It is rare when a Majority
Leader in Congress loses his Congressional seat in any election, but when he
loses in the primary it might just be the first time in our nation's history. Add to that the fact he was 34 points ahead
in the polls the week of the election, so far ahead he scheduled a national fund
raiser on election day in downtown Washington ,
D.C. when most candidates are
busy trying to rally supporters to vote, and it gets real bizarre.
Of course that is just the
tip of the iceberg. The Republican
leader, second ranking to only John Boehner, Speaker of the House of
Representatives, is one of the most powerful party positions in the nation. So powerful he was able to raise 25 times
more money than his primary opponent.
The opponent in Cantor's seventh
congressional district of Virginia was Dave Brat, an economics and ethics
professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland ,
Virginia , and political unknown
who enjoyed support among some tea party activists.
House Republicans, who are
certain to vote a loser out of office, will drive Cantor to resign from the leadership
position as well as the Congress because no one reaches the highest levels of a
political party in the center of the hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign
contributions and wants to return as a defeated candidate for the rest of the
year. Look for this change to happen by
July.
Cantor was highly
publicized as one of the Republican "young guns", the future leaders
of the party, and it was generally recognized he was the only one who might
defeat the current Speaker Boehner. Guess
he was firing blanks.
Now the White House, Democrats
and national political pundits in the media are having a field day trying to
explain how all of them could have been sooo wrong about the election. They are spinning opinions about how this
will invigorate the Tea Party and threaten other senior Republican elected officials.
A few even mentioned the
truth, that no major Tea Party organization even endorsed the winner. How could the Tea Party get credit for electing
someone they did not even support? Only
Laura Ingraham, a political talk show host, successful author and real
conservative openly supported the challenger out of all the political
mouthpieces in America , she
even campaigned with him, and she graduated from the University of Virginia .
The truth is the
politicians are afraid to address the real truth so they continue to misread the electorate just like they misread
this race.
Professional politicians
have lost touch with the invisible Americans.
Just like Obama did, they are spending billions and billions of special
interest dollars to get elected or re-elected, much of it to going professional
political pundits. Obama spent $2
billion in just two elections thanks to Wall Street, specifically Goldman
Sachs, trial lawyers, health care companies, banks, insurance, pharmaceutical and
a laundry list of other special interests.
So who are the
"invisible Americans"?
At least one third of all
registered voters are registered Independents.
They don't trust either political party.
Probably one third of the members of each party feels alienated by their
own party judging by the weakness of the party polls and collapse of
credibility in our elected officials. Add
to that a massive amount of people, millions, who are so disgusted or disinterested
by political gridlock they won't even register to vote and you have a massive,
maybe even lethal formula for political chaos.
Look at it this way. Of the eligible voters in America , 51
million are not even registered to vote.
But they could register and vote if they are motivated. That means nearly one of every four eligible
voters does not even register. There are
over 180 million registered voters but over 40%, over 72 million, do not
typically vote, especially in non-presidential elections like this year .
That means 159 million
eligible voters will not vote this year while about 129 million will vote. A majority of eligible voters refuse to
participate in the current two-party system.
So what does that tell you about our democracy? Like all other institutions in America , it is
broken.
Eric Cantor did not lose
because of the Tea Party or because of any party, he lost because he is one of
the Washington
professional politicians who worked the system and there are those people in
both parties working the system throughout the house and senate.
Don't believe the media, pundits
and spin masters who say this is a Republican revolt or an isolated incident,
this is the beginning of the people's cure to our political problems, throw the
rascals out, all of them, no matter which party has their loyalty because
neither party serves the best interests of the people, just their own interest
of concentration of power and hijacking of our government.
It was 57 years ago in
1957 that Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged, a stunning novel of the collapse of
capitalism because of greed, corruption and runaway technology. The hero of her last novel was a mysterious stranger
named John Galt. I expect Who is John
Galt signs to be popping up all over America just like in her novel and one day
we will discover John Galt is the 159 million disenfranchised voters waiting in
the wings to fix the mess we are in.
Perhaps Virginia was the beginning....
.
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