You know who's having a really bad night...The Philadelphia 76ers. With about 88 percent of their game with Boston Celtics completed, the Sixers have only tallied just over 39 percent of the total points. Attytood -- with no help from any of the Bush cousins -- projects that the Celtics as the winner in this contest. We're not ready to make a projection in the New Jersey governor's race, but incumbent Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine only did a tad better than Iguodala & Co. Minutes ago, here like Springsteen fanatic (yay!) and Mets fan (boo!) and corrupt (double boo!) overweight dude Chris Christie was projected as the next govenor of the Garden State. Ineed, it looks like a good night for Republicans across the board.
A repudiation of Obama? Yes and no.
Corzine's defeat is largely the result of his own unpopularity, which in turn is the result of continuing a generation of Democratic corruption in New Jersey, and of harsh economic measures that to some degree were necessitated by the recession (being from the evil empire of Goldman Sachs didn't help Corzine either). The early results suggest that the independent campaign of Chris Daggett collapsed in the last few days -- voters are smarter than people give them credit for, and apparently they realized that a vote for Daggett was a vote for Corzine. And people didn't want four more years of Corzine.
Obama himself seems fairly popular across the river, with an approval rating of 57 percent among those who voted in the New Jersey election. In fact, Christie even ran a Web ad that seeked to tie himself to the Obama phenomenon, hardly the mark of a failed presidency.
So how is the election a repudiation of Obama? Exit polls suggest that voter turnout tonight was low among people under the age of 30, as well as minority voters -- i.e., the people who gave the president his margin of victory in 2008. Some of that is just inevitable -- college kids are just not going to vote at the same rate as 60-year-old Glenn Beck watching couch potatoes in a non-presidential election, no matter who's on the ballot. But it would help if Obama and the Democrats would give young voters and the rest of the party's base something to get excited about; so far the White House's brand of incrementalism and its tail-chasing bogus pursuit of bipartisanism is simply not going to cut it.
For Obama, he's got three years to figure out how to recapture the spirit of '08. And now Jon Corzine will have plenty of free time to watch how he does it.
UPDATE: The worst thing to be tonight was neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but the party in power. While voters bounced the Democrats out of the statehouses in New Jersey in Virginia, incumbent New York mayor Michael Bloomberg -- whatever he is these days -- just narrowly won a third term after spending a whopping $100 million to ensure his victory. And in that hotly contested congressional race in upstate New York, the split between traditional Republicans and the Glenn Beck crowd is handing victory to the Dems for the first time in this seat since the 19th Century
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
E-mail Will by clicking here.
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