Mute all those cable TV pundits. The commentator who has the best grasp on what happened in Massachusetts this week is none other than President Barack Obama. It was a change election, he said Wednesday, just like his own.
In 2008, Obama won a solid majority by rolling up an eight-point margin with independents. His race, his youth, his political inexperience cast him as the antithesis of the despised “Washington insider.” These non-aligned voters warmed especially to Obama’s “post partisan” promise to put the nation’s interests above those of political careerists, partisan hacks and rent-seeking interest groups.
On Tuesday, Massachusetts independents — many of whom had voted for Obama — backed little-known Republican Scott Brown, who improbably captured Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat by running an insurgent campaign against politics as usual in both Springfield and Washington.
And not just in Massachusetts. Independents also propelled GOP gubernatorial victories last fall in Virginia and New Jersey. According to an Allstate/National Journal poll, the president’s approval rating among independents has fallen 17 points, to 44 percent, since April.
Evidently, America’s swing voters are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. What’s got them so riled up?
Read the full column at Sphere.com.
