The NY-09

Image credit: NationalAtlas.gov

The results are in for the special election in New York's 9th Congressional District, the one formerly occupied by Anthony Weiner until he was told to resign by the Democratic House "leadership". It's not good if you're a Democratic Party partisan:

[T]onight we have another body blow to [the] Democratic Party and it is a VERY bad one. Losing this seat, at the heart of New York City, home to so much party history, will be terrible. Weprin’s GOP opponent Turner effectively turned the race into a referendum on Obama, his weakness on the economy and smeared POTUS on being “weak” on Israel. And it appears to have worked.

Progressive Notes: Race Called for Turner in NY-09 in Disaster for Dems

The Associated Press page for the election shows at this time (11:50 PM PDT) that Turner is ahead by almost 5,000 votes, and that the percentages look to be 54-46. The Socialist Workers' Party candidate received only 277 votes, so he was not a factor.

If there's anything that says "I am a pathetic excuse for a political party leader", it's forcing out a member of your own party for an offense that's little more than a bad joke, begging the people whom he was doing a good job of representing for money to replace him with a party drone in what should have been a safe district, and then losing by eight points.

Well, maybe this does. If you look at who among the Democrats in Congress have been investigated for “ethics” problems lately, you notice that just about all of them were people who spoke badly of the leadership‘s work on health care "reform". Eric Massa was forced out over making inappropriate overtures to a congressional staffer. Maxine Waters was supposedly being investigated for some vague sort of conflict of interest that turned out (surprise!) to be nothing at all. Pete Stark was investigated for a similarly insubstantial thing. Weiner was forced out for e-mailing a photo of his penis to consenting adults. None of them did anything that really merited more than censure, and in Waters and Stark’s case there appears to have been nothing at all. Yet Weiner and Massa were both forced out, and in Massa's case it was only the appearance of a Tea Party candidate that saved that district from going Republican, too.

When those people were under investigation, and yet Pelosi took impeachment off the table for Bush (and Obama, too, effectively), I think it just showed how little accountability means to the Democrats in DC. It's nothing more than a hammer to use on people who get out of line. It also shows how little being in control of Congress means. They've decreased their chances by forcing out two congressmen, and trying to embarrass two others for petty political considerations.

I’m hoping that someone does an after-election poll similar to the one done by Democracy For America after the loss in the Massachusetts Senate race. In that one, the two things that turned off potential Democratic voters were:

1. the economy
2. the health care bill

I warned at the time that this was a portent, as did others. It didn’t do any good, though. They just passed the crappy health care "reform" bill that the MA voters didn’t like, then they punted on the economy. Jane Hamsher commissioned those polls on a few Blue Dog congressmen that said that they were in trouble because of the economy and the lousy health care reform bill, and all the “experts” could do was tell us how flawed those polls were. Then they lost big in 2010, and all the same people are still in positions of leadership. But to hear these guys talk about it, I and all those other people who saw all that coming are the idiots.

So, I’d like to see another of those polls. I hope someone has the nerve to commission one this time. I bet that the voters’ first problem will be with the economy. Health care might not be the second-biggest issue, but it will be in one of the principal areas where the Obama Administration has been such a huge failure – the wars, the perpetual state of fear, the failure to regulate the banks. They’ve given us voters plenty to choose from.