When most voters don’t win at the ballot box, they usually get over it the next day but make mental notes for the next election. Left-wing voters, particularly the academic variety that now may make up most of the breed, seem to need therapy, at least in print.
“Waking up Wednesday morning this week I had to face the disappointment and the noise,” Wesleyan University president Michael Roth wrote on The Huffington Post web site on November 6, 2009, three days after the recent spate of elections. “The disappointment was clear enough.”
“The turnout in Virginia and New Jersey ensured that the progressive wave some of us last year thought might wash across the country had a strong undertow, or at least a rip current.” He must have missed those TEA parties.
Yep, he did. “The noise came from the shrill predictions that now there is a fresh conservative tide returning to wash away the hopes for change,” he ruminated. “If two governor races were all there was to talk about, then they just had to become bellwethers for pundits without a clue.”
“The morning after Election Day I felt disappointed and puzzled, but then I remembered the Maine elections and called my friend Joan. For Joan Wednesday morning’s question was not just about how worried to be about gubernatorial races, or about the full employment program for loud TV journalists.”
“For Joan, Wednesday morning’s news was that her wedding in Maine planned for this spring could not take place because voters in that state had decided that people like her were no longer welcome to have their ceremonies and celebrations there. Maine voters, who many had seen as open-minded and fair when it came to social issues, had decided that gay people were not welcome to marry in their fair state.”
Joan and her friend can go to Massachusetts but when she and Michael get their wishes, the rest of us will be stuck in My Own Private Wesleyan.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
