One of the small election results that has been relatively ignored by the national media was the election for County Supervisor in Westchester, New York, where I reside. Westchester is the perfect Democratic demographic. The major voting blocs in Westchester are wealthy/upper middle class liberals, especially Jewish liberals, poor minorities, and an increasingly stressed and marginalized middle class, often white ethnic, squeezed between the two. Democrat Andy Spano has been the County Supervisor for 12 years and was running for a fourth term against a little known Republican challenger named Rob Astorino. The results were stunning:
The smart people are speaking of a genuine tremble in the Democratic ranks after the election results from the down ticket races in the states of Virginia, New Jersey and even New York. A stunning reversal of fortune to be found in most plush, liberal, Democratic Hillary Clinton country of Westchester County, New York. The roles have over 500k registered voters, all of them devoted to HRC, the Yankees and Mets, the Jets and Giants, and the Democrats, and generally split 3 to 2 or 2 to 1 for the Democrats -- until last eve. A low turnout saw the long time County Executive Andy Spano, 73, tossed out by an unknown Rob Astorino, 42, (right in debate with Spano) who inherits a patronage system so reverentially crony Democrat that it will be years cleaning out the cousins and nephews of the Spano posse. Perhaps it was low turnout. The Democratic House can stare at the results in the gubernatorial Virginia and New Jersey and shrug, but Westchester stolen by the GOP? Stolen by a landslide of 58% to 42%?? No explaining it other than anti-incumbent rage that brought out the negatives and kept the regulars home. It was a vote against the Democrats, not a vote for the GOP, which doesn't much exist in Westchester. This is where Hollywood East and the UN elite and the Wall Street bankers live. Bill and Hillary Clinton vote here. To vote for a Republican youth? Ground movement. But what if it's not about the helter-skelter pace of healthcare reform (above)? What if it's the deficit and all those trillion dollar packages and the dead certainty that taxes must rise to pay for the debt? What if the general disdain for government and this leap into turmoil and anarchy has transformed itself into a tax revolt? Perhaps Mrs. Pelosi can get the subject of healthcare reform back on the table, perhaps Harry Reid can deliver the United States of Olympia Snowe; however both would be ignoring what Westchester represents, a complete negation of business as usual. It was a tax revolt. The Democrats stayed home. What will bring them out next year? Healthcare? No. Deficit? No. Joblessness at 9.5 projected? No. Taxes? No. Will there be a credible challenger with muscle to long time liberal Democrat Nita Lowey for the House?
Westchester's Astorino Landslide Close-Up Tax Revolt.
Examining the campaign promises of the newly elected Astorino, there may be a template for the coming assault on incumbency. Astorino is young, wiry, sympathetic, engaged, schoolmaster-like, but his promises are aggressive austerity to counteract what he claims has been 12 years of Spano spending (doubled the country spending) and taxes (raised taxes 60%.) Astorino claims that Westchester is "the highest taxed country in America." His brochure announces, "It's time for tax relief." Astorino promotes a library of cost-cutting that starts from the top. No more county executive car and driver and bodyguard. "Rob will drive himself to work." Cut the county executive's staff size by 10% on "Day One." Also, "Require all managers and appointed employees to contribute to their health care costs." Also "End travel junkets disguised as county 'business.'" And "Post online all County contracts, key documents, invoices, etc." Does look like a genuine tax and spend revolt. How does this fit into the healthcare debate and the cap'n'trade bill? Both bills are higher taxes for the people of Westchester.
Astorino basically ran on a platform promising government austerity and no new taxes. He vowed to get the county finances back onto some kind of reasonable shape. If the people of Westchester are finally fed up with the size and cost of government this is an earthquake threatening the big government Democratic party. It is impossible to underestimate the power of this result. As noted in the local paper:
Astorino's win over an entrenched Democrat who served 12 years as executive is the first time in the 71-year history of the county executive's office that an incumbent has been defeated.
