Not So Special Election
The media ignores the GOP’s Virginia victory.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
June 21, 2001 3:50 p.m.

t's a slow news day when the top story in the New York Times is a presidential poll, especially a trumped-up one saying George W. Bush's popularity has "diminished considerably" when in fact it's down only 7 points, to 53 percent, over the last three months. This is perhaps a cause for modest concern at the White House, but no more — surely nothing that warrants the screaming, APB-treatment of the Times.

If the Times is so desperate for a political-trend story, it may want to examine Tuesday's special congressional election in Virginia's fourth district, where Republican Randy Forbes defeated Democrat Louise Lucas to take the seat held for 18 years by the late Rep. Norman Sisisky, who died in March. Except for one thing: Forbes won, which means his victory can't possibly be interpreted to represent much at all.

This wasn't the case in the hours leading up to the election, when the media was banging a steady drumbeat on the significance of the race. Political handicapper Stuart Rothenberg called it "a sort of referendum on George W. Bush, on the energy issue, on Social Security, and on the direction of the country." The Los Angeles Times labeled it "an early indicator of voter attitudes toward Bush and his policies." On CNN, Mark Shields asked whether it was "an early referendum on President George W. Bush." Replied his guest, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia: "To a certain degree I think it is."

That's a heavy burden for such a little election to carry, but then some elections have greatness thrust upon them. Yet the election didn't seem so spectacularly important to the media after Forbes won, 52 percent to 48 percent.

Last month, the Times thought the race was "a bellwether" that would provide "an answer of sorts to the question of whether Republicans can retain control of the House." Yesterday, though, the story was worth a mere 236 words on page A16. Perhaps tomorrow the Times will print a correction: "On May 20, the Times called a Forbes-Lucas race a political 'bellwether.' Following the GOP victory, we no longer believe this to be the case." (The coverage elsewhere wasn't much better — the Forbes win was a below-the-fold story in today's Roll Call, which calls itself a Capitol Hill newspaper.)

It's easy to read too much into the result of a special election — and Republicans should avoid doing it here. The Virginia victory does offer a small sign of encouragement to the GOP: It's a win in a swing district where both parties spent lots of money and fought hard, and it increases the Republican House majority to 222 seats (where it was before another Forbes, ex-congressman Michael of New York, bolted the party in 1999). Republican officials say there have been 78 special elections for the House since 1977. Only 18 of them have changed parties, and only 3 of these switches went to the party of the incumbent president — until Forbes. The Republican was the underdog in other ways, too. The district was shaped for a Democratic officeholder, nearly 40 percent of its voters are African American, and Democrat Chuck Robb carried it over Republican George Allen in last fall's Senate race (which Allen won).

So the election was special. But perhaps not as special as many of the Democrats' cheerleaders in the media once had hoped.

Bar Fight
Many of our readers are probably too young to remember this, but there was once an organization called the American Bar Association, and it used to rate the president's federal judicial nominees as part of a formal screening process. But it became too politicized, and so one of our presidents, whose name has vanished into the mists of time, withdrew its semi-official role.

For those who think the ABA has gone the way of ABBA, the Swedish supergroup, think again: It's still kicking around rating judicial nominees, and just now it has gotten around to six of Bush's initial picks. The result, according to a report by Jonahtan Ringel of American Lawyer Media, is that all six are deemed either "qualified" or "well qualified" for the federal bench.