"It's the Spending, Stupid!"

Dan Henninger on why Washington Democrats are in such trouble.

Look at the astonishing numbers in the Rasmussen poll released last week. Nearly seven in 10 respondents (68%) want a smaller government, lower taxes and fewer services. The party breakdown: GOP, 88%; Democrats, 44%; and Other, 74%. In short, the independent voters who decide national elections have moved into the anti-spending column. I don't think they'll leave any time soon.

In a note on last week's poll, Rasmussen points out that the only time it recorded a higher shrink-the-government number, at 70%, was in August 2006. That was just ahead of the famous off-year election in which Republican voters withheld support for their party's free-spending members in Congress.

Also Henninger mentions our very politically clever governor.

Pennsylvania's shrewd Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, scripting the new conventional wisdom, says the tea party movement supporting Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Joe Miller in Alaska proves the GOP is in the grip of crazies. With luck, none of his audience will wake up from this delusion before November.

Democrats may be able to hold on to the Senate thanks to the nomination of the religiously conservative O'Donnell in Delaware but Angle is within a point and a half of the Senate Majority Leader and Miller, who has a resume any Democrat would love (Yale law, West Point grad, U.S. Magistrate Judge) is going to easily win in Alaska.

As for Ed and his conventional wisdom, I recall him predicting Joe Sestak would get murdered by Arlen Specter in his bid to win the Democratic Senate nomination.

Joe is now running 8 points behind Pat Toomey almost assuredly because of his votes for all the mamouth spending pushed by Democrat leaders.

To take a page out of Ed's book, who attributed his own easy victory over Lynn Swann to the fact that many Pennsylvanians are too racist to vote for a black man, I say that if Arlen Specter were the party's nominee this year, he'd be behind Toomey by double digits. Although NOT because Pennsylvania voters are anti-Semitic.