Midterm Recap

It is a week since the debacle, and that has barely been enough time to get my head around the disaster that was the midterm elections for 2010.

It was not that the results were unexpected.  Nor were they particularly historic.  But the swing seems drastic when you consider the "mandate" the Democrats were given in 2008.  I think the main message we can take from this is...

...the American people are pissed.  

But what are they pissed about?  Why did the election play out the way it did?  Why did Americans vote for the Republicans when they gave such recent majorities to the Democrats?  Only a retarded fraction of the electorate truly believes that Obama is a Muslim from Kenya, a Marxist or Hitler.  So, what's the BFD?

One idea was that Americans have "rejected the Obama agenda."  They truly did, if you consider the swing in the election.  But I see this as a talking point.  Polling shows that Americans by and large favor the individual parts of Democratic policies.  From health care to Wall Street reform, folks approve of select parts of Democratic bills.  They also see the villains the way most of us do.  Polling shows that when it comes to the Economic disaster, Americans blame: 1. Wall Street, 2. George Bush, 3. Obama.  And though Obama comes in number three, the combo of one and two account for about two thirds of those polled.  I don't think that Americans rejected most of what Obama did.

Pollster and Hillary advisor Mark Penn has gone with the standard DC pablum: Obama and the Dems need to move more to the center.  This makes me want to heave my toast - especially because it is likely that this is the advice that the Democratic leadership will take.  If Obama reached any more to the right, his fucking arm would have fallen off.  No, "centrism" (corporate sell-outism) definitely did not work.  Half of the blue dog caucus, those champions of move-to-the-right, lost their seats.

Now, progressives like Feingold and Greyson lost too.  And they were some of the strongest progressive fighters.  This would seem to support Penn's argument.  But they also had giant targets on their backs.  money poured in to beat those two.  The progressive caucus only lost four members, and still number in the eighties.  Progressives did well enough, the conservatives in the Democratic party got hammered.

So why did Democrats lose the House?  

One reason is the success of Republican messaging.  For the last two years we've heard about rampant spending and rapacious taxes.  The message was simple and constant, and came from every candidate on that side.  It didn't matter that it was bullshit - it was effective.  And worse, many on the "left," especially our president, validated these talking points.

And even worse, there didn't seem to be much of a counter-message.  Obama touted his health care bill, and financial reform as 'epic,' but nobody was buying it.  And he only started that in the last two months before the election.  He didn't seem to realize that Republicans started this election in January of 2009.  He also came about as strong as a cat fart in an elephant house.

Obama and the Dems needed to hammer three points home, month after month, until we were ready to scream if we heard them one more time:

1. Republicans want to give your money to a CEO...
2. ...give your job to the Chinese...
3. ...and give your house to your banker.

Saying this over and over again would have been true, and would have made Americans decide that Republicans would fuck up the economy - again.

Now, it's universally agreed that the economy is the #1 issue.  And yet, Obama and the Democrats couldn't craft a message that resonated with what two thirds of the public already thought.  The bankers fucked us, and the Republicans helped them.  This always floors me - the professional politicians of the left have such a hard time crafting an effective message that 2/3 of Americans already agree with. 

Don't get me wrong, I see their problem.  When you give health care CEOs and Wall St. everything they want, it's hard to point to the other guys and say "not me!"  But that doesn't stop the Republicans, and it shouldn't stop the Democratic Party either.  Not if they want to win in this day and age.

So messaging was huge in this election.  But the other factor was the lack of fight for the average family.  Jesus, you gave the bankers all the fucking money, our money, and they paid themselves record bonuses.  That was in our face.  That was the moment to put them on a government salary.  Americans wouldn't have seen that as socialism, outside of Glenn Beck's viewership, they would have seen that as 100% fair.   GM management and labor had to crawl on their knees to get help to save manufacturing jobs.  The bankers snatched up over a trillion dollars, paid themselves record bonuses, and then complained how unfriendly the Democrats were to the business community.  Seriously, Obama...that's when you would have been cheered if you had punched Jaime Diamond in the face.  

Instead, you bowed your head.  You apologized, and then told the Fed to print the banks another trillion dollars.  And the Republicans, who want this as much as anybody, get record donations AND get to point the finger at you and the Democrats for helping bend working Americans over the meat counter.

People can reasonably disagree about the merits or failings of health care, or foreign policy, or whether there was enough change.  Those conversations have filled blogs and cable news opinion shows - all viewed by folks who already knew how they were going to vote.  But the enthusiasm gap was tied directly to the pain felt by the Average American, and that pain can be tied to the murdering of the economy, and the murderers who did it.  And you paid those murders trillions, without consequences of any kind.  You looked forward, not back.

Nobody, in the last 10 years, has been held accountable.  Not by Bush, Not by Obama, nor any leaders of their respective parties.  Not for treason, not for torture, and not for grand theft and fraud.  So, the American People decided to hold the Democratic Party accountable for letting the bankers rob them.  It was a form of mob justice - the electorate, women and white, working class men in particular - grabbed their torches and their pitchforks and chased Frankenstein out of Congress.  

Again, Obama and the Dems fucked this election up horribly, and truly deserve the drubbing they got.  It just sucks that we will suffer for it.  And what's the alternative to the Democrats?  The Republicans ghouls will cut the legs out from under the poor and middle classes, borrow more from China to give directly to the top 2%, and leave our country in ruins.  

Jesus, it's like a choice between riding on the Titanic or the Hindenburg.