“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Gail Collins: The Day After the Day After
O.K., you poor little Democrats. Stop sobbing. Lift up your little liberal heads and shout. There’s gonna be. …
Umm.
Harry Reid! There’s gonna be more Harry Reid! Nobody thought it could happen, but the charisma-challenged Senate majority leader won another term, decisively defeating Sharron Angle, a Tea Party favorite who had claimed that American cities were run by Sharia law and who had ingratiated herself to a roomful of Hispanic teenagers by telling them that they looked Asian to her.
Yes, the Titanic went down, but Harry Reid got a lifeboat. I know you were hoping for someone more Leonardo DiCaprio, but right now you’d better take what you can get.
Arianna Huffington: In 2009 the White House Underestimated the Economic Devastation, in 2010 Democrats Paid the Price
For all the hours of pre-election predictions and post-vote analysis, the 2010 midterms came down to a very simple truth: If unemployment were near double digits come November, Democrats would take a beating.
It is, and they have.
Exit polls found that nearly nine in ten voters believe the economy is in bad shape. The same percentage said they feel pessimistic about America’s economic future. That’s practically everyone!
And while a large majority of voters still believe that George Bush is to blame for getting us into this mess, they are clearly holding Obama accountable for not fixing it.
Amanda Marcotte: The Real Reason Sharron Angle Lost
It’s the curse of the Mama Grizzly.
Sharron Angle had all the breaks that should have allowed her to take the Senate seat in Nevada. She was running against a wildly unpopular incumbent in a state that leads the nation in unemployment. She raised and spent a record amount of money for a Senate race. She ran a race-baiting campaign in a style that almost always works for Republicans. She had the Mama Grizzly hype behind her. Despite all this, she managed to lose the race for Senate by virtue of her inability to stop saying crazy things, talking about “Second Amendment remedies,” calling the unemployed “spoiled,” and telling a group of Latino students that they look Asian to her.
Still, it all seems a little unfair. Angle, for all her hard-right views, was no worse and often better than some of her more successful male colleagues running in swing states, such as Pat Toomey and Marco Rubio. In the world of gaffes, she fell short of Rand Paul, who called for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act before backing off and who kept having to let go of volunteers and employees for doing things like celebrating lynching and stomping on the head of a MoveOn activist.
David Sirota: Ignore the Media Conflictinator: 2010 Vote Was Turning Point Against Conservative Doctrine
There is no shortage of disturbing/depressing meta-messages from last night’s election results. . . .
All of that said, though, there is one very positive meta-message that — arguably — trumps all of the negative ones — a meta-message that will be inevitably ignored by what Jon Stewart so aptly called the national media’s D.C.-obsessed “conflictinator.” You can see this deeper, far more important story in the ballot measures.
Ballot measures get ignored by the media because they don’t involve personality — but that’s exactly why they are so good at telling us what an election is all about. Precisely because they are exclusively about issues and stripped of all the personality/side issues that come with specific candidates, ballot measures tell us what voters are thinking. And when you look at what happened to the ballot measures here that exemplify the most pure form of conservative doctrine, you see an overwhelming rejection of that doctrine.
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson: Giving the Keys Back to the Folks Who Crashed the Car
After Tuesday’s drubbing, Democrats will search for the hidden message of the election. But the message isn’t hidden: The decisive blocs of voters that switched from Democrats in 2008 to Republicans in 2010 were angry and disillusioned — with the economy, with a political system they see as helping banks and CEOs, not ordinary working families, and with both parties, Republicans (exit-poll favorability rating: 41 percent) as well as Democrats (43 percent). They want action to rebalance the economy so it produces jobs and gains for the middle class, not just Wall Street. Unfortunately, they’re not going to get it.
That’s because these voters have just handed Congress back to a party least likely to heed their call: the party that spent the last two years saying no to Wall Street reform, to an economic recovery package that included major tax cuts, to expanded health insurance and medical cost control, and to extension of the 2001 tax cuts for the middle class; the party that shamelessly courted lobbyists and corporate donors while claiming they were only against reform because it represented a “bailout” of these very same interests.
Dahlia Lithwick: Standing Down
The Supreme Court wonders whether your non-money can fund non-religion.
his morning’s oral argument over the constitutionality of an Arizona tax credit revealed that even when the justices are peering down at a murky mud puddle of doctrine, they can still see precisely what they want to see. Arizona v. Winn is about a suicide pact between two doomed lines of First Amendment jurisprudence: The rule that grants taxpayers “standing” to bring lawsuits in cases that may have the effect of “establishing religion” and the rule that holds that government shouldn’t be in the business of establishing religion in the first place.
The standing question sounds trickier than it is. Usually taxpayers can’t even get into courtrooms with the claim that they don’t like how the state is spending their tax dollars (on, say, wars or highways). But in the narrow area of the Establishment Clause, the Supreme Court allows taxpayers to sue the government based on the idea that there is no other mechanism to stop the government from promoting religion, since presumably it’s only the taxpayer who is harmed. In a 1968 case, Flast v. Cohen, the court determined that taxpayers could sue when government expenditures are unconstitutional. There is a real question looming today about whether the Establishment Clause can be policed in any other way if Flast is overturned.
John Dickerson: I Don’t Feel Your Pain
At his news conference, Obama struggles to show that he “gets it.”
Every year the president’s doctor gives him a physical. In the second year of his term, the voters give him a colonic. Or, as President Obama put it at his news conference Wednesday, “a shellacking.”
n the post-election press conference that has now become a White House tradition, Obama’s goal was to show that he “got it.” This was the big charge of the campaign, lobbed liberally by both sides. But the election results shifted the burden on the president. Republicans didn’t just take over the House and win six seats in the Senate. They picked up a slew of governor’s offices and flipped 19 statehouses from Democratic to Republican.
There is a formula for these press conferences after the president’s party suffers a big electoral defeat. Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, and Obama today all acknowledged that voters wanted an end to partisan bickering and called for a new era of cooperation. This may be true, but it’s not the point. All took responsibility for the slow pace of “progress”-a word each put into heavy rotation-but went no further. All refused to admit that the election said anything about their course for the country.
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