Northwest Herald Editorial Board John Rung, Kate Weber, Dan McCaleb, Jason Schaumburg, Kevin Lyons, Jon Styf, John Sahly, Val Katzenstein
OPINIONS SATURDAY NWHerald.com
THUMBS UP, THUMBS DOWN
November 8, 2014 Northwest Herald Section A • Page 9
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SKETCH VIEW
Dignity in losing a race The Northwest Herald Editorial Board offers this week’s thumbs up and thumbs down: Thumbs down: To politicians who won’t return phone calls or refuse to comment after losing an election. Appreciating that you put a lot of hard work into a campaign, so did many others. The people who helped your campaign and those who voted for you deserve to hear your parting thoughts. There still should be dignity in losing a race. Thumbs up and down: We’ve been beating the drum for voter turnout for years, decades even. So thumbs up to the 45.6 percent of registered McHenry County voters who weighed in Tuesday to help shape how this county and state will operate for the next few years. To the majority who abdicated that responsibility, thumbs down. With all of the ways voting has been made more convenient, such as the ease of early and absentee voting and same-day registration, we hope you take advantage next time, and join us at the polls in the spring. Thumbs up: To Marian Central runner Emma Baumert, who put her postseason finish at risk by stopping to help a fellow runner who was sick at her regional race two weeks ago. Baumert was honored Thursday by the IHSA for her selfless act to help an opposing runner in need. Thumbs down: To Holiday Hills. Whether it’s the unnecessary drama in finding a police chief or arguing over who owns a small piece of land an already torn down fence was on, there’s a lot of news coming out of Holiday Hills; none of it good. End the drama, and put an end to these issues as soon as possible. Thumbs up: To the Atkinson family from Elgin. The city of Chicago has selected a 57-foot Colorado blue spruce from the family’s front yard to serve as the annual Christmas tree on Daley Plaza. The tree was cut down Thursday and delivered Friday to Chicago, where it will undergo a holiday transformation and be ready by Nov. 25 for the tree lighting.
ANOTHER VIEW
Which GOP wing will rule? The Republican Party’s triumph Tuesday was deep and broad, encompassing two chambers of Congress, several state capitals and assorted demographic groups. The depth of the victory reinforces concerns about the nature and future of Republican conservatism; its breadth offers the promise of a more inclusive and moderate party. Republicans deepened their reliance on the South, driving some of its dwindling white Democratic members of Congress out of office and intensifying the party’s regional base. The South’s 70-year transformation from Democratic to Republican bastion is essentially complete, with state and national Republican victories in Georgia and North Carolina disproving predictions that a Democratic resurgence, based on demographic and generational change, was at hand. The dominance of the Republican Party’s Southern wing – more conservative culturally, more rigid ideologically and more committed to full-scale opposition to government in general and President Barack Obama in particular – does not bode well for compromise or problemsolving in Washington. Yet an emergent wing of the party, weakened and battered in recent years, showed surprising strength Tuesday. Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, who has eschewed the symbolic crusades of Washington Republicans for more pragmatic fare, won re-election. So did moderate Republican governors in Nevada and New Mexico, while Republican gubernatorial victories in Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts give the party important stakes in some of the most liberal states in the union. To state the obvious: The political interests of a moderate governor from the Northeast, Midwest or Southwest differ from those of the party’s base in the South, where distrust of government has a unique history. Newly re-elected Ohio Gov. John Kasich, for example, facilitated the expansion of Medicaid in his state as part of the Affordable Care Act, as did Snyder. Republican governors in the South have joined congressional Republicans in sabotaging the law in hopes of making it fail. The question now is whether a growing cadre of pragmatic Republican state executives will have more influence on the national party. The answer is not clear. Republicans in Washington benefit when voters lose faith in government’s ability to function. Gridlock may be a national affliction, but it is a partisan advantage, which helps explain why Republicans have pursued it so zestfully. Having just been rewarded with additional power for their role in keeping Obama in check – and Washington from addressing climate change, crumbling infrastructure and other issues – congressional Republicans may see no incentive in cooperating with the White House. Yet if they want to expand the electoral map to win the next presidential election, they should. In his victory speech in Kentucky on Tuesday night, incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “Just because we have a two-party system doesn’t mean we have to be in perpetual conflict.” Bloomberg View
THE FIRST
AMENDMENT
IT’S YOUR WRITE Proud of Lemonade Brigade To the Editor: Over the summer, three friends – Aubrey Hennig, Baylon Diebold and Morgan LoManoco – started the Lemonade Brigade, with the goal of selling lemonade to raise money to help others. They recently took that goal to a whole new level when they spent their four-day weekend selling lemonade in McHenry and Holiday Hills to raise money for the families of the two McHenry County sheriff deputies who were shot in Holiday Hills, as well as for the family of the man accused of this crime. I had the pleasure of meeting these young ladies as they sold lemonade in McHenry. They were unfazed by the attention they were receiving. They were there to sell lemonade for the purpose of helping others. I was so impressed that at their young age they understood there were three families who were victims of this crime. They displayed maturity beyond their years. Their families should be so proud of them. Through hard work and determination, and help and support from their families and friends,
the Lemonade Brigade raised over $4,500 in four days, but more important than that, they raised the spirit of our communities. They demonstrated what it means to be outstanding citizens who care for others. They brought us together for the common purpose of helping others. I hope they know how proud we are of them. Sue Low Mayor, McHenry
ACA a good start To the Editor: I keep hearing certain politicians say they want to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, commonly called Obamacare. I cringe every time I hear this. This act, no matter what you call it, has helped so many people in many different ways. Here are a few of the facts. Ten million more people in the U.S. now have insurance. When people have health insurance, they can go to doctors’ offices for treatments for minor things and not have to be visiting emergency rooms for the care they need. It
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lessens the amount of people that show up for colds, ear infections and other things at the ER, so the doctors and nurses can treat real emergencies. The act also has eliminated the pre-existing condition rule that prevented many people to be on insurance. The act also allows young people to be on their parents’ insurance coverage until age 26. That lets young people finish college or trade school, and then start working in their fields still covered by insurance of their parents. The Affordable Health Care Act might not be perfect, but it really is a good start.
