In the movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the entire plot hinges on whether Deeds is, in the words of two somewhat daft neighbor ladies, “pixilated.” Deeds, who plays the tuba in the village band of his hometown in Mandrake Falls, Vermont, has suddenly inherited a huge amount of money and so like every small town dweller with big-city dreams decides to travel to New York, pitting the seemingly naïve and innocent rural native against the evils of the big-city. Everyone wants a piece of his money, especially his greedy relatives who were appalled at his plans to use it to help the poor and out-of-work.
Tuesday’s election reminds me a lot of that movie, including quarrels over money, small town versus big-city, and how to aid the victims of an economic crisis. Most of all, Tuesday is about being pixilated–or should we say pixelated– which is an apt description of press coverage that as usual opted for sensationalistic headlines over facts and the hard work of real research. Not a few bloggers were guilty of similar failings, especially the ones who have been anointed by the media to the exalted state of talking head — pixilated talking heads.
The most common assessment was that save for that crazy contest in upstate New York, Tuesday was a victory for the Republicans and a loss for Barack Obama. Which Republicans it was a victory for, they didn’t say, because figuring out what is a Republican these days will drive anyone crazy.
Virginia
The absurdity of the common belief that Tuesday was an Obama loss can be seen in comparing exit poll data from 2008 to data from Tuesday. As the chart below shows, in 2009 the turnout of those who helped Obama to win this state was below that of 2008.
In 2008, 51% of the voters were under 44, while in 2000 and 65% were over 45. Over 20% of the 2008 voters were African American while in 2009 that dropped to 16%. Fifty-four percent of 2008 voters were female as opposed to 52% this year. Even more telling, in 2008 Democrats made up 39% of all voters, but in 2009 only one third of those who voted identified themselves as Democrats.
Adding up the differences between 2008 and 2009 in the turnout of all these groups of Obama supporters is around 25%–a sizeable total that exceeds the victory margin for McDonnell. In other words, if Obama’s supporters had turned out this year in the same strength they voted last year, McDonnell would have had a much closer race–and might have lost.
More pointedly, the media are not even looking at the exit polling data itself which shows that 56% of McDonnell’s supporters said Obama was not a factor in their vote.
Mr. Deeds Runs Into the Clintons
So why didn’t Obama supporters turn out even after he campaigned for McDonnell’s opponent, state senator R. Creigh Deeds? The first initial should have provided some clue of electability, for people with first initials tend to be viewed as snobs.
But Creigh Deeds is no snob. One of his favorite anecdotes is the story of his mother sending him off to college with four $20 bills. Like Hollywood’s Mr. Deeds, he comes from a rural area–Bath County, located in the Allegheny Mountains where a town named Mandrake Falls would not be out of place.
This recent campaign was not the first time Deeds and McDonnell have met—a fact few in the media seemed to acknowledge. In 2005 the two faced each other in a race for Virginia Attorney General that ended up with Deeds demanding a recount after losing by only a few hundred votes. That loss, along with the fact that McDonnell outspent him almost two-to-one had to have left a bitter taste in Deeds’ mouth.
When McDonnell filed for governor, Deeds wanted another shot at him. Unfortunately, a few other Democrats had the same idea including former national Democratic chair Terry McAuliffe, who has a long relationship with the Clintons, helping to run Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and serving as co-chair of Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election committee.
Depending on which reports you read, McAuliffe spent close to $7 million in a losing effort, indicating there was a lot of national money placed on his candidacy. Meanwhile the third candidate, Brian Moran, enlisted the support of Jerome Armstrong of MyDD, a blogger who has not been above walking both sides of the street in the past. Deeds was a nonfactor in the early part of the race, but in one of the great comebacks in American politics surged past both Moran and McAuliffe to easily defeat them both, astounding political pundits.
Even Deeds himself seemed like he could not believe it, becoming openly emotional during his victory speech. Perhaps he knew the campaign left him a wounded candidate. Like the Longfellow Deeds jealous relatives who could not accept his inheritance, the McAuliffe crowd could not accept that this country lawyer had bested the Beltway insider. Those on the left who had supported Moran remained opposed to Deeds’ stance on gun control, seeing him as tainted by his endorsement from the National Rifle Association in the 2005 race against McDonnell.
Three weeks before the election the New York Times‘ Jason Kenney wrote “In Praise of Terry McAuliffe and the Campaign That Could Have Been.” Last July a Washington Times story noted “McAuliffe’s big donors hold back from Deeds campaign” citing that only two of McAuliffe’s top 115 donors had ponied up for Deeds.
