Michael Steele: It's the spending, Mr President. - NY Race shows Rep. leading 20th Distr.

Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 20th Congressional District was closely watched, and rightly so. The election represented the first opportunity for voters to give Democrats a progress report on President Barack Obama’s economic recovery policies and, judging by the results, voters don’t like the “change,” let alone the taxing, spending and borrowing, that’s coming from Washington.

Make no mistake — we believe Jim Tedisco will win once all the absentee and military ballots are counted. And let’s be clear, this is not a recount.

At least 4 percent of the votes have yet to be counted in the first place. Tedisco’s victory will be a credible repudiation of the spending spree that Obama and Congress have been on since January. Even the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee acknowledged over the weekend that the race was “a referendum on the Economic Recovery Act and Barack Obama’s policies.”
Well, the DCCC is right — this likely Republican victory is a referendum on the president. Democrats sent mailers out to voters linking their candidate to the president, and the Obama campaign team used its much-vaunted e-mail list to rally its troops in support of Scott Murphy. Obama himself made a high-profile endorsement of Murphy in the closing days of the race, Vice President Joe Biden cut a radio ad and a robocall for Murphy, and the Democratic Party ran an ad in the closing days featuring the president himself.

Well, the voters have spoken, and while the results are still pending, Republicans are confident that the final vote tallies will show those voters have rejected the president’s approach. This will be true even in this Democratic-leaning district that candidate Obama carried in the presidential election and the previous Democratic candidate for Congress carried with more than 60 percent of the vote.

Look at it this way: Does any student of politics think that this race would have been competitive if it had been held last November? Answer — no. The ground has shifted, and is shifting, as the voters become increasingly worried about Obamanomics.

And who can blame them?

As the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, Obama pledged he would be a responsible steward of the taxpayers’ money, saying, “I want to go line by line through every item in the federal budget and eliminate programs that don’t work and make sure that those that do work, work better and cheaper.”

That was then. Today, a mere two months into his administration, Obama and congressional Democrats have demonstrated that their only solution to the current economic crisis is to spend, tax and borrow. The Democrats’ reckless approach will leave our children and grandchildren with a staggering national debt owed to China and oil-rich countries in the Middle East.