Ted Bromund: Out of touch and out of favour... US voters turn their backs on Obama’s world in Washington

That’s too bad, because in politics, it’s the little things that reveal the most. And we’re now seeing many stories that all point in the same direction. There are a lot of out of touch politicians in the United States, their fate reveals America’s discontent with the Washington establishment.

Take President Obama. You’ll have heard that he’s running for re-election. What you may not have realised is the he has to go through the same process of state-based primaries as his presumptive Republican opponent, Mitt Romney. Unlike Romney, who faced genuine competition, there’s no doubt at all that Obama will get the Democratic nomination.

But what’s remarkable is how badly the President is doing. In West Virginia, his opponent was a convicted felon, currently residing in a Texas jail, who makes a number of colorful claims about his ancestry – none of them obviously true. The President took only 59 per cent of the vote.

He did even worse in Oklahoma, and pulled less than 80 per cent of the vote in Louisiana and North Carolina. In Arkansas, he almost lost to a habitual candidate named John Wolfe, who took 41 per cent of the vote. In Kentucky, “uncommitted” won 42 per cent of the Democratic vote.

These aren’t marginal states. True, most of them went Republican in 2008, but Obama won North Carolina handily then, and he needs it again this time. And these primaries are mostly for Democratic voters only, so it’s not that Republicans are raining on Obama’s parade.

What these primaries show is that between 20 to 40 per cent of Democrats in these states dislike Obama so much, they are motivated to come out and vote against him, even though they know that he is guaranteed to get the nomination anyhow. That’s some serious discontent.

As always, politics is partly local. Obama has shown nothing but contempt for the coal industry, and coal votes in West Virginia. But West Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas don’t have much in common – except, evidently, Democratic unhappiness with the President.

But it’s not just Democratic politicians who are in trouble. In Indiana, a solidly Republican state, the six-term Senator, Richard Lugar, the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has lost his primary race to Richard Mourdock, the State Treasurer.

This was partly a Tea Party race, but only partly. Mourdock’s been a conservative for a long time, but the Tea Party came to him as much as he came to it. His candidacy was immediately pilloried as radical, though most of his positions on the big fiscal issues – against stimulus spending, bank bailouts, and Obama’s health care plans – are standard Republican fare.

Nor did Lugar lack for money. Mourdock drew support from conservative political action committees around the country, but – like most insurgents – he was outspent heavily anyhow. Lugar ended up a bad loser having spent $8.4m, while Mourdock was a big winner while spending $4.9m.

What sank Lugar wasn’t so much the issues, or the Tea Party, or his fundraising. It was that he seemed to have lost touch with Indiana. Lugar has lived in Virginia for years, had to fight to convince a court that he was eligible to vote in Indiana, stayed in a hotel when he visited his home state, and wasn’t even sure what address was on his driver’s license.

He didn’t seem to represent Indiana Republicans in the Senate. But worse, he didn’t seem to want to devote the time necessary to persuade his fellow Republicans that he was right. Lugar was a pillar of the bipartisan establishment, which in Washington today is a nice-sounding way of saying that he agreed with the White House more than most Republicans do.

As a result, when Lugar lost, a lot of media outlets predictably concluded that his defeat was another sign that the Republican Party has gone round the partisan bend. But bi-partisanship is one of those irregular verbs: when conservatives agree with liberals, that’s bipartisanship. Extremism is when conservatives have the temerity to say that liberals should agree with them.

But fortunately for those who like it, there is still a lot of bipartisan agreement in Washington. Interestingly, it’s centred on rejecting the President’s budgets. It should be common knowledge that US hasn’t had a budget since 2009. Since then, we’ve run on continuing resolutions. What may not be common knowledge is that Obama’s proposed budgets have done relentlessly badly.

In March, the House of Representatives rejected the President’s budget by a unanimous vote of 414 to 0. In April, the Senate, controlled by the Democrats, did the same: 99 against, 0 in favour. In fact, not a single Senate Democrat voted for any budget – the Republicans offered four budgets of their own, and the Democrats were also unanimously against all of them.

What’s going on here? Simple. Any budget that spends or taxes enough to get Democratic representatives fired up will be unbearably unpopular with voters. But if the US can’t adopt a budget, the defence budget, not the welfare programmes that liberals love, will take most of the heat. So doing nothing is their best bet. Politically, this looks brilliant. What it’s not is responsible.

Washington inherently likes nothing better than spending other people’s money. That’s why it’s so regularly out of touch. The President has spent four years cheerleading big government.

He’s not the only one suffering from that, but whether he likes it or not, he personifies Washington. And in November, Washington’s irresponsibility could end up being a very big story indeed.