Editorial: In most states, a win for responsibility

11/10/2005

“Voters were ready for substance and candor.”

Star Tribune Editorial

It’s dangerous to read any one message into Tuesday’s national election results, especially with so many ballot measures sprinkled across so many states.

A shot in the arm for Democrats? Probably. A referendum on President Bush? Perhaps. But the broadest and most encouraging theme seems to be that Americans embraced responsible government and leaders who behave like grownups.

In California, voters rejected Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s simplistic promise of reform by proposition. In New Jersey, which chose Democrat Jon Corzine for governor, voters rebuked the politics of personal smear. In Virginia’s race for governor, voters chose a Democrat who had been brave enough to support a tax increase when he saw it was essential to the state budget. And in New York City, voters reelected Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican who raised taxes, cut crime, improved the schools and ran his city with executive efficiency.

“You can make tough decisions and be reelected, as long as they are the right decisions,” Bloomberg said Tuesday night. We think so, and it appears voters agree.

Perhaps the biggest loser on Tuesday was not any one politician, but Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, who has built a political movement around the proposition that you don’t need government and you shouldn’t have to pay for it.

That notion doesn’t seem so convincing after a year when the government visibly failed to respond effectively to Hurricane Katrina, when U.S. troops died in Iraq for lack of adequate armor, when schools laid off thousands of teachers and when the U.S. Treasury borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars from China because Congress won’t ask Americans to pay for the public services they receive.

About a year ago, an adviser to President Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people who live in “the reality-based community” no longer understand how the world works. “When we act, we create our own reality,” he said. Well, vision and persuasion are powerful forces in politics. But today it seems that Americans like to keep one foot in reality.