In case you missed it last Tuesday while you were out, say, having a life, the residents of New York's 20th congressional district held a special election to fill the seat of congresswoman-turned-Senator Kirsten Gillibrand '88. For the ideologues, partisans, spin-doctors and diehard political junkies that breathlessly awaited the results, the night was a spectacular disappointment. It ended with the tallies essentially tied, and the race much too close to call. Ties are terrible for political analysts, and horribly boring for more casual observers. Electoral outcomes are, of course, important for determining who has political power and how much, but they're equally important in allowing parties to drive a favorable narrative and influence public opinion toward their respective policy agendas. Last Tuesday, there wasn't much in the way of political power at stake, as a single vote in the House is a relative drop in the bucket compared with the Democrats' commanding majority. For politicos on both sides, however, the messaging implications were potentially enormous.
Had Republican and state Minority Leader Jim Tedisco won, it would have added to a streak of much-needed and morale-boosting GOP electoral successes. Embattled Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele would have temporarily silenced his critics, notching his first win and giving some reasons for optimism to depressed and financially tapped Republican donors. More importantly, the right-wing media machine, from Sean Hannity to Rush Limbaugh, could have spent the next few weeks touting the election as a referendum on President Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats' spending-heavy policies, and extrapolating general dissatisfaction from the outcome. It would have been a much-needed shot in the arm for the wounded elephants, and a chance for the rest of us to dust off our "Fox News is corrupt" jokes.
Had Democratic businessman and political featherweight Scott Murphy won, the Democrats could have continued their thus-far-successful narrative that Americans are tired of failed Republican policies. They could have reveled in winning one of the few districts north of the Mason-Dixon line with a Republican party-identification advantage, and we all likely would have been treated to yet another hilariously condescending "special comment" from MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.
Either of those scenarios would have been loads of fun. Imagining another call to uprising from Daily Kossack Markos Moulitsas and Open Left's David Sirota or another profanity-laced tirade from Fox News' Bill O'Reilly certainly has my heart racing. Alas, election night left us with a tie, and what can one do with a tie? By the time the outcome is decided, probably in a Minnesota-style court battle, the window during which one might have swayed the public will have long since passed. Does anyone, government majors aside, still care who wins the agonizing battle between comedian Al Franken and former Senator Norm Coleman? Both parties will spend an obscene amount of money contesting what ultimately amounts to a single vote washed away in a Dem-dominated chamber.
Fun as it would have been to watch talking heads attempt to extrapolate a national political mood from a bunch of upstate New Yorkers, it is equally amusing that they would have been able to make such claims with a straight face. So desperate are the warring ideologues to score political points each news cycle that they actually try to tell us that what happens in Sarasota County is a good reflection of what voters are thinking in, say, Pensacola, Fla., or Elkhart, Ind.
Maybe, just maybe, the ideologues would better serve the American public by using their resources and intellect to come up with new and dynamic ideas to fix our struggling economy, bridge our societal divides, reduce crime, improve \education, solve the health care mess, repair our unresponsive bureaucracy and solve our numerous foreign relations quagmires -- instead of just trying to force-feed an obvious load of self-serving garbage to a weary and bruised public. Maybe upstate New Yorkers weren't passing judgment on the effectiveness of massive government spending programs, just weeks after their passage, and long before a lion's share of the money had even been spent. Maybe they were just asking themselves whether Mr. Tedisco or Mr. Murphy was more sincere in his desire to help them through these hard times. Maybe that's what Americans want: sincerity instead of mindless bleating.
Then again, if Americans actually cared about sincerity, they probably would have voted out every incumbent last November.
