Is the Tea Party Movement a Net Plus for America?

Steve Chapman points out that the Tea Party movement (like any other large group of people) has a few odd characters, but he is delighted that there is a growing mass of citizens who think it's important to restrain government and not impose burdens of future generations.

Here's my first impression of the tea party movement: It's a rabidly right-wing phenomenon with a shaky grasp of history, a strain of intolerance and xenophobia, a paranoia about Barack Obama, and an unhealthy reverence for Fox News. Any movement that doesn't firmly exclude Birchers, birthers, and Islamaphobes is not a movement for me. Here's my second impression of the tea party movement: We are lucky to have it. That's because the tea partiers, who may not all agree on gay marriage or birthright citizenship, are united behind a couple of sound goals: curtailing the cost of government and refusing to live at the expense of future generations. Those are goals that, for eight years, had many rhetorical supporters in Washington, but few authentic champions. Blame that on George W. Bush, who arrived billing himself as a compassionate conservative, a description that was accurate except for the adjective and the noun. Whatever his ideology, his policy was to expand federal spending at a rate unseen since President Lyndon Johnson, the architect of the Great Society. He didn't do it alone, though. Had Bush been a Democrat, Republicans would have fought his budget plans at every turn. But since he was one of theirs, they joined in the spree with gusto, even as they cut taxes and piled up deficits. The prevailing attitude was: Live it up now, and let someone else worry about paying for it later. Budget hawks were left wondering what happened to Republican tightwads, who thought every dollar spent by the government was a dollar that had to be justified as a vital necessity. The tea partiers were dismayed to see these penny-pinchers replaced by poll-driven insiders with an appetite for earmarks. That's one big reason hard-right candidates have scored so many upsets in recent GOP Senate primaries—including Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Joe Miller in Alaska, and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware. They didn't get nominated because they look and sound like the popular image of a savvy, experienced, well-informed, practical-minded U.S. senator. They got nominated because they don't.

Blacks and the Collectivist Plantation

Republican is a dirty word for many African-Americans, often for good reason. But blacks should be equally hostile to Democrats - at least if actual results count for anything. This is the basic message of this video sent to me by a black friend.

The NAACP's Shameful Descent to Partisan Hackery

Deroy Murdock unloads on the NAACP's decision to condemn supposed Tea Party racism. I'm sure there are a handful of cranks and racists at Tea Party events, just as there are similar people at Kiwanis clubs, union halls, insurance conventions, and NAACP meetings. But as Deroy explains, there is nothing racist in the actions or agenda of the Tea Party movement. My two cents, for what it is worth, is that the NAACP is acting like an interest group of the Democratic Party rather than an organization genuinely focused on promoting the interest of black Americans (if they actually did care about the African-American community, school choice would be their top issue).

The NAACP is like a talking G.I. Joe doll with a cord coiled in his back. Pull it, and G.I. Joe says something manly and combative. Pull the NAACP’s string. “Racism!” squawks the shopworn voice. Pull it again. “Bigotry!” it squeals, as it has so many times before. The NAACP was totally justified when it decried the racism and bigotry that the Jim Crow South’s Democrat-led governments mandated by law. In 2010, however, screaming “racism” sounds increasingly delusional, given that America is governed by a black man whom voters comfortably elected in November 2008 and wished well, largely across the political spectrum, on Inauguration Day 2009. ...If the tea-party movement really is fueled by bias, why did they invite a black man like me to address one of the first tea parties in Washington, D.C., on February 26, 2009? Why would these alleged racists invite me to rally an even bigger tea party in Manhattan on July 1, 2009? Did prejudice inspire them to let David Webb, a black man, organize that Times Square event, and also run the New York Tea Party? Did racial insensitivity lead the tea party to showcase Congress of Racial Equality national spokesman Niger Innis, Project 21's Deneen Borelli, and other black conservatives and free-marketeers? ...Some have accused the tea-party movement of being racist just because its huge crowds are mainly white. By that measure, the NAACP should organize a boycott of the New York Philharmonic. I attended its delightful concert in Central Park on Tuesday evening. Gershwin’s beautiful “Rhapsody in Blue” might as well have been a rhapsody in white. Scanning the thousands of faces on the Great Lawn, I spotted only a handful of black ones. What a racist orchestra! Yes, the tea party’s events feature few black faces. This is true at most center-right gatherings. The unfortunate fact is that black Americans tend to be liberal Democrats. President Obama won some 95 percent of the black vote. It should shock no one that those who reject most of Obama’s agenda would attract few of his most ardent supporters. Thus, the tea-party movement is no more racist than an Easter dinner is anti-Semitic because so few Jews show up to eat ham and venerate Jesus of Nazareth.

