Nationalizing politics

All politics is local (isn’t that what Tip O’Neill used to say?), but all coverage appears be national — and it is skewing the storyline.

Blanche Lincoln’s escape Tuesday, a narrow win for a conservative, probusiness Democrat in a conservative state, is being spun as a huge loss for organized labor (it wasn’t) and a major rebuff of the Democrats’ flaccid left wing. Democrats, the lesson appears to be (or so the conventional wisdom folks are telling us) that Democrats must move to the right or lose.

Except that two weeks ago, when Joe Sestak knocked off Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter on the same day that Bill Halter forced Lincoln into yesterday’s runoff, the storyline was about muscle-flexing on the left.

I wish they would get their stories straight.

The problem with national coverage of U.S. Sente and House races is that most of the races do not hinge on national issues. These are local races that often turn on local and state-level issues.

When Bill Bradley nearly lost his re-election bid to the U.S. Senate from New Jersey in 1990, it was because the former Knick was seen as out of touch with the Garden State. He refused to take a position on the biggest issue in New Jersey that year — the Florio tax increases — and he allowed a then-relatively unknown Christie Whitman to capitalize and make the race close. (She then parlayed that campaign into two terms in the governor’s mansion)

Chris Christie won the NJ governor’s race in 2009 not because of some kind of national backlash against President Obama, but very simply because he was not Jon Corzine, a governor with approval ratings in the 30s.

Candidates who nationalize these elections often fail to make headway with voters, which is what appears to have happened in Arkansas, where Halter got tremendous help from “outside groups” and Lincoln made it an issue.

But this doesn’t work on national television, so the narratives get rolled out: It is about Obama’s coattails, the Tea Party, an anti-incumbent mood. True, generic polls show voters ready to throw the bums out, but voters do not vote generically and most tend to believe that the bums represent other districts.

We may as yet see a shift in numbers in both houses of Congress toward the Republicans, with a possible shift in majority; that’s normal during off-year races, especially ones during economically volatile times.

But the winners will have won not because of Obama or the Tea Party. Rather, the peculiarities of the local landscape are likely to have the final say.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet