A response without substance-less snark. Color me stunned.
Blah, blah, blah.
Larry Pressler walked into a closet thinking it was an exit, and was routinely rated one of the more dimwitted members of the Senate. But he still got sh**t done for South Dakota and upheld a number of conservative principles that the voters supported. On the other side of the aisle, Patty Murray is far from a nuclear scientist, but she votes from a liberal angle, which is what people in Seattle want. So they vote for her.Seems like
she knows enough compared to perpetual candidate Dino Rossi.
This is complete garbage.
American voters, for the most part, don't care about someone's
policy. They don't have some sort of solid set of principles that they stick to election after election, that's completely ridiculous. Sure, most Democrats usually vote for Democrats and most Republicans usually vote for Republicans, but all those "swing" and "Independent" voters jerk wildly back and forth so often that it is
impossible to suggest that those voters have any sort of coherent ideology.
Ohio voted comfortably for Sherrod Brown in 2006, easily one of the most left-wing Senators Ohio has ever really had. Brown is probably one of the most populist anti-trade Senators in the chamber.
Rob Portman was elected by an even wider margin than Sherrod Brown was, even though
most Ohio voters (
two thirds!) oppose free trade deals such as NAFTA on the grounds that it hurts the Ohio economy. Rob Portman is one of the most rabidly free trading individuals you could ask for, he was the
number one recipient of money from the insurance industry and commercial banks this year.Ohio is just one example. If you sit down and look at a bunch of different races, you could come up with a dozen more. Voters in Ohio clearly didn't change their minds about trade or business, or whathaveyou. The large margin in favor of Portman makes no sense if you try to arrive at explanations under the assumption that American voters actually have some sort of coherent ideology and set of principles that determine their votes.
Americans don't vote on
policy. If they did there would be at least a shred of some sort of consistency in voting patterns and who wins. People vote based on stupid news stories, nonsense issues, national "mood", personality, how their friends vote, etc. You are
wildly overestimating the intelligence of the average American voter if you think there is any sort of coherence to their choices.
People blame Obama for TARP. A decent chunk of the population doesn't think Obama was born in the United States. A large portion of the voters think that healthcare reform has "death panels" that will kill the elderly. Most republicans, if not most voters over all, erroneously think that Obama has raised taxes and refuse to believe the stimulus included any sort of cuts. The list of popular public misconceptions that are routinely abused goes on and on and they approach a level of absurdity that I can't find any sort of equivalent to in the recent American political history.
Sure, people vote based on the lesser of two evils from time to time, it's a sad reality of our political system, but that has nothing to do with this. The tea party movement was basically based on the idea that there is no such thing as a "lesser of two evils" option for them. Where do you even think Marco Rubio and Rick Scott came from?
Influenced by tea party thought, Rubio rose to prominence on the basis that Crist was far too moderate to elect to the Senate (even though the only moderate thing about him was something other Republicans supported privately but publicly said they hated, the Stimulus) because the far right didn't want someone who voted with them 80 or even 90 percent of the time, they wanted Marco Rubio. Rick Scott won because he was considered the "tea party candidate" because he was more solidly right-wing than his opponent.
Joe Miller was the tea party candidate and rose to prominence because Republican primary voters thought Lisa Murkowski was too moderate to support, even though she is, for the most part, a doctrinaire conservative. Christine O'Donnell became the primary winner in Delaware because Republicans in the primary didn't want someone who voted with them the vast majority of the time, they wanted a purist. Rand Paul won the primary because his opponent was considered too moderate.
All of these people rose to power and far, far more because the entire movement, the entire influence of the movement, what the
very movement itself was based on was refusing to accept people who were establishment candidates (supposedly) and wanting candidate who were far-right wing purists on policy, not even a teeny tiny bit out of right-wing-ville.
Nearly half of Indiana voters identify with or support the values of the tea party. For those people to vote for Dan Coats is a freaking
joke. Coats is the very definition of an insider. It's completely inconsistent with the supposed values of this crackpot "movement." Do I expect those people to stay home and not vote? Perhaps not, but it's no less inconsistent, no less completely hypocritical, no less
stupid, regardless of that. You can find dozens of examples like this guy.
It's precisely the same for someone like Art Robinson to get nearly 115,000 votes. I don't care if he's the lesser of two evils, the guy is downright insane. AIDS is a government conspiracy, low-level radiation is good for you, selling home-school curriculum with books from a racist author, the list goes on. So what if dude is the "lesser of two evils" (even though that is clearly a phenomenon that the tea party is supposedly inherently opposed to), he's still a psycho and there's no justification for voting for someone like that anyway.
You may think so for some absurd reason, but I can't even think of any sort of left-wing equivalent to an Art Robinson. Alan Grayson was crazy and bombastic at times, but even he at his worst just called Republicans "neanderthals" and his screed on the house floor about Republicans was basically just a tasteless variant of "Republicans hate the poor." You can't really compare people like that, even though it might be cute to try.
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