Considering the NAACP's shameful behavior, here's a card that should be distributed to everyone who voted to condemn the Tea Party movement. It was sent to me, by the way, by a black friend (not Deroy).

Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXVI

Two cheers for House Republicans, who plan on offering an amendment to freeze the pay of federal bureaucrats. There are two reasons, though, why they don't deserve three cheers. First, they should be proposing significant pay cuts, as nations such as Spain and Ireland have implemented. Second, they didn't do anything to rein in excessive pay for government workers when they were in power, so Stenny Hoyer actually is right when he accuses them of playing politics. That being said, I don't complain when politicians do the right thing for the wrong reason. Here's a blurb from the Politico story:

House Republicans will try to force a vote on freezing federal wages when Democrats bring a defense spending bill to the floor Friday afternoon. ...Even though the proposal would be attached to the defense bill, military salaries would be exempt from the pay freeze. The proposal would also freeze pay for members of Congress. ...Republicans say that freezing federal salaries — except for those in the military — would save the government $30 billion in the next decade. The Obama administration intends to increase federal salaries 1.4 percent. ...“We need to reject this cynical ploy to make federal employees a scapegoat for spending after congressional Republicans added trillions to the debt when they were in the majority,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) wrote in an e-mailed statement.

Greetings from Slovakia

I'm in Bratislava, where I spoke at the first stop of the Hayek Institut's seven-nations Free Market Road Show. Slovakia is one of my favorite nations because it has both a flat tax and personal retirement accounts. A new wave of reform may be possible, depending on the outcome of the June 12 elections.

A new liberal (classical liberal, meaning free market) party has been launched, and their campaign's message focuses on representing future generations. Here is the billboard that ones sees in Slovakia. Not sure how it would fly in America, but I certainly wish the party well.

Senator Bennett, R.I.P.

I shed no tears that incumbent Senator Robert Bennett lost his fight to get nominated for a fourth term. His support of the bailout and other big-government policies was a sign that he had become far too comfortable representing established interests and forgot that his job was to defend Utah taxpayers. I've received a couple of emails arguing that Bennett is being victimized because he was "brave" enough to support a bailout that "saved" us from another Great Depression. That is nonsense. Even if one believes that the banking system needed to be recapitalized with government money, it would have been far better to replicate what happened with the S&L bailout 20 years ago. That bailout also cost money, but at least insolvent institutions were shut down, managers were fired, and shareholders were wiped out. Unlike the recent bailout, which rewarded incompetence by propping up the people who made mistakes, the S&L bailout liquidated bankrupt firms and used the money to pay off depositors instead. Not a perfect approach, by any means, but at least it did not exacerbate the problems associated with moral hazard. By the way, I fully agree that the Fed, along with Fannie and Freddie, bear the blame for the financial crisis, but private sector institutions were not obliged to go along for the ride. Simply stated, capitalism without bankruptcy is like religion without hell. Bennett forgot that lesson, so let's celebrate the news in this AP story:

Republican U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah has lost his bid to serve a fourth term after failing to advance past the GOP state convention. Attorney Mike Lee and businessman Tim Bridgewater are the remaining Republican candidates after Saturday's vote. Bennett was a distant third in the voting among roughly 3,500 delegates. He garnered just under 27 percent of the vote. Bridgewater had 37 percent and Lee 35 percent. Bennett is the first incumbent to lose his seat in Washington this year, the victim of a conservative movement angered by rising taxes and the growth of government. Bennett was targeted by tea party activists and other groups for supporting a massive bailout of the financial industry, securing earmarks for his state and for co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill to mandate health insurance coverage.