In Westchester an average "middle class" home in a community with good schools starts in the mid-$600,000 range (even with the recent fall in home values, people are slow to lower their asking price; it is likely that the new normal for a middle class house is in the $500,000s but time will tell where prices stabilize.) People accept high taxes as the cost of assuaging white liberal guilt and taking care of the less fortunate. One of the "dirty little secrets" of Westchester is the degree of segregation that is an inextricable aspect of the price of housing. The poor are effectively kept out of sight, but the high taxes keep them in mind. It may finally be dawning on people that even if the Republican prescription of lower taxes is harmful to the poor (a liberal shibboleth that the recent City Journal article, The Big-Spending, High-Taxing, Lousy-Services Paradigm, comparing California and Texas, may finally be bringing into question) Westchester taxation has now breached the threshold and become actively damaging to the Upper Middle Class. But this was not only about taxes: [All Emphases mine-SW]
Other issues, especially taxes, no doubt ranked high in the minds of Westchester County voters, who last night in a stunning upset threw out incumbent county executive Andy Spano in favor of Republican challenger Rob Astorino by an impressive 58–42 margin. But it didn’t help that county residents felt strong-armed by the federal government and private litigants into a controversial lawsuit settlement on low-income housing that cuts deeply into the county’s tradition of suburban home rule on development issues—or that Spano reacted to voter discontent by suggesting that critics of his housing plans were racist.
Announced in August, the settlement calls for the county over seven years to override local zoning and other rules to force the construction of at least 750 low-income housing units, most to be located in relatively affluent towns. The intention is to increase the number of poorer minorities living in these areas. A federal judge had sided with plaintiffs’ complaints that the county had accepted federal funds but had not lived up to its talk of combating purported “segregation” based on income. (Affluent blacks and other minorities have long been welcome in many of the communities under scrutiny; as the Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock points out, blacks are at most slightly underrepresented in towns like Scarsdale, Harrison, and Pound Ridge compared with their overall presence in the affluent income brackets typical of those towns.) The Obama administration took credit for arm-twisting the county into going along: “This is historic, because we are going to hold people’s feet to the fire,” said HUD deputy secretary Ron Sims, who added: “It’s time to remove zip codes as a factor in the quality of life in America.”
Read that last line again: it’s pretty startling. To remove zip codes “as a factor in the quality of life” in a nation—so that 10455 (South Bronx), 91731 (El Monte, California), and 48210 (Detroit’s west side) have exactly the same implications for quality of life as 10021 (New York’s Upper East Side), 90210 (Beverly Hills), and 48009 (Birmingham, Michigan)—would require extreme, indeed utopian, ventures into social engineering. It’s certainly a result unachieved by Scandinavian social democracy (in which cities like Stockholm and Copenhagen include both chic, desirable neighborhoods and neighborhoods that are neither), or for that matter by the harder tyrannies of the Left. Even 50 years after Castro’s seizure of power in Cuba, Wikipedia describes the Miramar neighborhood as “an upscale district . . . one of the better parts of Havana.”
What kind of social engineering might be called for to remove zip code as a quality-of-life factor differentiating gritty Yonkers from leafy Yorktown, or crime-plagued Mount Vernon from calm Mamaroneck? The New York Times lays it out:
Go to City Journal to read more about the social engineering the Obama administration has forced down the throats of Westchester's wealthy. We can all trade snarky comments about liberals loving minorities "as long as you don't let 'em in our school" in the immortal words of Tom Lehrer's National Brotherhood Week, but the sad fact is that when "diversity" is forced, no one ends up happy.
If there is an American ethos it is the firm conviction that we have the right to be left alone by our government. Social engineering is the antithesis of the right to be left alone. The healthcare abomination and cap-and-trade are not only tax bills but are efforts to engineer the behavior of the American people, to force us to behave in ways which our betters believe are proper, even as they leave themselves immune to their own legislation.
Between intrusive and coercive government and the confiscatory taxes required to support that poorly responsive government, the Democrats are risking a perfect storm of insults which, if they persist, will mean that the Westchester revolt is only the beginning.
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