Peggy Noonan…gets it.  Read her entire piece at The Wall Street Journal.

An upset is a surprise. The loss of Anthony Weiner’s former seat to the Republicans was not a surprise. It was the latest in a long string of referendums on the president’s leadership. That string started in 2009 when the New Jersey and Virginia governorships went Republican, and continued in 2010 with the loss of Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat. Then there was last November.

At first these elections looked like, and could be experienced by the White House as, an attempt at a corrective: Change your ways or you’ll lose us. By November 2010 they were a warning: You’re losing us, we’re leaving. Now they are simply more proof of a broad rejection: You’ve lost us.

How did it happen? It still comes down to three big mistakes: the president’s spending decisions, his health-care bill, and the White House’s strange inability to understand the breadth and depth of the economic crisis. Spending was both high and same-old-same-old: The 2009 stimulus and the budget proposals were Democratic wish lists. This at the exact moment voters were coming to fear that we are losing America, the strong country of old, and the first thing we must do to right things is stop the hemorrhagic spending in Washington. The health-care bill was huge, expensive, vaguely menacing and lacking in any serious reform. Most amazingly, the White House failed to understand what the financial crisis was. They did not understand it was systemic, world-wide, would last years, and would change everything.

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Filed under: Economy, Featured, Inside The KC, Politics, Sonja Eddings Brown by Sonja Eddings Brown, Sep 16, 2011