Don't Give Up on the American People...at Least not Yet

Gloominess and despair are not uncommon traits among supporters of limited government - and with good reason. Government has grown rapidly in recent years and it is expected to get much bigger in the future. To make matters worse, it seems that the deck is stacked against reforms to restrain government. One problem is that 47 percent of Americans are exempt from paying income taxes, which presumably means they no longer have any incentive to resist big government. Mark Steyn recently wrote a very depressing column for National Review Online about this phenomenon, noting that, "By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury." Walter Williams, meanwhile, has a new column speculating on whether this cripple the battle for freedom:

According to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., research organization, nearly half of U.S. households will pay no federal income taxes for 2009...because their incomes are too low or they have higher income but credits, deductions and exemptions that relieve them of tax liability. This lack of income tax liability stands in stark contrast to the top 10 percent of earners, those households earning an average of $366,400 in 2006, who paid about 73 percent of federal income taxes. ...Let's not dwell on the fairness of such an arrangement for financing the activities of the federal government. Instead, let's ask what kind of incentives and results such an arrangement produces and ask ourselves whether these results are good for our country. ...Having 121 million Americans completely outside the federal income tax system, it's like throwing chum to political sharks. These Americans become a natural spending constituency for big-spending politicians. After all, if you have no income tax liability, how much do you care about deficits, how much Congress spends and the level of taxation?

Steyn and Williams are right to worry, but the situation is not as grim as it seems for the simple reason that a good portion of the American people know the difference between right and wrong. Consider some of the recent polling data from Rasmussen, which found that "Sixty-six percent (66%) believe that America is overtaxed. Only 25% disagree. Lower income voters are more likely than others to believe the nation is overtaxed" and "75% of voters nationwide say the average American should pay no more than 20% of their income in taxes." These numbers contradict the hypothesis that 47 percent of Americans (those that don't pay income tax) are automatic supporters of class-warfare policy.

So why are the supposed free-riders not signing on to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda? There are probably several reasons, including the fact that many Americans believe in upward mobility, so even if their incomes currently are too low to pay income tax, they aspire to earn more in the future and don't want higher tax rates on the rich to serve as a barrier. I'm not a polling expert, but I also suspect there's a moral component to these numbers. There's no way to prove this assertion, but I am quite sure that the vast majority of hard-working Americans with modest incomes would never even contemplate breaking into a rich neighbor's house and stealing the family jewelry. So it is perfectly logical that they wouldn't support using the IRS as a middleman to do the same thing.

A few final tax observations:

The hostility to taxation also represents opposition to big government (at least in theory). Rasumssen also recently found that, "Just 23% of U.S. voters say they prefer a more active government with more services and higher taxes over one with fewer services and lower taxes. ...Two-thirds (66%) of voters prefer a government with fewer services and lower taxes."

There is a giant divide between the political elite and ordinary Americans. Rasmussen's polling revealed that, "Eighty-one percent (81%) of Mainstream American voters believe the nation is overtaxed, while 74% of those in the Political Class disagree."

Voters do not want a value-added tax or any other form of national sales tax. They are not against the idea as a theoretical concept, but they wisely recognize the politicians are greedy and untrustworthy. Rasumussen found that "just 26% of all voters think that it is even somewhat likely the government would cut income taxes after implementing a sales tax. Sixty-six percent (66%) believe it’s unlikely to happen."

Fiscal restraint is a necessary precondition for any pro-growth tax reform. If given a choice between a flat tax, national sales tax, value-added tax, or the current system, many Americans want reform, but it is very difficult to have a good tax system if the burden of government spending is rising. Likewise, it would be very easy to have a good tax system if we had a federal government that was limited to the duties outlined in Article I, Section VIII, of the Constitution.

Republicans should never acquiesce to higher taxes. All these good numbers and optimistic findings are dependent on voters facing a clear choice between higher taxes and bigger government vs lower taxes and limited government. If Republicans inside the beltway get seduced into a "budget summit" where taxes are "on the table," that creates a very unhealthy dynamic where voters instinctively try to protect themselves by supporting taxes on somebody else - and the rich are the easiest target.

