Nothing to see here

It’s larger than nine U.S. states, more economically depressed than Detroit, and more conservative than any area in its immediate vicinity. It’s the 23rd Congressional District of New York, a huge swathe of backcountry extending from the Canadian border down to just north of the I-90 corridor running from Rochester to Albany. Its major population centers are places like Oswego, Watertown, and Plattsburgh, places that have long hemorrhaged jobs, wealth, and population.

You might have heard about the 23rd District recently thanks to the off-year Congressional election this month where a Democrat won the district’s U.S. House seat for the first time since the 1800s. It was the only bright light for the Democrats in an otherwise dreary election season, but pundits of all political persuasions have sought to interpret the 23rd District’s tea leaves as validation for their perspectives (imagine that). Democrats claim that their victory in this long-time bastion of Republican politics is proof positive of their message and program. Conservatives claim the opposite and point to the incredible second-place showing by a third-party candidate as validation that, with better financing and organization, he could have won. Moderate Republicans and independents feel confirmed in their position as kingmaker, even as the Republican Party’s official candidate quit the race amid eroding support.

In truth, all three groups have something positive to talk about. Democrats should feel good about winning the election, as well as their recent gains in the district’s voting rolls at large, but let’s not go overboard in what this means about their “message and program,” either locally or nationally. They merely profited from the Republican Party’s bout of civil war, where moderate and conservative Republicans decided to fight each other rather than the standing candidate from the Democratic Party.

Conservatives, too, should feel emboldened by the election results in that they were able to lift a third-party candidate (Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman) to within three percentage points of victory. For perspective, there are only two third-party members of the U.S. Congress (Senators Sanders and Lieberman). So, yes, this was an accomplishment of sorts…but at what cost? By backing en masse a third-party candidate, conservatives took a district that had been represented by a Republican since the mid-19th century and turned it over to Democratic control.

Which leads us to the final group that has something positive to take away from the election: the moderates and independents. The recent election demonstrated that this group does indeed make or break candidates. But figuring out how to appeal to them is much more difficult than making overtures to either political pole. In this era of shifting allegiances and alignments, what is the right balance of statism versus populism, fiscal rectitude versus New Dealism, labor versus management, free market capitalism versus government regulation, religion versus secularism?

Part of what explains the flux and drift of the American voter is that neither party has figured out how to govern, how to bridge electoral gaps, or how to forge sturdy coalitions focused on a few key issues. In my view, as we enter full swing into the 2010 mid-term elections, both parties seem content with sticking to old verities. The Democratic policy-making apparatus is still controlled by labor unions and Keynesian economists; the Republicans are still controlled by windbag evangelicals and Ayn Rand devotees; and the independents are still fissiparous and uninterested. I can’t see how recycling the same old arguments of right and left are going to help us surmount the considerable troubles we face. Sadly, I fear that it will take more pain before Americans begin to coalesce around a set of ideas – and a proper ordering of priorities – that might see us to better days.