Tuesday’s election offered a bit of good news for advocates of individual rights.
Independents voted overwhelmingly for Republican gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey in yesterday’s election, according to the Associated Press. The decisive Republican victories, Bob McDonnell in Virginia and Chris Christie in New Jersey, are likely to be perceived as a rejection of the unprecedented expansion of government intervention in the economy sponsored by President Barack Obama, who campaigned hard for both losing Democratic Party candidates. Obama, who carried both states in last year’s presidential election, has spent most of the year pushing for socialized medicine and, with serious losses in states where the supposedly charismatic leader campaigned, his supposedly inevitable plan for government control of the medical profession is reportedly off track, with the Senate’s chief Democrat suggesting that it may not pass this year.
While both new Republican governors-elect are apparently anti-abortion, and, therefore, anti-individual rights and consequently not credible advocates of capitalism, neither McDonnell nor Christie apparently campaigned as conservatives that would mix religion and state, as previous Republicans and, recently, Democrats have done. In fact, the only major, high-profile candidate to run on a conservative platform, anti-gay, anti-abortion Doug Hoffman in upstate New York, who was widely expected to win, lost in a stunning upset by the Democrat after a pro-welfare state Republican had been driven out of the race. Hoffman had been endorsed by nearly every conservative advocate of mixing religion and government, including Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich.
To the extent one can take any reading from the election, it is possibly a rejection of both today’s economic fascism by President Obama and the Democrats and the religious government proposed by conservatives and the Republicans … which could be a warning to all politicians that anyone who supports increased government intervention in business (such as Obama’s “health care reform”) and personal affairs, such as banning abortion, risks being fired by the people.