Last but not least, I can't resist pointing out that I am part of a debate for U.S. News & World Report on the flat tax vs. the current system. For those of you who have an opinion on this matter, don't hesitate to cast a vote.

Obama Delusion Watch (with guest commentary by Jay Leno)

I had to laugh when I saw this article linked on the Drudge Report. Does Obama really think that Democrats in the House will be intimidated by a threat not to campaign for them? Look what wonders Obama did campaigning for Corzine in New Jersey and Coakley in Massachusetts. If he can't boost Democrats in very blue states, I doubt he would be helpful for Blue Dog Democrats from red states. Here's the laugh line from the article:

Barack Obama has said he will not campaign for any Democratic congressmen who fails to support health care reform.

Jay Leno was much more accurate when he joked the other night that, "President Obama turned the heat up on Congress to pass healthcare reform. He’s telling Democrats if they don’t vote for this bill, he will campaign for them in November."

Politicians Are the Enemy, not Rich People

Politicians like to play a class-warfare game of demonizing rich people. Walter Williams explains, though, that rich people can only do bad things to us if they are conspiring with politicians. The moral of the story, of course, is that government is a threat to our freedom and liberty:

Bill Gates is the world's richest person, but what kind of power does he have over you? Can he force your kid to go to a school you do not want him to attend? Can he deny you the right to braid hair in your home for a living? It turns out that a local politician, who might deny us the right to earn a living and dictates which school our kid attends, has far greater power over our lives than any rich person. Rich people can gain power over us, but to do so, they must get permission from our elected representatives at the federal, state or local levels. For example, I might wish to purchase sugar from a Caribbean producer, but America's sugar lobby pays congressmen hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to impose sugar import tariffs and quotas, forcing me and every other American to purchase their more expensive sugar. Politicians love pitting us against the rich. All by themselves, the rich have absolutely no power over us. To rip us off, they need the might of Congress to rig the economic game. It's a slick political sleight-of-hand where politicians and their allies amongst the intellectuals, talking heads and the news media get us caught up in the politics of envy as part of their agenda for greater control over our lives. ...While American politicians and intellectuals have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision. Tyrants denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are the chief supporters of reduced private property rights, reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly. They are pro-control and coercion, by the state.

Good Advice for Republicans from Tom Sowell

I've always been mystified by GOP politicians, pollsters, and consultants who argue that the GOP needs to support big government in order to win votes. The biggest victories for Republicans in living memory, after all, are the 1980 and 1994 landslides, when the GOP was most aggressive in promoting an anti-government message. The big-government, compassionate-conservative message of Bush, by contrast, led to electoral debacles in 2006 and 2008. Tom Sowell has been addressing the strange predilection of some Republicans to tack left. In his third column of the series, Sowell explains that the GOP should use an explicitly conservative message to appeal to black voters rather than foolishly assuming that a "me-too" platform will somehow work:

One of the things that is long overdue is some Republican re-thinking-- or perhaps thinking for the first time-- about the approach that they have been using, with consistently disastrous results, for trying to get the black vote. ...There is no point today in Republicans continuing to try to win over the average black voter by acting like imitation Democrats. Those who like what the Democrats are doing are going to vote for real Democrats. ...[Blacks] want their children to get a decent education, which they are unlikely to get so long as public schools are a monopoly run for the benefit of the teachers' unions, instead of for the education of the children. Democrats are totally in hock to the teachers' unions, which means that Republicans have a golden opportunity to go after the votes of black parents by connecting the dots and exposing one of the key reasons for bad education in inner cities and the bad consequences that follow. But when have you ever heard a Republican candidate get up and hammer the teachers' unions for blocking every attempt to give parents-- black or white-- the choice of where to send their children? The teachers' unions are going to be against the Republicans, whether Republicans hammer them or keep timidly quiet. Why not talk straight to black voters about the dire consequences of the pubic school monopoly that the teachers' unions and the Democrats protect at all cost, even though many private schools-- notably the KIPP schools in various states-- have achieved remarkable success with low-income and minority youngsters?

