|
The
Washington
Post ballyhooed the election results two weeks
ago as a major victory for the Democrats and a
rejection of the pledge to limit real estate growth
generally to 5 percent a year.
Yet,
in Loudoun county, seven Republican candidates who
took that pledge won.
The board now includes those seven plus one
lone Democrat and one Independent.
Previously the board had only three
Republicans.
In
Fairfax
County,
pro-taxpayer Republicans vigorously challenged major
liberal Democrat strongholds.
They ran strong campaigns for Fairfax
County
chairman
and against two-long entrenched liberal state
senators, Janet Howell, D-Reston, and Toddy Puller,
D-Mount Vernon. They
ran a strong campaign against long-term liberal Del. Kris
Amundsen, D-Mount Vernon. They also challenged liberal Democrats in
three board of supervisor races.
If conservative Republicans had won even half of
these races in the heart of Democrat strength in
Northern
Virginia, it would
have been a political earthquake. They
didn't, but they came much closer than they did last
time around -- despite the fact that Gov. Mark R.
Warner poured huge sums into Northern Virginia
races. The
Democrat candidate for chairman of the Fairfax
County Board of Supervisors won last time 77 percent
to 18 percent. This
time Democrat Gerry Connolly beat
conservative Republican Mychele Brickner by only 53
percent to 44 percent. If
high-tax Fairfax Democrats do not learn the error of
their ways, Fairfax
may catch up to Loudoun.
In
addition, the high-tax Democrats failed to defeat
any of the major pro-taxpayer Republican incumbents
they targeted. Warner
and his big developer allies poured $280,000 into
the campaign of the Democrat challenger to Sen.
Kenneth Cuccinelli, R-Centreville. Even
though he was outspent two to one,
Cuccinelli prevailed.
The
Democrats were so anxious to defeat conservative
Del. Richard Black, R-Loudoun, they recruited
another Republican, Jim McWatters, to run a third
party race against him, hoping to split the
Republican vote. The Democrat opponent, Patti Morrissey,
deployed against Black the most original campaign
tactic in many a season: She accused Black of voting against a bill
requiring churches to report allegations of child
abuse to law enforcement authorities. The only problem was that Black was actually
the bill’s chief sponsor. Despite Warner’s funding for Morrissey,
Black beat her 52 percent to 36 percent. Del. Scott Lingamfelter also turned back a
furious, well-funded challenge.
Indeed,
the only major incumbent to lose in Northern
Virginia
this year
was the chairman of the House
Transportation Committee, Jack Rollison,
R-Woodbridge, who was the
chief sponsor and advocate of the sales tax
referendum last year.
He was replaced by pro-taxpayer conservative
Republican Jeff Frederick.
The
national Club for Growth provided direct
contributions to eight state and local candidates in
these elections. Six of those candidates won on Election Day
– Cuccinelli, Black, Frederick, Lingamfelter,
Eugene Delgaudio, and Lori Waters. The other two were Mychele Brickner and Rob
Stuber, who challenged a long-term liberal Democrat
incumbent in the
Fredericksburg
area.
You
gotta just love, though, how the Washington
Post covered these elections. You
had to go to page A17 to find out that, nationally, the Republicans
won both governor’s races on the ballot, in
Democrat-leaning
Kentucky
and
Mississippi,
bringing to three the number of governorships the Rs
had taken from the Ds
in the past 40 days. The big news to the Post was the
ability of the Democrats in Fairfax
County
to hang on to seats they already held. If
the Dems had won the two governors races, you can be
sure that would have been a banner front page
headline, with a feature on how it meant President
Bush could kiss his 2004 re-election hopes good-bye.
The
Post so helpfully explained how in electing high tax Democrats in
the Fairfax
races the
public was simply choosing the high quality “Fairfax
lifestyle” over tax relief. Truly, you have to be a serious socialist, or
hopelessly naïve, to think increased taxes and
spending translates into higher quality
“lifestyle.”
Any
intelligent citizen in Northern
Virginia
knows that the Post
is not a journalistic enterprise.
It is a political activist organization
posing as a journalistic enterprise. The purpose of the paper is not to give you
the latest news and the facts. It is to manipulate your opinion through
selective reporting and outright misinformation.
Fairfax
County is
now completely locked up by a
political machine that is organized and operated to
screw the little guy for the benefit of organized
political special interests. The
county’s politics are dominated by
public employee unions, government contractors and
big developers looking for county favors. They are the only ones paying attention to
these local races, the only ones contributing
serious campaign cash, and the majority of those who
even vote. They
want as much tax money flowing into county
government as possible because they believe that
money will filter down to them or provide them
with some big favor. When they get together to divide up the pie
without the little guy paying attention, you can be
sure the little guy is not going to be left with
much. This
is how the County ended up with a real estate tax
increase over the last four years of 53 percent.
So
what we have here in Fairfax
is Tammany
Hall writ large. This machine can only be beaten by organizing
the average citizen and getting him to the polls. That requires an inspiring message that will
motivate people.
But
too many Republican leaders in the county
unfortunately think the opposite. They think they can’t beat the County’s
special interest machine with the Republican
message, so they downplay it or hide it.
For
example, U.S. Rep. Tom Davis, R-11, smothered the Brickner campaign
to downplay the pledge to limit real estate tax
growth. But
how could Brickner possibly have overcome the special
interest political machine without a strong message
on taxes to inspire and motivate the average person
to get involved? The only chance
she had of beating the
machine was to drive home that extremely defensible
pledge, which limited real estate tax growth
roughly to the long run rate of growth of family
incomes. Taxes cannot keep growing faster than income
forever. At some point, county real estate taxes
will reach 100 percent of family income.
Extrapolating current trends in Fairfax County,
that's where we are headed.
Even
the voters of liberal Washington
state can
understand this, with 62 percent voting in 2000 to adopt an
even stricter real estate tax cap of 2 percent per year. Indeed, different real estate tax limitations
are on the books in 30 states. But Davis is convinced the people of Fairfax
county are just pining away to see their real estate
taxes go up 10 percent a year, because 5 percent growth would just
destroy the county and end the public schools. But Ken Cuccinelli and Dick Black, who
sponsored legislation to cap real estate taxes
statewide, both were reelected in the face of
furious onslaughts.
The
Fairfax
County
political machine can’t be beaten by Tom Davis’s
content-free Republicanism. That may work for long-time Congressional
incumbents, who get reelected in over 90 percent of races. But in
county races, who needs a Republican
who can’t even limit real estate taxes to grow no
more than 5 percent a year? Davis’s
featherweight Republicanism and his cronies on the
Fairfax County Republican Committee, who have no
conception of how to conduct a voter turnout effort,
have been killing the Republican Party in Fairfax
in recent
years. Theirs
is the kind of thinking that led to a 77 percent to
18 percent
victory for the Democrats for Fairfax county Board
Chairman last time around. Indeed, the weakness of
Davis’s empty
Republicanism now threatens Republicans statewide:
As the Republican Party
infrastructure in the county collapses due to lack
of interest, the ability of statewide Republican
candidates to compete in the state’s largest
county is greatly diminished.
The
Virginia Club for Growth will continue to pursue a
principled, Reaganite Republicanism. The organization will work to organize the
grassroots in Fairfax
County,
and elsewhere in the state, to be effective. It will next lead the fight against
Gov. Warner’s drive to adopt the biggest tax increase
in the history of Virginia.
Its top priority this year will be a much-needed state tax-and-spending cap. If that is what you are for, you should join
us.
--
November 17, 2003
|
