, we can add: as above, so below. New Jersey is not located on some other planet orbiting a distant star. It is a great state of our Union, its political and economic life intimately connected with the political and economic life of the country and indeed the globe.
Being a stone’s throw from NYC ensures that NJ will be even more directly wired to the “financial crisis” than most states. It is quite entirely unsurprising that, at the peak of that financial crisis – a crisis of the post-Reagan political-economic governing compromise that our neo-Marxist friends have helpfully defined as “financialized neo-liberalism” – New Jersey would be governed by former Goldman-Sachs CEO John Corzine… and that Corzine would be in trouble.
There is nothing “purely local to New Jersey” about Corzine’s wealth (and campaign war chest), Corzine’s history, and Corzine’s politics and policies: John Corzine and what hardly anyone would even bother to call “Corzinism” are just the Jerseyized excrescence of a 50-state and 200-country political and economic conjuncture. (Incidentally, Michael Bloomberg’s mayoralty in New York City reflects many of the same patterns – though he’s even wealthier than Corzine, and was thus able to buy a 3rd term at the obscene cost, it is said, of $100 Million. It’s further typical of how far gone the political culture of the East Coast is that the only alternative to neo-liberal Bloomberg was a more traditional urban liberal.)
Up until rather recently, having been a wealthy financial exec was a plus in a place like New Jersey – especially in the days that you could skim enough off the evil Bush’s or good Clinton’s asset bubbles to finance the neo-liberal state through generally rising revenue. In the familiar pattern, legalized corruption – under the broad heading of constituent service – other questionable dealings, and outright graft blend more and more into each other over time. It happens to both Republicans and Democrats – as to Whigs and Tories and Nazis and Commies and Roundheads and Augustans and Pericleans – when left in power too long.
So of course Corzine had a net unfavorable rating. He’s a creepy incumbent and owns the creeping catastrophe, and he has nothing in his medicine cabinet for coping with gaping fiscal wounds except band-aids that temporarily protect client constituencies, while leaving the deeper injuries untreated.
The state can’t be financed without further impairing the Golden Goose – eventually the tax collectors and regulators are reaching all the way up inside the unfortunate Fowl searching for the next golden egg before it’s even been laid [photoshop, Howard? - ok maybe not]. This same syndrome affects state after state as well as the federal government, where the party of putting on the latex gloves and searching hard and ruthlessly for not-yet-laid golden eggs to finance projects and obligations, fully controls 2 out of 3 branches of government, with the 3rd largely uninvolved, having already decided decades ago that it would prefer to look the other way.
In our binary system of government, the Republicans represent “steps in the opposite direction.” They don’t, or don’t yet anyway, represent leaps and bounds in the opposite or a new direction. Both parties in their current incarnations are parties of the Great Compromise – the state expanded beyond its revenue base, the difference financed – which under economic pressure becomes the Great Dilemma, and threatens to pit the party of social welfare and the party of liberty against each other on a more fundamental level.
Whether and, if so, how soon, we’re approaching that tipping point and the unraveling of the Compromise is a subject for another time and place, but we can observe that, up until recently, the Democrats have been enough in thrall to their further left, or confident enough in their position, to speak to such a fundamental confrontation – in terms of “realignment,” a new era, a new Roosevelt, the end of Reaganism, etc. Once ensconced in government, they shed the last vestiges of centrism and bi-partisanship that served the President so well in his campaign. Still seeking to defend and complete the legislative program that emerged amidst ’08-’09 triumphalism, they are reluctant to argue the easier case on the Tuesday “smackdown” – that, rather than an elemental rejection of partisan Obamaism, it was merely the trusty old American political pendulum swinging back the other direction within its narrow range.
They can’t just state and accept the obvious: “We went left and lost the middle, as usual.” It would imply a level of defeatism regarding next year’s pendulous mid-terms, put in question the Big Mandate for re-making the country in the phantom image of “hope and change,” render several Big Lies obsolete (not least the “they alone screwed it all up, we alone rescued it” mega-lie), and strip this President and this Democratic Ascendancy of their last pretensions of being something more than the latest creepy incumbents already overdue for comeuppance.
Comments 20
Comrade Fuster?
Gonna have to bury you for that, Tsar.
I certainly didn’t say that the NJ elections mean nothing. NJ elections dynamics and results have traditionally been right up there with pro wrestling in nation-wide import, but this time round I’ll be happy to group it with the vital race run in NYC by Joshua Goldberg.
November 7th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Prost, prost, Kamerad!
Poisonally, I have no problem with the word “comrade.” You’re not his colleague or associate. Would you prefer “ally”? You were clearly arguing the same side.
November 7th, 2009 at 10:34 am
I am not one them knasny-eyed treehugging type frogs!!
Neither you nor your Okhrana provocateur with codename “Tailor” can be saying such thing.
November 7th, 2009 at 11:12 am
@ CK MacLeod:And, here in Chicago, Daley has already sold The Skyway and the parking meter concession, and is using those funds to temporarily fill the revenue gap. Next will come additional property taxes.