Successful book sale
Linda M. Walsh
Ethel Huberty
Crystal Lake
Vice president, Friends of the McHenry Library
To the Editor: Once again, Friends of the McHenry Library held a successful warehouse sale in October. Each successful sale gives your library the funds to deliver wonderful programs to children and adults. We have to thank our wonderful volunteer members for all the weeks of hard work sorting thousands of books to ready the sale for the public. We also would like to acknowledge our local Meijer for donating the bags for our sale. The next sale will be April 18-19. Mark your calendars.
What Democrats must do after Tuesday When a party loses as catastrophically as the Democrats lost Tuesday, something very big has gone very wrong. Democrats can’t blame the blowout simply on the six-year itch, or low midterm turnout, or Republican negativity, or Barack Obama’s too-cool-for-rule presidency. What fundamentally ails the Democrats, rather, is the same ailment that afflicts incumbent parties throughout the advanced economies, and parties of the center-left in particular: their inability to deliver broadly shared prosperity as they used to do. The Ebola and Islamic State phobias certainly didn’t help, but the overwhelming anxiety Democrats failed to address was the economy. In national exit polls, 45 percent of respondents cited the economy as their chief concern – way ahead of health care, which ranked second at 25 percent, not to mention foreign policy, which clocked in at 13 percent. Dig a little deeper into the public’s economic fears, though, and you might conclude the Democrats should have had a good election night. Sixty-three percent of respondents told pollsters they believed the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy, while only 32 percent said it is fair to most. And a wave of ballot measures to raise state or city minimum
VIEWS Harold Meyerson wages carried wherever they were put before voters – from deepest-blue San Francisco and Oakland to solid-red Nebraska, South Dakota, Arkansas and Alaska. Yet Democrats were singularly unable to take advantage of such inarguably populist sentiments. Never mind their failure to win in red states or hold the Senate. They failed to turn out their voters, or persuade the hitherto persuadable, in such blue bastions as Maryland, Massachusetts and Illinois, where they lost governors’ races. Even in the people’s republic of Vermont, the incumbent Democratic governor won so narrowly that the race will be tossed to the legislature (as Vermont law requires when no gubernatorial candidate breaks 50 percent). If current margins hold, there will be only 18 Democratic governors in January, and only eight in the 31 states that don’t border the Atlantic or Pacific. Tuesday’s verdict makes clear the Democrats cannot win by demographics alone. Republicans failed to improve their dismal performance among Latino and African-American voters or among the young, but
these groups’ low turnout helped doom Democrats in blue states particularly. Voters ages 18 to 29 constituted only 13 percent of the electorate, down from 19 percent in 2012. Latinos favored Democrats by 62 percent to 36 percent, but they constituted only 8 percent of voters, the same level as in 2010, despite their growing share of the population. Tuesday’s electorate tilted white and old – which is to say, Republican. Yet the same factors that lowered the turnout of the Democratic base also cost the party votes among whites: the failure of government to remedy, or even address, the downward mobility of most Americans. Democrats who touted the nation’s economic growth did so at their own peril: When 95 percent of the income growth since the recession ended goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, as economist Emmanuel Saez has documented, voters view reports of a recovery as they would news from a distant land. Even though it was the Republicans who blocked Democrats’ efforts to raise the federal minimum wage or authorize job-generating infrastructure projects or diminish student debt, it was Democrats – the party generally perceived as controlling the government – who paid the price for that government’s failure to act. But with the exception of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who
has been plenty outspoken about diminishing the power of Wall Street, the Democrats have had precious little to say about how to re-create the kind of widely shared prosperity that emerged from the New Deal. The regulated and more equitable capitalism of the mid-20th century has morphed into a far harsher system, just as Americans told the exit pollsters, and the Democrats, whose calling card to generations of voters was their ability to foster good economies, are at a loss for how to proceed. Like their counterparts in the center-left parties of Europe, they had crafted national policies that bolstered the power and income of the majority of their citizens. But globalization, technology, financialization and the erosion of workers’ power have undermined those policies and fractured their electorates. Democrats can’t rely simply on their demographic advantages and their edge on cultural issues to win the White House in 2016, much less retake Congress. They need to go where they haven’t gone before – increasing workers’ power and incomes within corporations, say – if they are to create an economic platform credible enough to win back the country. • Harold Meyerson is editorat-large of The American Prospect.
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