Washington overreacts with aplomb

Opinion: May 28, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Washington’s punditocracy loves to overreact. And it’s doing so again.

When Republican Scott Brown won an unexpected Senate victory last January in Massachusetts, analysts quickly pronounced the Obama presidency on life support and predicted that this result foretold a smashing Republican victory in November.

Since then, Obama has secured congressional approval of his landmark health reform bill and is on the verge of getting a major bill tightening federal supervision of financial markets.

Fast forward to last week’s surprisingly comfortable Democratic victory in a bitterly contested congressional election in a rural Pennsylvania district that backed Republican John McCain in 2008.

The new conventional wisdom is that the GOP is struggling, its anticipated November triumphs in doubt.

Actually, very little has changed. Republicans are still likely to score significant gains in November, though the extent remains in doubt.

But a spate of election contests last week serves as a reminder of some basic factors in politics.

Candidates and campaigns matter, as does the local political terrain.

The post-Pennsylvania reaction has transcended partisan lines. Democrats see a model for success in similar hotly contested districts; some Republican reactions suggests fear that their rivals are right.

The real explanation is simpler. A bitter Senate primary boosted Democratic turnout, and victor Mark Critz ran a better campaign. He rode the coattails of his longtime boss, the late Rep. John Murtha, a revered figure in the rural district, while separating himself from Obama policies unpopular there.

Critz said he would continue to seek the federal largesse for which Murtha was noted and would have voted against Obama’s health bill (though he disagreed with his GOP rival’s vow to repeal it).

On the other hand

Republican Tim Burns ran against Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who may have low approval in the district but is hardly on the minds of many voters. The GOP campaign recalled a similarly unsuccessful Republican effort three decades ago in Mississippi targeting then Democratic House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill.

Critz’s formula won’t work as well for Democratic incumbents defending their actual votes. But a GOP campaign against Pelosi probably won’t be more successful than Democratic efforts a few years back against then GOP leader Tom DeLay.

Meanwhile, the Republican capture of a longtime Democratic seat in Hawaii on Saturday looks like a meaningless fluke. The reason: There were two Democrats running against one Republican. The Republican victor, Charles Djou, got about 39 percent of the vote; the two Democrats drew 58 percent combined. In November, it will be one-on-one, and a Democrat almost certainly will win.

Scrutiny increases with visibility, and simplistic solutions won’t necessarily play as well in a broader electorate as within the party base.

Before the election, GOP Senate hopeful Rand Paul seemed like a colorful curiosity, the son of a maverick libertarian congressman and the latest tea party-backed insurgent. As the Kentucky primary winner, he quickly exposed himself as an out-of-date throwback, a modern-day Barry Goldwater so opposed to the federal government he wasn’t sure it should enforce civil rights.

Republican leaders put up with Goldwater taking that view 45 years ago, but it won’t fly today. The speed with which some GOP leaders separated themselves from Paul’s views suggests they recognize that, even if wanting to dismantle federal agencies and privatize Social Security doesn’t sink Paul in November, he could cause his party bigger problems if he wins.

Attempts to shade the truth on Vietnam are not credible, no matter how elaborate the explanation.

When Democratic Senate hopeful Dick Blumenthal of Connecticut sought to excuse his repeated claims of having served in Vietnam as mere misstatements, he strained credibility, as his own national party chairman, Tim Kaine, pointed out.

Everyone who lived through the 1960s and wrestled with the subject of military service knows exactly what he did and how he did it.

Campaigns are revealing, but so too is the post-election scrutiny. And easy assumptions are often wrong.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.