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Archive for the ‘Roars of Approval’ Category

Six days ago a fairly significant political upset occurred during a special Senate election in the state of Massachusetts. A Republican won the Senate seat previously occupied for 47 years by Sen. Ted Kennedy. The outcome of this election has stirred up a tidal wave of political analysis that threatens to drown us all in its punditry, and frankly, I’ve just been waiting for the dust to settle before weighing in.

Well, that was a waste of six days. As it turns out, there is no definitive answer as to why Republican Scott Brown won, what his win means, or what message the voters were trying to send to Washington. Did Scott brown win because he put his exact views on the table and let you know who he was, or did he win because of who he wasn’t? Did his opponent Martha Coakley lose because she ran a poor campaign, because she took the Democratic voter support for granted, or because an unlikely grassroots effort overwhelmed her (or all of the above)? Does Scott Brown’s win mean health care reform is dead, or does it just need to be different? Will this new senator and his overthrow of the 60 vote majority cause more bipartisan cooperation in Washington or will it further harden the Democrats to get done whatever they can before the 2010 midterm elections? Were the voters of Massachusetts trying to send a message that they’re unhappy with health care reform, Government bailouts for large corporations, Constitutional rights for terrorists and perceived tax hikes, or were they upset that the Democratic majority couldn’t get items from their progressive agenda passed with any haste (or at all)?

As it turns out, you don’t have to go far to find an equal number of people that will come down on either side of those and many other questions surrounding the election of Scott Brown. So I’ve decided to tell you what I do know for sure, and I think it’s every bit as important. As anyone who regularly reads my columns knows, I believe that the right to vote is probably the most sacred right we possess, and that being said, I saw many encouraging things in last Tuesday’s election in Massachusetts. First off, the voter turnout was quite high by any standard, but it was even more impressive when considering that it was a special election with only one item on the ballot, and the weather around the state was cold, snowy and wet (which can often keep people from the polls)(read more about the voter turnout here in an article by the NY Daily News). High voter turnout is always a good thing, because it means people are getting involved, and regardless of the outcome, people have made a personal investment in the direction of the country.

The number of voters who turned out is only a fraction of the reason the voters of Massachusetts deserve a Roar of Approval. The larger reason is how they voted. For anyone who doesn’t reside in Massachusetts let me tell you that getting a competitive political race is no small task. It is a state that has three registered Democrats for every registered Republican, a state where 85% of the state legislature are Democrats, a state where all 10 members of the U.S. House of Representatives are Democrats, and a state that hasn’t had a Republican U.S. Senator since 1979, and where the senate seat won by Scott Brown has be a Democrat since 1952. Taking these facts into account it’s very easy to see why this election was considered such an upset, but more than an upset it was revelatory moment. We saw that the voters aren’t stupid and they aren’t sheep. When a combination of factors that people care about converge, like a poor economy, high unemployment, health care, terrorism, and taxes, people are willing to think and vote with an independent mind. Even I am guilty of not giving the voters enough credit, accusing them (during calmer times) of just going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for either a D or an R, depending on political persuasion, without knowing all that much about the candidates, or worse, not voting at all. My previous criticism of voters may have been fair or unfair, but it clearly was not the case in Massachusetts this time around, as they went against their own political stripe in these uncertain times, and came out in droves.

In my ideal world no political parties would exist, and each candidate would have to tell you what they stand for, and what direction they think the country should go, and the voters would have to pay close attention to elections to know who to vote for, not being able to rely on traditional party affiliation. That will probably never happen, but I feel that the election in Massachusetts is probably as close as we will get, where voters looked hard at the candidates and put party politics aside, voting independently and presumably for who they thought would be the best advocate for them. I can’t lie, I never thought I’d say that about Massachusetts, and to steal a line from all those political talking heads, “If it can happen in Massachusetts it can happen anywhere”…and I hope it does.

The U.S. House expenditures for last quarter were released today, and while they were accompanied by the usual sound of a toilet flushing away our tax dollars, there were two surprises. Minnesota Representative Tim Walz and Alabama Representative Spencer Bachus both returned $2,500 that had gone unspent in their budgets to the government, in an effort to help reduce the deficit (read the story from politico.com here). Considering that the national deficit is hovering around 12 trillion, giving back $5,000 won’t do much, but at a time when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spends $2,740 on bottled water, and House Minority Leader John Boehner averages $273.52 per day on catering services, it’s an excellent symbolic gesture. Considering how much money the various House offices blow through, these two Reps. could have spent that excess on anything and it never would’ve been missed, but both of them are outspoken Fiscal Conservatives (one a Democrat and one a Republican), and they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is. That’s something that is often lacking amongst today’s politicians and that is definitely worthy of a “Roar of Approval”.