Victor Davis Hanson had an interesting recent piece on this, explaining the left leaning politics of the very rich, who do not care about my income or property taxes, as long as their friends in DC do not touch their trusts.
November 7th, 2009 at 11:42 am
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Can you link to that, Z?
I would be entertained by reading how rich people not wanting to be taxed on inherited wealth is a left-leaning kind of a sort of thing.
November 7th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
@ fuster:
Someday, maybe you’ll figure out that the left, or at least the Democratic Party in its current incarnation, is a fat cat’s affair.
November 7th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Maybe someday I’ll figure out that national politics in a nation of 300 million people tends to favor rich folk and entrenched interests?
No, I’m gonna go right along thinking that we’re returning to an age of limited government presided over only by well-meaning citizen/statesmen.
November 7th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
And the question is whether the government acts primarily and exclusively as a tool of those “rich folk and entrenched interests,” or is checked and constrained by democratic (and economic) processes. Today’s Democratic Party sometimes sings the old leftwing standards, but is marching down the road to steady-state corporatism.
November 7th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Much of the Russian Aristocracy fancied themselves progressive. They celebrated Voltaire and Pushkin, and condemned their straying serfs to the knout.
Fancying oneself progressive is good business.
I find it depressing that such a large portion of the super rich with $100,000,000.00+ net worths feel they have everything to gain and very little to loose by aligning their interests with those of The Democratic Party.
Especially the Jewish ones do not seem to understand they are playing with fire.
November 7th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Obamaism = American Kropotkinism?
November 7th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I certainly appreciate the shout out. But there is certainly a very bad logical fallacy in the idea that anti-Obamaism equals anti-Corzineism.
On November 12, 2008 – only a few days after Obama took New Jersey easily, Corzine’s net unfavorable rating was already negative. As far back as December 11, 2007, only 44% of voters wanted Corzine to serve another term.
So if Corzine lost because of Obama, there’s some real explaining to do about why his support this November was exactly the same as it was in December of 2007.
As far as the NJ Democratic Party’s problems with corruption, they predate Corzine by at least a century. The problem wasn’t that Corzine or his cabinet were corrupt – the problem was that he promised to do something about it and didn’t. You know – the old campaign promise that isn’t fulfilled thing?
Same thing with high taxes. They are nothing new to New Jersey. In fact, NJ’s income tax was created in the early 1970s for the express purpose of creating a system for reimbursing home-owners for paying too much property tax (by Constitutional Amendment, 100% of our income tax has to be spent on property tax reimbursements). The problem was that Corzine promised to lower taxes and put the state on firm financial ground. He didn’t. Again, it’s the old campaign promises left unfulfilled problem.
This is true. But it has absolutely nothing to do with Obama.
Yeah, but here in NJ there is no “party of liberty.” Chris Christie admitted before the election that he wasn’t really going to cut anyone’s taxes. Only about 15% of NJ’s budget is discretionary, the rest is required by various Constitutional requirements and/or state laws.
First of all, even if that were true, it would be “as usual” in New Jersey. Second of all, corruption is not a left-right issue.
Beyond that, most of the hard-left stayed home on election day because Corzine was scorned by the NJ Sierra Club (Jeff Tittel called Corzine the worst in history). Gay rights activists just weren’t stirred up by Corzine’s support of civil unions.
I can’t speak for what will happen in other states, but I expect New Jersey will re-elect all thirteen of its incumbent Congressmen (no women). I expect that Democrat John Adler and Republican Leonard Lance will be targeted and have rough races…but they will likely be returned to office.
And, just to be clear, you can write about how stupid Democrats are all you want. I’m a Republican.
November 7th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
TH, you still don’t seem to be processing my argument: I’m not saying that Corzine lost “because of Obama.” I am saying that Corzine’s failure and the ongoing failure of Obamaism are part of the same thing: Corzine came up against the same limitations, and pushback, that Obamaism inevitably encounters.
Nor am I suggesting that Republicans – in their current incarnation anyway – have the answers that the dumb Democrats lack. I seriously doubt that they do, though I wouldn’t put it beyond all best case scenarios that Christie and/or McDonnell achieve some good things. I specifically describe the Rs as the party of steps, not leaps, at least under normal circumstances.
And I certainly haven’t argued that Christie’s victory means NJ is turning red. To the contrary. Up until the election, there were only a few observers predicting that Christie would win – despite all the reasons you give for Corzine to lose. It all seems obvious today. It didn’t last Monday.
It’s not that Corzine lost because of Obama, it’s that NJ couldn’t maintain leftwing leadership on the heels of Obama/Obamaism. We can’t know, though we can guess, what a real post-realignment election in NJ would have looked like – a truly coherent, big mandate movement might have replaced a loser like Corzine instead of hoping to buy and push him over the re-election line. No one can say.
In other words: We have returned, or appear to be returning, to political normalcy, if we ever left it.
