The victory by Republican Bob Turner over Democrat David Welprin in the special election to fill the seat vacated by Anthony Weiner in the New York 9th congressional district has Democrats feeling something close to panic.
Victories by the opposition party in special elections are often seen as harbingers of trouble to come for the party in power. When such a victory occurs in a bluest of blue districts such as New York 9th, that wake-up call should be considered deafening. When one considers that New York’s 9th was once held by Chuck Schumer, now an uberliberal Senator, and that it was last held by a Republican at the beginning of the Coolidge administration, that wake-up call should be seen as the equivalent of a nuclear blast.
The victory by Turner is being touted as being similar to the victory by Scott Brown in the race to fill the Senate seat in Massachusetts vacated when Teddy Kennedy died. It is much more than that. Turner, according to the Washington Post, ran as an anti Obama, deficit and tax cutting, tea party candidate. Turner won by about six points, a convincing win in a district regularly carried by Democrats by double digits.
Turner also attacked Obama’s Middle East policy, especially in regards to Israel. Dan Senor, writing for the Wall Street Journal, suggests that Turner’s win signals a collapse of support for Obama among Jewish Americans, irate at the hostile stance the Obama administration has taken toward Israel. This sentiment was oddly echoed by DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who blames the prevalence of culturally conservative Orthodox Jews for Turner’s defeat of Obama.
The question now arises, how will the Obama administration and the Democrats respond to the thumping it has received in the New York race and a second special election in Nevada? Obama ignored the Scott Brown victory and went full steam ahead to ram through health care reform. The political tsunami of 2010 resulted in the lost of the House and an erosion of the Democratic majority in the Senate.
If the Democrats ignore what happened in New York and Nevada, perhaps hoping that a nominee like Rick Perry or Sarah Palin could be beaten by Obama, they may set themselves up for a defeat in 2012 of historic proportions, the equivalent of what happened to Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Source: Yahoo! News