In his fourth column in the series, Sowell makes the common-sense point that a squishy, moderate message winds up appealing to nobody. That doesn't guarantee a lost election, to be sure. As Bush and Nixon showed, a milquetoast Republican can prevail if facing an incompetent Democrat in the right national climate, but those often turn out to be Pyrrhic victories since they often set the stage for big Democratic victories in the future. As Sowell notes, Reagan is the right model for the GOP:

A long-standing battle within the Republican Party, going back at least as far as the 1940s, is between those who want the party to clearly differentiate itself from the Democrats and those who seek a broader appeal by catering to a wider spectrum of social and ideological groups. The "smart money" advocates a "big tent" and deplores those who want a clearer adherence to the kinds of ideas espoused by Ronald Reagan. What the "smart money" fails to explain is how Reagan won two landslide presidential elections in a row. He certainly didn't do it by trying to act like Democrats. That's how the Republicans later turned off their own supporters, without gaining enough other voters to keep from being wiped out by the Democrats in two consecutive elections. ...When you try to waffle and be all things to all people, you can end up being nothing to anybody. That is where the "smart money" crowd have gotten the Republicans in recent years.

Four Lessons from Massachusetts

While there is always a tendency in Washington to over-analyze the meaning of elections, I think that we can draw the following conclustions from Scott Brown's victory:

1. Obamacare is an albatross for the Democrats. The White House wants to blame Coakley for being a bad candidate, but Massachusetts is a very left-wing state. Every single member of its congressional delegation is a Democrat. It went for Obama by 26 percentage points. It has sent reflexive statists like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry to the Senate for decades. Yes, Scott Brown was a good candidate, but good GOP candidates normally lose 60-40 in the Bay State. It's hard to draw any conclusion other than the fact that voters were registering disapproval with what is happening in Washington, and healthcare was at the top of their list.

2. Democrats should ram through government-run healthcare. I hope they don't, of course, but smart Democrats understand that Obamacare is not (and never has been) about health care, but rather about creating more dependency on government. Yes, Democrats will lose more seats in November if they move forward, but they presumably will strengthen their long-term political status by making more people rely on politicians.

3. Obama is not a centrist. A few people were under the illusion that Barack Obama was something other than a doctrinaire statist. This always struck me as absurd, since a quick look at the NTU vote ratings reveals that he received an "F" every single year and generally was graded as being worse than even Ted Kennedy. I suppose the charitable interpretation of why people got snookered is that Obama's rhetoric during the presidential election was very bland and he projects a thoughtful demeanor. But so what? Obama and his strategists knew the Republicans had spent their way into a ditch and that voters wanted a change. Obama simply had to appear semi-reasonable to win, and that's exactly what he did. Ever since he took office, though, he has pushed to make government bigger and more oppressive. Voters don't like that. They rejected Republicans for being for big government. Now they're rejecting Democrats for the same reason.

4. The GOP succeeds when it presents a conservative alternative. Scott Brown is presumably not another Jim DeMint, but his campaign rhetoric was very conservative by Massachusetts standards: For lower taxes, against government-run healthcare, for less spending. That message has worked very well for the GOP when it is a national theme, as it was in 1980 and 1994. When Republicans try to be "compassionate" (with other people's money, of course), by contrast, they get debacles like what happened in 1992, 2006 and 2008. This doesn't mean Republicans will always win by being conservative and it doesn't mean squishy Republicans never win, but it does mean that the GOP's long-term success is tied to whether taxpayers perceive Republicans as protecting America from big government. I'm not sure the national GOP really understands this, but they're at least pretending to be for small government again. That's a start.

Want to Know Who Will Win in Massachusetts?

Everyone in Washington is fixated on the special election in Massachusetts next Tuesday to replace Ted Kennedy. Some polls now show the Republican, Scott Brown, in the lead, which is a shocking result even if Martha Coakley eventually wins. A GOP victory doubtlessly would make Democrats very nervous about ramming through government-run health care, so Republicans are celebrating new polling data showing Brown in the lead.

But if you want to know who is going to win (or at least have a very informed opinion), don't pay attention to polls. Instead, check out the Intrade betting market, which predicts winners based on people putting real money at risk. Intrade does show a large shift away from Coakley in the last week, but it's still a very close battle.

