The national debt, rising healthcare costs, unrelenting unemployment, the specter of new tax tables, and skepticism did not evaporate last night.
Folks, we live in a 50/50 world (Updated link11/23/10 ) currently owned by the White House. If there was an expectation for a sweeping, dominant shift in political power, it did not come. If it had, the unregistered Tea Party, not R or D, would be calling the shots.
In the afternoon's presidential assessment I would not hold my breath, waiting to hear that the Executive agenda will change. A red veto pen, if it requires use, which is dubious, sits on the Oval Office desk. Expect quiet defiance, not Bill Clinton.
He's leaving the country. You would have taken that trip, right? After watching months of polls which weren't headed in your agenda's direction. Houses representatives and Senators who voted for healthcare, with few exceptions, lost. Hmmm.
Had California, New York, Delaware, and Nevada tilted, my enthusiasm would be different. They did not. We await George Washington-scale candidates to calm our nerves.
Heavy weight states' New York and California went safe with with Democratic, traditional light weights, the politically known quantities. Their citizenry succumbed to their paternalistic tendencies and a pesky poverty mentality.
No debt ceiling is too high. No tax or fee off the table. But, really, there was no surprise. Nor was there in Nevada or Delaware. Both Pauls are there, though. They will make sure a closed box is opened, so that we can see what the heck is going on. I hope.
The real world will stare down giants. Soaring rhetoric may see airtime, but without audience. All that will matter when we wake up in the coming days are ... results. Deeds. Quantifiable results. They had better come soon.
What is significant, is that the feared cap-and-trade legislation will not see the light of day. Maybe ever. An ill-conceived idea that might work in periods of soaring inflation and economic growth, but not now. Besides, who was going to make the money? Yep, bankers.
That does not mean EPA will not do some damage as they continue on their merciless march, which I fully expect them to do: carbon dioxide is a pollutant; coal ash is a hazardous waste; coal is bad.
The largest, oldest and most successful utilization program in the US is headed for the ash heap of history. Short of a miracle. No CEO will risk tort litigation over fly ash utilization. How will the US highway system manage? LEED building certification overcome the loss of fly ash as a building resource? And, wallboard? Done. (I am finished following it. Not writing about it. Looking for new subjects, where I can have more of an impact.)
Perhaps the most important guy to watch is a Democrat. He's West Virginia's popular Governor Joe Manchin III who heads to Washington as a US Senator. A popular leader in his state.
West Virginia, yes, we should see if Manchin's proclamations on energy and realizations about healthcare law turn into something more. Will he bring reason out of the mountains into the streets of reality? Byrd's ghost is what kind of ghost?
We are not islands in this world, especially on the hollowed grounds of Capitol Hill. An interesting dynamic duo would be Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey, a Republican and 51% victor in the US Senate race from neighbor-state Pennsylvania. Two heavy coal energy states.
A great signal to reason and common sense would be a Manchin-Toomey press conference that wrestled the national energy-and-environment policy agenda from the White House. Unity of thought, deed, and action. Americans gravitate to uplifting, unified resolve.
The theory of our country is government speaks for the people. An inescapable challenge is granite-edged political, philosophical division. How we handle the differences between the urban megapolis and the rural fields that nurture our country's promise, polar opposites, this will define us.
My view of the world is as it was before last night. People have to work together, inclusively. If they don't, stay locked away behind their doors, girded to their preferential shapes of society and their mutually adoring choirs, the earth may rotate, but not much more than that.
So, what defining problems need our joint attention right now? How can we work on them ... outside our windows, in our neighborhoods, without direction, from a central point? Today.
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