McAuliffe did put on a show of campaigning for Deeds, but the placement of stories like the two above suggest that his support was less than 100%. In short, the backstory on the Virginia governor’s campaign may well be that Creigh Deeds went from small town to big city where he ran into some still-smoldering resentments from 2008.
But there are also those who felt Deeds did not run a strong campaign, pointing to his pixilated answer on taxes during one of the debates as a key moment where he lost ground. The long-standing Virginia split between the northern counties and the rest of the state also seemed to have precipitated a strategy conflict in the Deeds campaign that was never resolved. Finally, Deeds played hot and cold with the Obama White House until he begged for a lifeline even as his campaign was drowning under polls showing him trailing by double digits.
Meanwhile, McDonnell ran what can only be described as a stealth campaign–a term from back in the 1990s that was used to describe the right wing tactic of not mentioning anything about your strong beliefs on social issues. An avowed social conservative, McDonnell said little about abortion or school prayer, sticking to the old GOP “tax and spend” mantra. Deeds tried to smoke him out, but the more he kept trying to paint McDonnell with a broad brush, the more paint he seemed to get on himself.
The word must have gotten out to the raucous right to cool it, because Sarah Palin and others largely stayed out of the Virginia race, perhaps because they knew McDonnell really was one of theirs.
New Jersey
Poll results from New Jersey parallel those from Virginia as the graph below shows.
As with Virginia, Obama supporters did not turn out like they did last November. Curiously, though, the African-American vote was an anomaly, showing a slightly higher turnout this year, but that did nothing for Democrat Corzine. In 2008 Obama received 92% or the African-American vote while Corzine received only 88%.
Sixty percent of New Jersey voters also stated that Obama was not a factor in their vote for governor. Like Virginia, it was local factors that figured most in the results. In these tough economic times, Jon Corzine was hardly an ideal candidate. First, he is a former Goldman Sachs CEO, a Wall Street insider in a year when being a Wall Street insider was probably the last credential one wanted to see in a candidate for any office.
Second. although he had no personal involvement in them, Corzine was plagued by New Jersey corruption scandals that implicated 44 people including three New Jersey mayors and two state assemblymen. Closer to home it also forced the resignation of a member of Corzine’s administration. Joseph Marbach, a political scientist at Seton Hall University admitted:
It’s going to just reinforce the stereotype of New Jersey politics and corruption.
Voters apparently agreed, citing corruption as their third-most important issue. Sixty-eight percent of those who voted for Christie made corruption the number one reason for their choice.
The New York House Contest
While the GOP gloated over these results, terming them a setback for Barack Obama, they were conveniently forgetting one important race, one that asked which Republican Party were they talking about? One that was open to a wide range of voters or one that preached ideological purity? If the Party leaders tried to make a case for the former, the mess in what had been an obscure New York House of Representatives election argued for the latter.
When none other then Newt Gingrich faces a purge you know things have gotten out of hand. The free-for-all began when Barack Obama appointed Republican John McHugh as Secretary of the Army, precipitating a special election for his seat. The Obama people are either very smart or very lucky–perhaps both–because the McHugh appointment managed to reveal the dark side of the Republican Party.
As had been expected, a New York Republican committee endorsed assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava to represent this normally safe GOP district. In times other than the Era of Bad Feelings all would have gone according to plan and Scozzafava would have coasted to victory.
But these are not normal times. Instead Scozzafava dropped out of the race and endorsed her Democratic rival, probably closing the gates on her own party. Why? Because radical GOP Counterrevolutionaries do not consider her pure enough even though one polling expert found that her record was actually MORE conservative than the average New York state legislator.
What irked the raucous right is that Scozzafava is pro-choice, supports same-sex marriage, and according to the right wingers “endorsed” Obama’s stimulus package. Leading the charge against Scozzafava was Faux News commentator Glenn Beck, who has eclipsed both Rush Limbaugh and Bill O Reilly as the voice of the raucous right by deliberately becoming even more outspoken than they are.
Beck does not let facts and reality get in the way of what he considers to be a larger truth. He has become the commentator Democrats and liberals love to hate, so an Internet search turns up dozens of rants pointing out his lies, which is exactly what Faux and Beck want. The more the left detests Beck, the more he must be doing something right in the eyes of the Counterrevolutionaries.