One other thing: There’s more to liberty than lower taxes.
November 7th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
CKM — nicely put and I agree. There a a large and significant overlap between what you’re against if you’re anti-Corzine and what you’re against if you’re anti-Obama.
“Whoa. These folks just want to raise our taxes, tend their crony constituencies at our expense, and engage in naked power grabs” — these things can be said about Corzine and about Obama.
The argument here is not that people voting in New Jersey were thinking, “Oooh, this is me, voting against Obama with my vote for Christie!”
The argument is that the same things that drove voters away from Corzine will drive them away from supporting Obama and his agenda — in fact, are already doing so.
November 7th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Ok, you’re arguing policy limitations. You are correct that I didn’t pick that up. However, Americans are taxed less (at the federal level) than they have been for most of the time we’ve had a federal income tax. I think it’s hard to argue that we are now, at our lower than normal rate, taxed to the point of blowback. The difference, of course, is that the level of taxation that people will tolerate is not a fixed measure. So we can only wait and see what happens.
Well, I certainly hope for the best, no matter who wins. I know nothing at all about McDonnell, but I do know that Christie isn’t going to get much done. The system is stacked against action.
Actually, almost every major post had Christie leading until rather recently. Then it simply became too close to call. There was a “conventional wisdom” error that Democrats always finish better in Jersey than what they poll – something I cautioned against repeatedly because Democrats had never run someone as unpopular as Corzine. (You can read through my writings at Garden State Politics or at NJ Voices.) I actually predicted Christie would win by five almost two months before the election. The only polls that showed Corzine ahead were those that were badly flawed.
NJ has been pushed into financial ruin by leftists who want more spending (one of Corzine’s pet projects was universal pre-K) and by rightists who cut taxes and paid for government by bonding, rather than actually cutting spending (such as Christine Whitman). It honestly is a bi-partisan push to destroy the fiscal sanity of the state. There is no one wearing a white hat up here.
The big problem, currently, isn’t the spending (which is certainly a problem) but that tax revenues have dried up. NJ’s tax base is largely dependent on the health of the NYC finance industry. What killed that industry was the failure of moral regulation, resulting in a race to embrace risky business practices. As with any house of cards, it only takes one tumbling to bring down the rest.
I agree. And neither party around here seems to understand where to find liberty at all.
November 8th, 2009 at 11:19 am
@ Thurman Hart:
Seems that you and I agree more than we disagree on a number of things, though your focus is much more on your own state.
There was a good article on the “conventional wisdom error” today quoted at Contentions (the blog where most of us here got to know each other before it closed comments) – the observation is from Clive Crook:
It seems your greater insight into things in your own state made the election more anti-climactic for you. It is only very recently that those of us rooting for the conservative side from further away could begin to feel more confident that we weren’t letting wishful thinking cloud our judgment about what would happen to candidates like Corzine.
November 8th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
I grew up in NJ and am pleasantly surprised.
What happened to that Jersey City Mayor who supposedly cleaned up that sewer and was destined to greater things?
November 8th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
I think the issue is what the Tea Partiers kind of stumbled on to; and I think CK and our new Zombie are running right into it. The fiscal guardianship, if you will, of the public purse has finally begun to start to focus the minds of the people who actually make the country work. That Obama currently shows that he also pays no mind to maintaining a fiscally sound house means he is just going to get caught up in the backlash. The GOPs poor polling shows that these people will have any GOP rep on as short of a leash as their currently spendthrift Dem ones. Corzine is the canary in the coal mine for Dems. Corzine didn’t lose because people hated Obama (they don’t yet), he lost because the $$ don’t work. I am not sure Christie can do anything about it either. The fix in NJ is the voting out of the legislature, where the crooks really live,and I doubt enough of that happened.
Obama will probably lose for a few reasons in 2012. The aforementioned fiscal insanity (coupled with a stubbornly high unemployment rate he won’t be able to blame on Bush), foreign policy which is quickly being shown to be at the level of a HS student council President, and that Obama doesn’t have the wealth of personality that Clinton had to save him. The 2010 elections could save him by losing the House, but if that doesn’t happen….
November 9th, 2009 at 5:24 am
In honor of our impending doom I’ve started I Claudius now that I’ve finished Time Enough For Love.
Within a few years President Obama will have the treasury drained and he’ll be doing mad fun things like launching our legions to attack the sea. He and his minions have already made Al Franken a senator.
Hopefully the infrastructure of empire will allow the center to hold long enough for me to get through the rest of the novels in the garage.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:48 am
@ Sully:
Franken worries you more than Jim Bunning does?
November 10th, 2009 at 6:50 am
@ fuster:
Jim Bunning is a pitcher. He belongs up on a mound.
Al Franken is a jokester, none too tightly wound.
If either was a catcher, with a hankering to be bound,
I’d grant that one the better choice,
For a horsey harness, stall and voice,
Like Mr. Ed, profound.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:24 am
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