Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson, whose work appears frequently in The American, came to mind as nationwide election results were announced last night. When the Democrats suffered huge losses in the 2010 midterm elections, Robinson compared that right-wing surge to the liberal zeal that fueled Obama’s runaway presidential victory in 2008 and decided that we have become a nationwide of knee-jerk reactions, veering from the left to the right and back again.
Progressives – who mostly stayed home or were beaten in 2010 – counted many victories in 2011, seeing evidence that the nation’s swing to the right was reversing itself. Mississippi voters defeated conservatives’ efforts to grant “personhood” to human embryos. In Ohio, voters overturned a Republican-backed law curbing the bargaining power of public-sector labor unions. In Arizona, state Sen. Russell Pearce, author of the state’s draconian immigration law, was ousted after a recall attempt by a fellow Republican.
Without question, these outcomes represent at least a welcome pause in the victorious stride of the Republican Party’s right flank, which powered the GOP’s 2010 victories during a prolonged economic recession that destroyed Obama and the Democrats’ momentum coming out of 2008. However, progressives make a mistake if they celebrate too heartily. The Ohio voters who backed unions also passed a ballot initiative to prohibit people from being required to buy health insurance as part of Obama’s health-care overhaul, and the Mississippi voters who sided with abortion rights also passed a voter photo ID constitutional amendment that will disenfranchise many minority, elderly and low-income voters. In all, we witnessed more of a drift toward the center than a swerve to the left.
In St. Louis, the biggest election news was the victory of a progressive Democrat running as an independent, Stacy McCreery, over the Democratic Party nominee in the 83rd District of the Missouri House of Representatives, Jeff O’Connell, who won the seat to replace state Rep. Jake Zimmerman through an insider election by committeemen, including O’Connell himself. It was a clear victory of democracy over Democratic Party inside power-dealing.
For us, this was nowhere near enough good news to offset China Cargo’s recent cancelation of its scheduled Monday freight flight to Lambert-St. Louis International Airport for the second week in a row. Airport officials claimed – at least officially – that a weak global market is to blame, but obviously China is smarting and pulling away from the St. Louis market after the much-heralded Aerotropolis legislation failed to pass the general and special sessions in the Missouri Legislature. High-level Chinese officials devoted an extraordinary amount of time and effort to exploring St. Louis as a new air cargo hub, but the incentives essential to attract their business were gutted. A once-in-a-lifetime chance was presented by a key player in China with St. Louis connections (Steven Perry) making all of the necessary high-level introductions, yet money and effort were squandered here and a tremendous amount of face was lost in China.
However our ideology may swerve, this region must seize its competitive advantages to attract greater capital investment and grow our economy to create the jobs and opportunities we so desperately need. Despite a relatively encouraging day at the polls on Tuesday, the dominant lesson of 2011 is we must move beyond rigid ideology to promote desperately needed sustainable growth.