Here's some more interesting Intrade data showing the betting on the 2008 presidential election. It shows that McCain actually took the lead right after the GOP convention, boosted perhaps by the Palin selection. But when McCain rushed to Washington to support the bailout - and made a public spectacle of screwing over taxpayers - his numbers fell through the floor and never recovered.

Story on GOP Hypocrisy Illustrates that Sometimes It's Better to Lose an Election

The Associated Press nails the GOP for budget hypocrisy, pointing out that a majority of Republicans voted for Bush's reckless Medicare expansion. This story gives me an excuse to pontificate on why fans of limited government and free markets should not blindly link themselves with the Republican Party. And sometimes they should even hope Republicans lose. There is a very strong case to be made, for instance, that big-government RINOs such as Bush (on economic policy issues) are far more dangerous to economic liberty than Democrats. Not only do they expand government while in power, they create a fertile environment for Democrats, with their out-of-the-closet statism, to gain power and impose even more government.

That certainly has happened this decade. Bush's profligacy slowed the economy and discouraged the GOP base, which (combined with unhappiness about his nation-building exercise in Iraq) helped deliver the House and Senate to Democrats in 2006 and the White House to Obama in 2008. It is quite likely, by contrast, that the GOP would control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue today if Kerry had won the 2004 election. A Kerry victory almost certainly would have enabled Republicans to hold the House and Senate in 2006. And since Kerry would have followed Bush's big-government interventionist policies, the bailout would have occurred on his watch, making it quite likely that the GOP would have enjoyed a strong year in 2008. There may have been some damage to liberty caused by a Kerry presidency (above and beyond the damage caused by Bush), but nothing compared to the damage now being imposed by Obama, Pelosi, and Reid. Food for thought. If nothing else, this AP story shows that we'd be better off if politicians of both parties stayed home all year long:

Republican senators attacking the cost of a Democratic health care bill showed far different concerns six years ago, when they approved a major Medicare expansion that has added tens of billions of dollars to federal deficits. The inconsistency — or hypocrisy, as some call it — has irked Democrats, who claim that their plan will pay for itself with higher taxes and spending cuts and cite the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for support. By contrast, when Republicans controlled the House, Senate and White House in 2003, they overcame Democratic opposition to add a deficit-financed prescription drug benefit to Medicare. The program will cost a half-trillion dollars over 10 years, or more by some estimates. With no new taxes or spending offsets accompanying the Medicare drug program, the cost has been added to the federal debt. ..."As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt," said Bruce Bartlett, an official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He made his comments in a Forbes article titled "Republican Deficit Hypocrisy." Bartlett said the 2003 Medicare expansion was "a pure giveaway" that cost more than this year's Senate or House health bills will cost.

The Left's Real Agenda

An honest statist at the New Yorker openly admits that a key purpose of Obamacare is to create a new entitlement that will make people more dependent on government and therefore more likely to support Democrats. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page admires Mr. Cassidy's honesty, but obviously is troubled by the implications. For what it's worth, Cassidy's argument is very similar to the one made by Bill Clinton's pollster back in the early 1990s, so we can't say we haven't been warned what the left wants:

...let's give credit to John Cassidy, part of the left-wing stable at the New Yorker, who wrote last week on its Web site that "it's important to be clear about what the reform amounts to." Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. "The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment," he writes. "Let's not pretend that it isn't a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won't. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind." Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of "making the United States a more equitable country" and furthering the Democrats' "political calculus." In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.

New Jersey and Obamacare

Yesterday's elections were almost a complete disaster for the White House. In the races for governor, the GOP won a huge landslide in Virginia and knocked off the Democratic incumbent in New Jersey. The only silver lining to Obama's dark cloud came in upstate New York, where the collectivist Republican nominee apparently was successful in helping the Democratic candidate beat the Conservative Party candidate.

But this was a 99 percent defeat for the Obama Administration. Especially New Jersey.

From a policy perspective, it will make Democrats on Capitol Hill much more nervous about supporting government-run health care. This does not guarantee the defeat of Obamacare, but it is much less likely now than it was 24 hours ago.