What a difference a day makes.
Especially when that day is Election Day, and the people vote to make their voices heard.
The voices of voters fed up with the wrong-minded policies of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party were heard loud and clear on Tuesday across America, but were especially loud and clear in West Virginia.
Talk about a red state! West Virginia is incarnadine, red as a rare T-bone. Our Statehouse is now 64-36 Republican, our State Senate 18-16 Republican (including the post-election conversion of one dazed Democrat).
This is the first time in 83 years that Republicans have captured either body.
And Republican Shelley Moore Capito trounced Natalie Tennant in the race for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Jay Rockefeller. Capito pulverized her hapless opponent, outpolling her by a margin of nearly 2-1.
Also, all three Mountain State members of the House of Representatives will be Republicans.
Capito will be West Virginia's first Republican U.S. Senator since the 1950s. (Joe Manchin may soon be the second, despite pro forma protestations of continued allegiance to the Democratic Party).
Tennant never had a chance. Try as she might – and she never stopped trying – she could not distance herself from the head of her Party, whose radical opposition to carbon fuels in general and coal in particular has made him toxic in these parts.
No matter how much she denied it, Tennant was compelled to run as Barack Obama's proxy, and her disastrous defeat was a resounding rejection of him.
Did he get the message? Apparently not. Though he insisted in the weeks leading up to the election that his policies were on the ballot and that it was really all about him even though he wasn't running, in the aftermath he affects to believe that there is no reason for him to chart a new course.
It will be up to Republican Shelley Moore Capito and Democrat-for-now Joe Manchin to keep reminding the President that his agenda has been rejected.
