Curmudgeon's Corner

'We The People' Have Spoken

Posted by Al Campbell on Nov. 3, 2010

Wisconsin, U.S., Quality of Life, Political, Economy, Taxes

The seeming impossible has occurred with the clean sweep of the governor’s mansion, the assembly and the senate in Wisconsin.  The voters also decided that there would be five Republicans and three Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives; and they decided that they wanted Ron Johnson in the U.S. Senate instead of Russ Feingold. 

I was particularly taken by Ron Johnson telling people at his celebration of victory that he would never cast a vote in the senate thinking of his re-election, he would vote for what the people he represented wanted.

Those of us who are either conservative or Republican or both have received what we wanted…the dominance of state government and a repudiation of the first two years of the Obama Administration’s agenda.  We will not have Nancy Pelosi to kick around anymore after the 112^th Congress is seated.

It now becomes time for all the promises, expressed or implied, to be kept.  This is the part that Republicans have seemed to have difficulty with after the flush of victory has worn off and the ‘down in the ditch’ politics begins to wear away at the campaign rhetoric.

Only time will tell if this season will prove to be different than those other seasons in Wisconsin.  If it isn’t, I suspect that the voters will not hesitate to let officeholders know.

The national scene has changed markedly and that will require a different governing approach by President Obama than he employed in these first two years of his tenure.  He no longer has the ‘get out of jail free’ pass that he had with control of both senate and the house.  There are open wounds that may take a long time to heal, and that could hinder the reformation of the national political scene to the detriment of ‘we the people’.

A lot of promises have been made as is the case in any election season.  The emergence of the Tea Party movement proved to be something with which to reckon for the state and national parties.  The folks involved were not the ‘neighborhood crazies’ as some would’ve had others believe.  There is unrest in our country and there is dissatisfaction with the two major political parties.  Time will tell if either or both major parties received that message.

In the final analysis, we have issues in both our state and our country that must be addressed head on if we are to get out of the economic doldrums we find ourselves experiencing.  We have a set of expectations at both the state and national levels that need to be addressed.  We have a split between the conservatives and the liberals and those two positions are not likely to come together any more now than in the past. 

Those in the middle made the decisions we talked about above.  The Republicans did what they do and the Democrats did what they do.  It was that group in between that made the ultimate decision as to which candidates they felt were the best picks in this time in our lives and in our history.  Now it is up to those whom we picked to do for us what they promised to do for us.

This isn’t about them; it is about us.  They have the responsibility to govern as we want them to govern.  If they forget that, we’ll likely remind them again in the future.