by Clifford F. Thies

The Republicans certainly scored an enormous victory in the mid-term elections of 2010. But, did this victory represent yet another change in the electorate or merely a snap back?

First, it is not unusual for a party that is wiped out in one election to make a snap back in the next. Talk of the demise of one or the other major party is almost always rubbish. The only time a major party actually did disintegrate, leaving the country with only one major party, was in 1816. All around the world, where countries are democratic, you find two or more major parties, or coalitions of parties, invariably coalescing about a “left-right” political axis. Those who argue that the members of the other major party should be held in suspicion, as though they were “enemies,” or should be relegated to the back of the bus, or have political opinions based on fear and the inability to think straight reveal only their own ignorance of how democracies work.

If this was indeed a snap back election, it obviously questions the lurch to the left engineered by the Democrats following their prior victories. But, it also questions the drift of the Republicans into “big government conservatives,” the succumbing of many of them to the corrupting influence of power, and the decision to invade Iraq and to allow mission creep in Afghanistan, that lead to the prior Republican defeats. The snap back is to the principles of limited government under the Constitution. Not to the failures of the prior administration.

While the election of 2010 can be viewed as a snap back in terms of Republicans versus Democrats, the election was also one of continuing change. In this election, we saw the emergence of significant numbers of women and minorities as leaders of the Republican Party. In both majority-white and majority-minority districts, Republicans elected women, African Americans, Hispanics and Asians.

Nobody stepped aside to allow these people to win their elections. In South Carolina, where Nikki Haley was elected Governor, a political rival described her parents, who are Indian Sikhs, as “turbin-heads.” In Idaho, a Republican running for the U.S. Congress was described as soft on Mexican drug-pushers because he is Hispanic. No party has a monopoly on hatred. There are those in each party who will play the race card, or the immigrant card, or the gender or the religion card. But, the heritage of this country has been, for more than 200 years now, to make the promise real, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. We are continue to work on this on redeeming the promise.

With the mid-term elections now concluded, it is time for the winners to get about the work of the American people. Here, in Virginia, we have seen the ability of a new Governor, working with a divided state legislature, to balance the state budget without raising taxes, and start the economy of the state on the road to recovery. With regard to our President, the ball is now in his court. Does he want to work with a divided Congress, or use the Republicans in Congress as his new excuse for a depressed economy? About this choice, I’ll just say: Nobody is re-elected President on the campaign slogan: “Things could be worse.”