@ 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.

@ Sully:
Franken worries you more than Jim Bunning does?

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.

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….

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?

@ 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:

We already knew that independents were turning in droves against the Democratic party. We already knew that Jon Corzine was so unpopular he would lose even to a divided opposition. We already knew that a staunchly conservative Republican could win a purple state by a big margin if he “projects a moderate, mainstream, nonthreatening, tolerant image”. Did we really know all those things? If I were a Republican, I’d still be pleased to have them confirmed, and if I were a Democrat I definitely wouldn’t be smiling.

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.

@ CK MacLeod:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One other thing: There’s more to liberty than lower taxes.

I agree. And neither party around here seems to understand where to find liberty at all.

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.

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.

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.

He’s a creepy
incumbent and owns the creeping catastrophe, and has nothing in his
medicine cabinet for coping with gaping fiscal wounds except to put
band-aids on them that temporarily protect client constituencies while
leaving the deeper injuries untreated.

This is true. But it has absolutely nothing to do with Obama.

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.

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.

They can’t just state and accept the obvious: “We went left and lost the middle, as usual.”

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.

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.

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.