Dejection 2012: America ratifies an untenable status quo.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

WELL INTO THE third year of the weakest economic recovery since at least the mid-19th century, less than two months before the U.S. government was scheduled to plunge off a "fiscal cliff," an American public deeply and rightly dissatisfied with the economic and political status quo voted to lock it into place.

On November 6, voters who just two months earlier had given Congress its lowest Gallup approval rating in 38 years (a measly 10 percent) ratified Capitol Hill's existing balance of power. The Democratic majority's edge in the Senate grew from four votes to nine, and Republicans at press time held a 41-seat advantage in the House of Representatives, just slightly down from 49 prior to the elections. Presiding above this hopeless stasis was the man who four years earlier campaigned on precisely the opposite: Barack Obama.

If elections are up-or-down assessments of politicians' job performance, then this was a vote in favor of trillion-dollar annual deficits, bailout economics, and failing the minimum competence test of passing an annual budget. Federal policy for four years has produced lousy short-term results for the price of long-term insolvency, and now the characters responsible for this misgovernance have been given a pat on the head.

It was not only at the national level that the results looked bleak for those of us yearning to tackle the three-pronged crisis of runaway government spending, unfunded taxpayer obligations (particularly to public-sector workers), and the surge in entitlements due to retiring baby boomers. Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuno, who faced down an impending debt crisis in 2009 by cutting government seriously and producing economic growth, lost his re-election bid by one percentage point. In pension-crippled San Diego's mayoral race, longtime pension-reform crusader Carl DeMaio (who has worked in the past for the Reason Foundation) lost to a Democrat by about 10, 000 votes. And in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, darling of the progressive left for her class-warrior rhetoric, beat out moderate Republican Scott Brown for Teddy Kennedy's old Senate seat.

Perhaps most depressing of all, California, which has been mired in double-digit unemployment since February 2009, elected to raise taxes on itself and send a supermajority of Democrats to Sacramento. No longer is there even the thin defense of an ineffectual state Republican Party or the veto power of Gov. Jerry Brown to protect taxpayers from the predations of...