Dan Calabrese

Much of America’s right today is having a good laugh at mainstream media, who are predictably trying to spin yesterday’s election results as saying nothing important about President Obama.

Without a doubt, had Democrats done well yesterday, these same sages would be telling how it represented an affirmation of Obama’s agenda.

Corzine on steroids.

But it is true that most politics is local, and conservatives need to be careful about thinking that the results in Virginia and New Jersey spell doom for Obama in 2012, or even for Democrats in 2010. If anything, these results probably represent a return to normal, and reveal the Obama phenomenon of 2008 to be a product of a one-time convergence of events that are unlikely to repeat themselves.

Obama won because his opponent wasn’t sure how to make the case for himself (and refused to defend any part of the Bush record), because the financial markets collapsed right before the election and because independents were just tired of Republicans.

Lucky for him. Too bad for Jon Corzine and Creigh Deeds that Obama couldn’t recreate those circumstances in Virginia and New Jersey this year.

But while these results were far less about Obama than they were about the issues in both states, the results in New Jersey nonetheless carry themes that should make all Democrats – especially Obama – very wary going forward.

The rejection of the Corzine style of government was very much a rejection of the directions in which Obama, Pelosi, Reid et al are looking to take the country.

Corzine, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, was elected largely on the notion that his financial management skills could get the state’s financial and economic house in order.

He failed in every conceivable way to achieve this. The state’s budget is a bigger mess than ever, and Corzine’s convoluted schemes for dealing with it – including everything from tax hikes (of course) to the use of toll road revenues to balance the state budget – came across to voters as exactly what they were. They were shell games designed to get around the fact that Corzine couldn’t fundamentally bring sanity to the state’s structural budget.

Originally, the voters bought the idea that Corzine brought some sort of welcome competence to the job. But the more they saw of how he governed, the less impressed they were. And even though New Jersey is a pretty blue state, they were willing to give the Republican Chris Christie a shot, if only because they recognized that Democrats’ basic governing philosophy does not lend itself to fiscal sanity.

This is why Obama should worry about yesterday. Regardless of whether the federal budget’s imbalance is his fault or not, it’s his job to fix it, and it’s becoming painfully obvious that he is not only unserious about doing so, he is bound and determined to take steps that will make the problem worse.

Like what? Like adding a huge health care entitlement onto the ones that are already putting us on the hook for $70 trillion in unfunded commitments. Like projecting budgets with $1 trillion deficits for at least a decade.

Four years of this and Obama will make Jon Corzine look like a governing genius. This is why the results of Election 2009 should scare Obama, Pelosi and Reid. The outcome in New Jersey wasn’t about them, but it was about the way Corzine governed. The way Obama, Pelosi and Reid govern is Corzine on steroids.

If they don’t change course, the nation’s voters are likely to render the same verdict on them at the earliest opportunity.

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