Primary Action

Rich Galen has summarized it this way:

[W]hen the history of this election cycle is written it might be that little Delaware - which has about 100,000 corporate head offices and one Amtrak station as its claims to fame - was actually the fulcrum which showed once and for all that the movement started by CNBC's Rick Santelli in February, 2009 is real and Americans are going to go to the polls to make themselves heard.

If you step back from the four-box shouting matches on the cable news channels and think about it, this is nothing more nor less than the continuation of what Americans were looking for when they elected Barack Obama in 2008.

They wanted change in Washington and they voted for the guy who said he would bring it to them.

Obama, as it turns out, had no idea how to accomplish what he promised and so has failed miserably in bringing that change, but the desire for change has not abated.
The only difference is, in 2008 the Left had the megaphone. In 2010 it is the Right.

The harsh reality of it is: People like me [Galen] just don't get it. This isn't about great tactics and clever campaign commercials. It isn't about winning the news cycle and having a good finance report.

This is about electing people who are going to get the Federal government to stop pressing the handle that has been flushing America's wealth, ingenuity, and capacity for hard work down the toilet bowl of history by promising more and more to people who have produced less and less until no one has anything.

The amusing thing is, although he's close, I’m not sure people like him get it yet. This is a Republican consultant. It was popular in the wake of 2008, at least in college dorm lounges, high school civics classes, and on MSNBC, to wax on the Republican Party going the way of the Whigs. Perhaps. But not for any of the demographic “certainties” that were being touted then.

If it happens, it will be more related to the Beltway’s blind spot displayed by Mr. Mullings here and summarized in an observation that Chesterton once made about the fundamentally human (and also quintessentially American) response in the face of an ongoing, and thereby increasing, nuisance:

Let me alone!

Consider 2008. Yes, the populous was generally tired, or annoyed, with the Long War, but there was little universal clamoring for the rest of the Democrat platform. The financial crisis, with its bailouts, insider deals, political paybacks, crashing 401k’s, and looming lay-offs and pay cuts, is what landed with a thud on the proverbial kitchen tables of the nation and tipped the election so decisively. It was not about change (or hope), per se. We’d been badgered enough.

And in that regard, nothing has changed.