Had Enough “Hope and Change”?

One of my daughters drove up north with some friends to stay overnight at a lake cabin earlier this weekend. Somewhere northeast of Minneapolis they passed a billboard that said, “Had enough ‘HOPE AND CHANGE’?” The billboard depicted a pair of hands feeding the Constitution into a shredder.
The rebellion against Washington Democrats is spreading and building in intensity. The point of the spear, so to speak, is the Tea Party movement. The Gallup Poll has some interesting data on Tea Partiers:

Self-described Tea Party supporters differ from those neutral or opposed to the movement on the issues they perceive as threats to the future of the United States, most notably federal government debt and the size and power of the federal government. They are essentially indistinguishable from those who do not support the Tea Party in their perceptions of unemployment and racial discrimination as future threats to the country.

No surprise there; and no support, of course, for the demagogues who try to associate the Tea Party with race. Here are some of the basic numbers; click to enlarge:
GallupPoll9082.jpg
Basically, Tea Partiers are people who have a more sophisticated understanding of current events than those who describe themselves as anti-Tea Party. Anyone who doesn’t realize that the exploding federal debt represents a serious threat to our future either is a fool, or doesn’t have children. (That, actually, would make for an interesting survey.)
The responses on terrorism are interesting, too: there is evidently a common thread between obliviousness to the dangers of debts we can’t pay and to the dangers of Islamic terrorism, but it is hard to see what that common thread might be, other than blind, stupid loyalty to the Democratic Party.
As the economic news continues to worsen, voters are appropriately growing more surly. That is reflected, I think, in this Rasmussen survey finding that 60% of likely voters–a figure that matches the all-time high–want Obamacare repealed. Maybe that is due to recent news reports about the effects of the government takeover bill, perhaps in part due to a general lack of confidence in the administration’s economic competence.
Disillusion with the Obama administration, which can hardly be disentangled from disgust with the Reid/Pelosi regime in Congress, is reaching dangerous levels–dangerous, anyway, if you’re a Democratic office-holder. In the Washington Post, Chris Cillizza points out that President Obama’s approval rating among whites is almost exactly the same as President Bush’s was two years ago. (I had forgotten, actually, that in 2008 Obama lost the white vote by 12 points. This was, however, a significant improvement on John Kerry’s performance.) It took President Bush seven and a half years to fall to that level; Obama, just 18 months.
For the Democrats, the ticking time bomb is the Gulf oil spill. We are now on, what, day 73? Something like that. The federal government has yet to figure out an effective response to the spill, and as time goes by, more and more information leaks out about the incompetence of the administration’s performance. We have written about that topic repeatedly and will continue to do so, but the fact is that the damage to Democrats will result much more from the brute fact of the spill’s persistence and ongoing environmental damage than from revelations about the administration’s bungling.
It may not be fair, but the President is viewed largely as a good-luck symbol, and he is held responsible, justly or not, when things go badly. Obama can hardly complain; he is President today mostly because, by sheer chance, the international debt crisis struck in late 2008, the last months of the Bush administration, rather than in early 2009.
Today tar balls began washing up on Texas beaches. They are expected in the Everglades and, up the east coast, in Miami before long. The oil spill will generate headlines and bleed enthusiasm for Democratic rule until November and beyond.
One more thing: the biggest tax increase in American history is scheduled for January 1, 2011, less than two months after the election. The Democrats apparently have decided to defer any discussion of next year’s tax rates in Congress until after the election, on the theory that if voters focus on the huge tax increases the Democrats have in store for them, their members will be tarred and feathered rather than just defeated in the midterm elections. I find it hard to believe, however, that the Dems will be able to keep the topic of tax increases off the table until the first Wednesday after the first Monday in November. If you need a reminder as to how, exactly, the Democrats intend to assault your bank account, go here. Read it and weep.
Put it all together, and there is reason to believe that the Democrats will face a tsunami of voter anger in November. Let’s hope so; as an email correspondent likes to say, it is November or never.

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