“It’s an anti-incumbent year.” This phrase, common in 2010, seems to have a different meaning for each person who uses it.
On its face, it is a simple fact.
In the liberal media, it is offered as a misleading, nonpartisan excuse for clear voter antipathy over President Obama’s very specific agenda of bailouts, stimulus packages and government micromanagement.
For Tea Partiers, “anti-incumbent year” is a rallying cry that suggests a much higher level of bipartisanship than truly exists in their anti-incumbent movement.
In the case of Utah Republican Sen. Robert Bennett’s demise, the truth lies somewhere in between.
Bennett’s poor showing at his state’s party convention means that he will not even appear on the party’s primary ballot. (He has not yet ruled out a write-in campaign this fall.)
As much as liberals in the media — and many triumphalist conservatives — would like to frame Bennett’s ouster as a “moderate versus conservative” battle, the characterization is inaccurate. Bennett is no moderate. On the scale of the American Conservative Union, he rates a lifetime 84 percent. On the shorthand test of modern conservatism — “Where do you stand on guns, babies and taxes?” — he rates an A-plus.
Bennett’s problem was a perception — in some ways fair and in others misleading — that he had become a member of the Washington Club. That perception is proving deadly in 2010, even for legislators normally considered safe. Even for some conservatives.
Bennett’s situation was unique. His ouster was probably only possible because of the Utah GOP’s odd candidate selection process. His detractors spread an alleged quotation from him all over cable television and the Internet, in which Bennett supposedly called the U.S. Constitution “an outmoded document from an agrarian society.”
My efforts to trace the origin of this quote proved vain. It is unverifiable, having allegedly come in a closed-door meeting.
But Bennett did some things that strengthened the perception. He stayed in the Senate for 17 years by breaking his original pledge to limit his own terms.
He became a powerful member of the Senate Appropriations Committee who both engaged in and actively defended the practice of earmarking as a constitutional prerogative of Congress. His vote against a temporary spending freeze last year, which had been proposed by Arizona Sen. John McCain, R, was taken by some as a sign he enjoys playing with other people’s money a bit too much.
Bennett’s opponents used his vote for the TARP bailout against him, to great effect. As Bennett pointed out on his campaign Web site, he had “vigorously opposed the stimulus, the auto bailouts, and all of President Obama’s spending proposals,” but this defense was not enough to satisfy the 3,500 convention delegates whose antipathy sealed his fate on Saturday.
As unfair as Bennett’s defeat might seem, just imagine: If Utah Republican activists are willing to dump a conservative like Bennett over these perceptions, just imagine what 2010 holds in store for the less innocent when they are judged by an even less studied electorate?
It is no accident that as I write this, such “safe” incumbents as House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., and Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., are suddenly retiring. Or that such long-term staples of Congress as Reps. Allen Boyd, D-Fla., and Chet Edwards, D-Texas, are trailing challengers by double-digit margins in new polls.
The Washington Club is breaking up.
David Freddoso is the Examiner’s online opinion editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
