The Wall Street Journal
The primaries are producing some welcome new talent.
American democracy is nothing if not responsive and on the evidence of the current primary season the frustrated American voter is demanding a transfusion of new political blood. The results have been volatile and sometimes bewildering but overall the elections are throwing up more candidates who are refreshingly unconventional.
Take California where the Republican Partythe party of primogeniture and middle-aged white maleshas nominated a pair of female former Silicon Valley CEOs to run for Governor and the Senate. Neither has run for office before and both are running as pragmatic but unapologetic conservatives seeking to reform runaway governments in Sacramento and Washington. Both face difficult autumn races in that Democratic-leaning state but this is the kind of tumultuous year when they might win.
If Carly Fiorina can defeat liberal Barbara Boxer she would represent the largest ideological shift in one Senate seat in many years. Ms. Boxer is so doctrinaire and so unpersuasive to her peers that Democrats have stripped her of Senate leadership on climate legislation. But she is also a brutal and well-funded campaigner who will portray Ms. Fiorina the former Hewlett-Packard boss as a cross between BP and Goldman Sachs who also favors back-alley abortions.
Ms. Fiorinas message can be distilled into two themes: Grow the economy and cut spending. If that prevails on the Left Coast we really do have a lovely revolution on our hands.
As for former eBay CEO Meg Whitman she has the task of convincing voters that a rookie Republican can tame the special-interest mobs that run Sacramento. Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected on a similar promise but was broken by the unions and his own desire to be liked. Ms. Whitman will have to convince voters she wont be rolled in the same way. Her support for a one-year moratorium on the states self-destructive climate-change rule AB32 is a tepid start but shell need both tax- and spending-limit proposals if shes going to win a mandate to overcome the gerrymandered far-left legislature.
Her Democratic opponent former two-term Governor Jerry Brown is a career politician but one who has been quirky enough in the past to make us wonder if he might take on Sacramentos Greek chorus. On the other hand he may now be so beholden to the unions to help him defeat Ms. Whitman that he wont be able to challenge them on spending and pensions. This is the kind of big reform debate that California voters deserve.
Tea party candidates also showed their mettle on Tuesday though in ways that make their staying power in November unpredictable. The rise and triumph of Republican state legislator Sharron Angle in Nevadas Senate primary against two better known candidates happened so fast that we wonder how many Nevadans really know her generally conservative voting record.
Shed better know how to defend those votes because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is preparing to run ads portraying her as a radical even as you read this. Further and Further Right is the headline on a Democratic fund-raising pitch we recently saw describing several GOP Senate candidates and with President Obama and his agenda down in the polls going negative and ad hominem will be the partys Alamo strategy.
Perhaps nowhere was the voter rebellion greater than in conservative South Carolina. Incumbent Republican Congressman Bob Inglis was crushed after his dalliance with cap and tax and his vote for TARP. Tea party favorite Nikki Haley prevailed over no fewer than three pillars of the GOP establishment including the current Lieutenant Governor state Attorney General and a Member of Congressand the states media establishment. The articulate conservative and daughter of Sikh immigrants barely missed avoiding the need for a runoff with 49 of the vote and is the favorite to win that on June 22.
Perhaps most revolutionary was the strong showing by black Republican Tim Scott in his Congressional primary against scions of two legendary South Carolina political families. Mr. Scott a state legislator from the Charleston area where the Civil War began ran well ahead of former Senator Strom Thurmonds grandson and the son of former Republican Governor Carroll Campbell.
He faces a runoff against Paul Thurmond in the heavily GOP district but his showing to date demonstrates how far the South has come on race matters. He would be the first black Republican in Congress from the Old Confederacy since Reconstruction.
The Obama Democrats lit the match for this voter tumult with their radical expansion of government. The voters are responding with a healthy fervor with Republicans in particular looking for standard-bearers who will fight more than accommodate the status quo. While some of these new faces will falter before November others look to be the kind of determined reformers that our political class naturally fears. So much the better.