Wait,…there’s more. Back in 2008 Rep. Walz took a stand against Congressional pay raises, saying that if one was voted through he would refuse it and give the money back to help balance the budget (read the story from The Minnesota Independent). Rep. Bachus has always refused to take cost-of-living increases in the middle of a Congressional term. Could we have two politicians on our hands that actually practice what they preach, and have the best interests of their constituents at heart, rather than their own pocket books (or at the very least, their stylish man-purses)? If that is the case, I’ve got to say it caught me off-guard. I’ve spent too many days reading story after story about political corruption and fraudulent tax spending practices, and I think I’ve grown cynical. It crept over me slowly, like rust growing on some forgotten Studebaker parked in a cornfield somewhere. It wasn’t intentional, but it can effect my opinion, and it’s nice to have these two Representatives snap me out of it with their actions. Thanks guys.

If you’d like to tell Rep. Walz or Rep. Bachus what you think about their decisions, you can contact them by clicking their name.

A few days back I rewarded a “Roar of Approval” to Doug Hoffman and his supporters for bucking the two-party establishment when it violated their principles. Doug Hoffman is the Conservative Party Candidate running for the 23rd Congressional District of New York (read the original post here). He said his main reason for jumping into the race was that he believed Republican Candidate Dede Scozzafava did not represent the conservative values of that district or the Republican Party and that the voters only had the choice between two liberal candidates. He couldn’t have been more right. After many major National GOP leaders supported Hoffman instead of her, Dede Scozzafava dropped out of the race only two days before the election.

That’s not the big news though. The big news is that upon dropping out, she endorsed Democratic Candidate (and former opponent) Bill Owens instead of Hoffman (read the story from Bloomberg.com). Can you recall a time when a Republican Candidate withdrew from an election and endorsed the Democrat that they were running against? I can’t, and maybe it’s because if you think that the Democratic Candidate is worth endorsing for office, why would you run against them in the first place, or better yet, why are you a Republican at all. So again I congratulate Doug Hoffman, not only for bringing validity to a third-party candidate and giving voters another option in a time when decent options are few, but for being able to sniff-out Ms. Scozzafava for what she truly was (she had Newt Gingrich fooled) and doing something about it. In the end, I guess you can pretend to be an elephant, but still just be a donkey.

This is a two-part “Roar of Approval”, but equally worthy on both counts. First, a roar goes out to Conservative Party Congressional Candidate Doug Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman is running in New York’s special election to fill their vacant 23rd Congressional District Seat. So What?  Mr. Hoffman is running as the Conservative Party candidate, and specifically joined the race because he felt that Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava was actually a liberal in conservative clothing, not representing the conservative ideals usually associated with Republicans. He wanted to offer the Constituency of that District a true conservative option on the ballot. This praise of Mr. Hoffman has nothing to do with his politics, but with his principles. Whether or not he’d be a good Congressman is irrelavent, we need more people like Doug Hoffman in this country if we’re ever going to alter the stagnant political landscape. If you don’t like what you’re seeing, get involved. He did.

The second piece of this roar of approval has to do with why we even know about Doug Hoffman. Plenty of third-party candidates have been running for office all over the country for years. There has been Independent, Libertarian, Green Party and so on, so what makes Doug Hoffman’s case so special. He got major political figures from the opposing party to break ranks and support him, and that’s a worthy of mention.  Sarah Palin, Steve Forbes, former Sen. Rick Santorum, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and former Sen. Fred Thompson are just a few power players in the Republican party that have denounced the Republican candidate and publically supported Doug Hoffman (read the full story from Politico here). Ultimately we should never be voting on party lines, we should be voting for the person we think can best do the job, but this rarely happens. Maybe if we were all “Party-Blind” when we stepped into the voting booth we would have to invest a lot more time into researching the candidates to see who that best person is, instead of relying on the good old “R” or “D” next to their names to guide our hand.

Will Doug Hoffman win this election?  It doesn’t matter (and frankly I don’t care). What does matter is whether or not Doug Hoffman (and the Republicans who supported him) represents a chink in the armor of an antiquated two-party system that can often be so entrenched in partisan politics and so deep in the pockets of lobbyists that it doesn’t even know or care about what the voters want. We can only hope so.