This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Rick Henderson, Managing Editor of Carolina Journal.
RALEIGH — Bill Clinton may have been 15 years ahead of his time. Recall the State of the Union Address that Clinton delivered in January 1996, when the 42nd president declared, “The era of big government is over”?
As a state and a nation, since Clinton uttered that phrase we’ve stepped into the time machine and selected reverse far too often. But perhaps Tuesday’s election — which was a rout for the grass-roots activism of the Tea Party movement — can remind us that no matter how difficult it will be to stop, let alone reverse, statist spending, taxes, and regulation, most Americans reject an overbearing government that stifles individual initiative and neglects the public interest.
Voters correctly consider the Obama administration hostile to private enterprise and free markets and the Democratic Party unwilling or unable to strike a different path. So with Tuesday’s vote, called by humorist P.J. O’Rourke not an election but a restraining order, Democrats across the country paid a major price, losing at least 61 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, with a handful of races not decided.
That wasn’t the case in North Carolina, however, where seven of the eight Democratic incumbents held their seats. The eighth, Rep. Bob Etheridge, D-2nd District, has demanded a recount after finishing roughly 1 percent behind GOP challenger Renee Ellmers at the polls. We may not know the outcome of that race until the week before Thanksgiving.
Other Tar Heel congressmen seemingly bucked the national trend. But North Carolinians still have not embraced the national Democratic agenda. A survey by Public Policy Polling released Election Day showed the president holding a negative approval rating in the state, with 41 percent supporting him and 55 percent opposing him.
Indeed, the three House Democrats considered most vulnerable by political pundits secured a return trip to Washington by running against their party, not with it. Reps. Mike McIntyre (7th), Larry Kissell (8th), and Heath Shuler (11th) voted against the president’s health care reform, and that alone may have saved them.
Taking no chances, McIntyre ran a series of ads claiming he wasn’t really a Democrat. In one, he said, “I don’t work for [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi; I work for you.” In another, he touted his support for extending all the Bush tax cuts. Shuler went further, suggesting he would run against Pelosi for speaker if Democrats held the House majority. After the election, he told Roll Call he might challenge Pelosi in a race for House Minority Leader.
Once you get past the so-called centrists and the Etheridge squeaker, however, the other Tar Heel State Democrats, all in secure Democratic districts, had unexpected troubles.
Including Etheridge, the five most reliable allies of the Obama agenda in the state’s congressional delegation performed worse on Tuesday than they had in their two most recent elections. And they outspent their Republican opponents significantly.
The 1st District’s G.K. Butterfield received only 59 percent of the vote this November, compared with 71 percent two years ago and 100 percent in 2006, when he ran unopposed.
The 4th District’s David Price won 57 percent of the vote against B.J. Lawson. When the two first met in 2008, Price collected 63 percent, and in 2006, Price got 65 percent.
In the 12th District, Mel Watt won with 64 percent of the vote — 8 percent less than 2008 and 3 percent less than 2006.
And in the 13th, where Brad Miller as state senator literally drew his own district lines, the four-term incumbent garnered a mere 55 percent of the vote, compared with 66 percent in 2008 and 64 percent in 2006. Miller ran into trouble even though he had 22 times more cash on hand than GOP challenger Bill Randall.
“Progressive” pundits and interest groups are urging the Democrats who survived 2010 to ignore the groundswell of support for responsible governance and turn even harder to the left. Tuesday’s results suggest that such stubbornness would be sheer folly.