A reporter’s liberal wishful thinking

by Rossputin | 6:04 am, November 9, 2011 | Comments Off

(I’m posting this now, which might seem a bit late to some, because part of the below was submitted to the Denver Post as a letter to the editor. Now that it’s clear they’re not going to run it, I am running an expanded version here.)

Liberals tend to live in a click-my-heels-together world in which tax hikes and the election of liberals portend a wonderful, candy-filled future, whereas the defeat of such things are a temporary setback on the yellow brick road to the promised land where everyone gets everything for free.

One such bit of wishful thinking was shown by Denver Post reporter Jeremy Mayer a week ago, following the slaughter of Proposition 103, the only state-wide tax increase on any state’s ballot in 2011, as well as the demise of almost all other tax hiking measures on Colorado ballots last Tuesday.

His article’s title is accurate: “Colorado Election Day results prove a killing field for tax measures.”

However, twice in the article, Mayer suggests that political analysts doubt that last week’s results imply anything for 2012 elections in Colorado. Once, Mayer names a particular analyst, Katy Atkinson – who, to be fair to Mayer is a former Republican staffer at the Colorado state legislature – and once he said “Colorado political analysts don’t think tonight’s results have any bearing on how the state will vote for president”, while again quoting Atkinson. In short, he found one analyst willing to say what Mayer wanted to hear.

The suggestion that Tuesday’s election results will not “have any bearing on how the state will vote for president” is absurd. Not only did Proposition 103 fail, but almost every local mill levy freeze (tax hike) also failed even when marketed to local communities as beneficial to their local schools.

Meanwhile Barack Obama keeps pushing for tax hikes and a federal bailout of states to keep teachers and first responders – members of public sector unions which support Democrat political candidates – from being fired.

Even Democrats are just saying “no thanks” to throwing more money into the black hole of government – and even when the measures are offered “for the children.” Beyond Proposition 103’s emphatic rejection, turnout showed Republicans more motivated than Democrats to vote, and unaffiliated voters siding substantially with Republicans. The idea that this has no implication for 2012 is simply wishful thinking by Democrats who can’t believe how dramatically the public has turned against Barack Obama and his “progressive” bankrupting of the nation.

At some point, won’t reporters recognize that subtly hoping that the public always and ever supports bigger, more expensive government, is keeping them from actually committing journalism? Probably not, and any hope by non-leftists of fairness by most media would be just as much a fantasy as Meyer’s hope that Colorado’s fiercely anti-tax mood will not impact the electoral fortunes of those who must support raising taxes on citizens of our state and our nation.

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