Joining Beck’s crusade against Scozzafava were such right wing luminaries as Michele Bachmann, Irving Kristol, Fred Thompson, and Dick Armey. Meanwhile endorsing her were none other than Newt Gingrich along with John Boehner and Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele (see how long he stays in that post after the election).
In this Civil War, Republicans found themselves forced to choose sides, especially after Sarah Palin tossed in her own condemnation of the endorsed candidate on her Facebook page. As noted above, Palin does not believe the old adage that there is no “I” in team. She has become so enamored with herself that one imagines her looking into the mirror each evening and asking “Who is the fairest Republican of them all?”
Palin and company think they ARE the team, that the voices of New York Republicans and the RNC do not matter. Instead the raucous right decided to back hitherto unknown conservative Doug Hoffman. His list of endorsements grew to include Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum, and Republican representatives from Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and California.
In typical fashion the raucous right trotted out what Joseph Goebbels termed the big lies to savage Scozzofava. Glen Beck linked her to that favorite GOP devil, ACORN, even though Scozzafava had nothing to do with the organization. Michael Barone unleashed a tirade:
I mean, this is a woman who was endorsed by the Working Families Party, which is basically front for ACORN … As we’ve seen, it’s an organization whose organizations have systematically aided and abetted child prostitution, as reported in the videos that Fox News ran — that other networks were finally forced to run, that Andrew Breitbart put on the Big Government Website. There is some reason for principled Republicans not to back the Republican nominee in a situation like that.
Now parse this paragraph for a minute because it is emblematic of the trash that passes for the truth these days. Fox News ran some videos, whose content is not fully explained nor cited, that “other networks” (which ones) were “forced” (by whom) to run (what did they say about them), that some right wing blogger put on his website. This tangled tale makes Scozzafava’s ties to ACORN gospel (pun intended). THIS is what is wrong with America.
I held off on this post hoping to find exit polling data on New York district 23, but could not. The last polls taken before the election showed their “conservative” candidate winning, prompting some right wing sites to begin prematurely crowing. Now they are eating crow as a Democratic has won District 23 for the first time since before the Civil War.
Social Issues
The conflict over District 23 is yet another skirmish in the long-standing battle for the soul of the Republican Party that pits social conservatives against more traditional economic conservatives. Despite generations of Republican ranting against Big Government, the social conservatives want to inject government into our board rooms, classrooms, and bedrooms with a Puritan zeal that recalls H. L. Mencken’s famous quote that these people are afraid that somewhere someone may be having a good time.
The Palin, Beck, Bachmann crowd has about them the attitude that it is my way or the highway. Politics for them is not the art of compromise and seeking a middle ground, it is about confrontation and take no prisoners. Anyone who opposes them is the enemy, even if they are members of their own political party.
The problem with this approach is that, if polling data are any indication, it risks turning the GOP into a minority party. This February the Pew Institute hosted a forum on the “Religious Vote in the 2008 Election.” Reviewing the exit polling data, the Institute concluded:
Weekly attending white evangelical Protestants were the strongest Republican group in 2008, as in 2004.
That is not exactly a foundation for a national party as a recent Wall Street Journal poll found. Only 25% of those surveyed had a positive impression of the Republican Party while 23% had a highly negative perception. The Republicans in Congress received the highest negat9ive ratings in the poll—64% on their handling of the health care issue. Only 10% of those answering the poll considered themselves strong Republicans.
Despite leading the charge in New York, Sarah Palin’s positive rating has dropped from 42% to 27% and her negatives now have reached 45%. As for one social issue she champions, only 15% of Americans support making abortion illegal. Meanwhile the number opposing same sex marriages has dropped from 62% to 49%. Seventy-three percent support allowing the medical use of marijuana.
A lot of Democrats are secretly smiling over the New York race, believing that the more the social conservatives inject themselves into such contests the better the Democrat’s chance of avoiding the traditional midterm realignment. That may be a mistake, for the real lesson for the GOP may be that if you are a card-carrying member of the raucous right the best thing you can do is to hide your membership like McDonnell rather than bully members of your own party like Palin.
Coda
According to the dictionary “pixilated” has several meanings including eccentric, which describes Hollywood’s Mr. Deeds, who won a trial over an attempt to commit him to a mental hospital because of his tuba playing and other eccentricities by pointing out the eccentricities of the major players in the courtroom including a psychiatrist who doodled and a judge who filled in his “Os”.
But an older meaning comes from someone who is possessed by spirits that make them behave irrationally. I am not sure what possesses Sarah Palin, certainly she likes to blow her own horn, but she does have a pixilated look that she shares with Glenn Beck.
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