The “anti-incumbency” nonsense

No follower of political news and opinion could fail to have noticed the emergent Democratic/liberal party line of recent weeks and days: that the electorate is angry at all incumbents, they want to throw all the bums out, regardless of party. The argument first appeared back in January with Obama’s response to Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. As Obama put it, the same voter anger that had produced his own victory in November 2008, led to the victory of the Republican Senate candidate over Obama’s Democratic candidate in January 2010 in the most Democratic state in the country! Even Charles Hurt, Washington bureau chief and columnist at the conservative-leaning New York Post has advanced this nonsensical line, thereby demonstrating once again that he is a centrist (i.e. a liberal) rather than a conservative. The claim is so blatantly ridiculous that you wonder that people are not ashamed to make it. But trafficking in a patent absurdity is preferable to admitting the, for them, unbearable truth, that the voters are rejecting the Democrats’ egalitarian-statist agenda, their decades-long dream of socializing America and bringing it into harmony with unfree Europe. In short, as Andrea Tantaros writes in today’s New York Daily News, this is not an anti-incumbent wave, but an anti-liberal wave.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 20, 2010 01:19 PM | Send