Orrin Hatch captures the alienation of his breed in a comment on the election results yesterday.
“My gosh, these people in Washington are running the country right into the ground,” Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, lamented this week, despite having lived and worked there for the last 34 years.
Matt Bai reports on the "voter insurrection" in the Times.
The old laws of politics have been losing their relevance as attitudes and technology evolve, creating a kind of endemic instability that probably is not going away just because housing prices rebound. Nor is that instability any longer driven only by ideological mini-movements like MoveOn.org or the tea parties, as some commentators suggest. Voter insurrection has gone as mainstream as Miley Cyrus, and to the extent that the parties in Washington take comfort in the false notion that all this chaos is fleeting, they will fail to internalize the more enduring lessons of Tuesday’s elections.
You could be forgiven for believing that voters are beginning to take their country back. If so, the Tea Party deserves some credit if only because it has mobilized the left and center as well as the right.
Both major parties have something to learn from the change. The first lesson is that each party HQ has had power over primaries taken away.
This age-old idea of “clearing the field” for a preferred candidate, so as to avoid divisive primaries, is now, much like the old party clubhouse, a historical relic.
After all, Barack Obama's selection by the voters was a good example of this in 2008. This time Paul and Sestak are examples of voter power over party manipulation.
Having been a loyal Democrat my whole voting life, I've often wondered why it was so easy to leave the party several years ago while continuing to vote progressive. Bai has a big part of the answer.
A new generation of politicians has been raised with more consumer choice and less loyalty to institutions, and they are no more likely to take their orders from, say, party leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, than they are to drive a Malibu just because some car magazine tells them to. Nor, thanks to the Web, are they reliant any longer on the party structure to raise the necessary cash.
A second, related lesson is that less affinity for parties makes incumbent politicians less safe, generally. That’s because when fewer people bother to engage in party politics, it takes a smaller group of ultra-motivated activists to overturn the traditional order of things.
And so, Bai points out, voters have learned to stand on their own feet, vote from their own experience.
A final truism to emerge from Tuesday’s primaries is that the politics of issues, the stuff of which parties have most often crafted their core identities, has now been largely displaced by a politics of personal conviction. In other words, Tuesday’s results were less about the ideological purging of either party than they were about a rejection of the culture of both, a sense that Washington acts from expedience and little else.
Analysts are saying that Mark Critz won in western Pennsylvania less because of his close relationship to John Murtha than because he campaign on local issues. Which have nothing to do with Washington.
I hope Matt Bai will write about MoveOn and the Tea Party. Their differences are instructive. Meanwhile, if you're looking for a wonderfully dreadful (but hilarious) "analysis" of yesterday's election results, this is quite a ride.
