That was quick. Not even a month into the first session of Congress and already Sen. Jim Webb, narrow victor over George Allen in Virginia and chosen by Dems to deliver their response to the President’s state of the union speech, has a negative approval rating among his constituents.
I think that’s significant as it sort of flies in the face of this idea of a “mandate” to pursue a liberal agenda Democrats have been pushing. Immediately after the election Pelosi and her Democrats claimed that America called for a “new direction” in political leadership. The Dems, amplified by the media, have also been saying that the election was a comment from Americans about Iraq. Yet is that true?
Webb has certainly been outspoken in his opposition to the President’s policies on Iraq, yet here he is with a negative approval rating right out of the gate. What does that tell us?
It tells me that the election was less a referendum on Iraq than it was a simple rejection of Republicans who had grown arrogant and corrupt while in power. When 15 of the campaigns Republicans lost in the House, and three of the campaigns they lost in the Senate, can be directly tied to scandal and controversy you can hardly say that the Democrats who picked up those seats really earned them with their policy ideas. And when Republicans, the supposed party of limited government and low taxes, are beat out by Democrats as the party who will most likely cut taxes and lower spending there is clearly something wrong.
Republicans lost the last election because some of them were corrupt, a few more were involved in personal scandals and a whole lot of them had abandoned the conservative principles of limited government and low spending that got them into power in the first place. The Dems were able to cash in on the Republicans shooting themselves in the foot, but that doesn’t mean the election was an endorsement of their policies (or that it was a punishment for Republicans and their stance on the war in Iraq), though it’s not surprising that this is what they’d like you to believe.
I suspect that a lot of the Democrats who took out incumbent Republicans in the last election are going to be suffering low approval numbers just as Webb is. That’s because most of those Dems didn’t win on their own merits but rather the demerits of their opponents.