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Election Winners and Losers Lowell Ponte Tuesday's election outcome means new drapes for victorious House and Senate Democrats, but does it mean curtains for the Republican Party? The election actually produced some surprising winners and losers. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois was a loser, at least in one sense. This "great black hope" as a 2008 Democratic presidential candidate must secretly have hoped for a win by Michael Steele, the African-American Republican Senate candidate who narrowly lost to the Democratic machine that dominates Maryland. A Steele victory would have sent Obama's stock soaring as Democrats panicked at the loss of their most reliable voting bloc. This would have guaranteed Obama at least his party's vice presidential nomination in 2008. But Democrats — historically the party of the slave owners, Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and Bull Connor — were able to defeat Steele with racist smears. Blacks thus continue to pick the cotton and deliver the votes on the Democratic plantation, but almost all top positions in this racist party are reserved for whites. Presumptive Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a product of Democratic machine politics in Maryland. Her father and brother were mayors of Baltimore, and by age 7 she was helping keep her father's book of political favors owed him. She strong-armed her partisans to sweeping new power on Tuesday. But, henceforth, Democrats share responsibility for failure in Iraq or terrorism here. "Comprehensive immigration reform" was a big winner on Tuesday. This policy to encourage Latino immigrants and turn them into citizens is shared by President George W. Bush and liberal Democrats. Business likes the cheap labor, and leftists are empowered by importing the proletariat their class warfare ideology requires. Story Continues Below
Tuesday's election terminated the pesky Republican majority in the House that voted for a border fence which, in the wake of Tuesday's vote, will never get built. Mr. Bush never intended to build it anyway. The "big government conservatism" of President Bush, however, proved to be a failure. It was too small to satisfy socialists across the aisle, but far too taxing and intrusive to win support from conservative voters. "We went to Washington to change government," said Arizona Sen. John McCain, "and government changed us." For many who spent decades working their hearts out for simultaneous Republican control of Congress and the White House, Bush has become a four-letter word. As Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan warned conservatives in 2000, Dubya "really is a moderate," the Connecticut-born grandson of a liberal Connecticut senator. When President Bush on Wednesday held out an olive branch of cooperation to Democrats, veteran Republicans knew that metamorphosis into an Arnold Schwarzenegger "big government" politician will be easier for Bush than for Reagan or Goldwater "small government" conservatives. Ironically, smaller government conservatism could prove to have been a winner on Tuesday, for two reasons. One is that this election has made blue states bluer by killing off some northeastern Republicans in name only (RINOs). This could make the Republican Party more principled and less compromised, albeit more Sun Belted. Tuesday's other benefit to conservatism is that Democrats in key states ran as conservatives: Senate candidates Bob Casey in Pennsylvania ran as anti-abortion, and both James Webb in Virginia and Jon Tester in Montana as pro-military and pro-gun. One pro-gun Democrat running for Congress in Indiana went so far as to sign the Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) pledge never to vote for a tax increase, putting him to the right of his Republican opponent. Nine Democratic candidates promised tax cuts. Only two Democrats on the ballot Tuesday, according to ATR, "called for higher taxes without promising offsetting tax cuts." Conservatives at least have the satisfaction of knowing that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and, as La Rochefoucauld said, that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Tuesday brought defeat for Republicans but victory for many Democratic candidates who ran as conservatives. Speaker Pelosi, of course, will on her first day in power require all newly-elected Democrats in the House to kiss her ring and promise to vote for whatever tax increases her socialist heart desires. But her power and the election's Democratic "mandate" rest on new Democrats who ran against gun control and big government. No popular mandate exists for bigger government or socialist programs. Ironically, many of the new Democrats who won would have been overwhelming defeated in Ms. Pelosi's ultra-liberal San Francisco district. But the election of these conservative Democrats has given Speaker Pelosi control over the agenda and committee-controlling assignments of the House of Representatives where the Constitution requires all taxing and spending bills to originate. In order to cement their newly-regained majority, Democrats therefore ought to feel constrained to go slow with their more radical agenda until after the 2008 election. Voters gave them a mandate to move right towards the center, not left. Democrats will probably be content to pocket the easy victories Mr. Bush gives them, such as a boost to the Federal minimum wage (and the automatic union-contract raises tied to it), while using congressional subpoena and regulatory powers to harass the Bush administration and to extort and intimidate individuals, companies and industries supportive of Republicans. (Remember how Democrats found nothing wrong with smoking back when tobacco states elected only Democrats and tobacco companies poured millions into Democratic coffers?) Or did you think Rupert Murdoch, the genius behind the Fox News Channel whose company depends on many government broadcast licenses, hosted a fund-raiser for Sen. Hillary Clinton just because he likes her? The Democratic shakedown was bringing in truckloads of corporate cash — think of it as protection money — as soon as polls showed that their congressional victory was likely. Henceforth, American business will again be under political pressure to pay this additional "tax" to Democratic politicians to keep government off its back. The unelected liberal media was the biggest winner on Tuesday, proving that it can control our government by tilting in favor of Democrats and against Republicans. Our freedom now depends on honest alternative media such as NewsMax.
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