As expected, Republicans have taken over the House of Representatives and greatly reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate. It was a bloodbath.
By early Wednesday, Republicans had netted 60 formerly Democratic seats in the House and led in 4 more. Excluding Patty Murray’s (D-WA) seat, which is still too close to call, the Democrats lost a net of 6 Senate seats. So the total loss in Congress is about 70 seats. In the 2010 midterm, the Democrats have lost more than all the gains they made in the 2006 and 2008 elections (66 seats).
For comparison, Democrats lost 62 seats in the 1994 "Contract for America" mid-terms. You'd have to go back to 1938 for a mid-term loss larger than this one. In that year, FDR's Democrats lost 79 Congressional seats.
In two years’ time, Democrats have used up their political capital. They spent it on modest changes to health care (i.e., no single payer like most advanced democracies) and to the financial system and to saving the US auto industry. They enacted a stimulus package that was able to save 3 million jobs and helped keep the Great Recession of 2008 from turning into the Great Depression of 2009.
It was not enough and people were angry.
Democrats did not adequately respond to the misleading and downright false statements thrown out by Republicans and they paid for it. The Big Lie (Harold Evans, The Daily Beast, Nov 1) is “that the aggressive fiscal and monetary measures by which Obama defended America in the Great Recession were a waste of money, a notorious example of the Democratic appetite for throwing money at any problem.” That is, “the stimulus didn’t work”. There were a lot of other lies and misrepresentation around health care and TARP and financial reform but this is the one that worked best for the Republicans in the mid-terms.
Should Obama have worked harder on jobs and less on health care in the first year? It would have made sense politically but let’s face it - extending health care to more than 30 million Americans is a major accomplishment.
Could he have pushed through a stronger stimulus? He might have if he seized the initiative and explained in simple terms why deficit spending is important in overcoming a recession.
The Democrats tried to do what was best for the country in the long run and ended up suffering for it politically. Rachel Maddow had an excellent segment that summarizes the major accomplishments of the 111th Congress with a Democratic President and Democratically-controlled House and Senate.
As a sidebar, the Blue Dogs who sometimes acted and voted like Republicans took it on the chin. They could have enacted the stronger measures that progressives were championing and lost anyway. According to an analysis by The Huffington Post, 22 of the 46 Blue Dogs up for re-election went down on Tuesday.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_midterm_election
Feedback from my progressive co-worker:
ReplyDelete"Good analysis. My issue with Obama and the Democrats is that they are woefully inept at getting their message of accomplishments out. In addition, the administration often started their bargaining with the other side from an already compromised position. Instead of saying we need a single payer system for health care, they bargained from a position far less and settled for far less than that. With the stimulus, many economists (including my fav Paul Krugman) predicted that the approved stimulus would fall short of what was really needed and the Republicans would seize on that moment and call its actual modest successes as outright failures. Maybe the stimulus really did save 3 million jobs but when unemployment stands at 9.6%, it's hard to say you were successful.
Finally though, the current political environment does not foster strong potential for true progressive achievement. Both parties have been bought by special interests. The difference though is when special interests buy republicans and put them in power, the things they wish to enact are embraced by the executive and legislative branch as well as all of the republican voters. When special interests buy democrats (to hedge their bets in case democrats actually win), it becomes nearly impossible to enact liberal policy that is embraced by both the legislative and executive branch that truly meets the needs of liberal voters:
1. You can't enact meaningful health care reform because a Senator in Mass. has received enormous contributions from insurance firms and a Texas democratic congressman has received contributions from a pharmaceutical firm.
2. You can't enact a progressive energy policy because the W Virginia democratic leadership has received enormous contributions from the coal industry.
3. You can't enact financial reform with real teeth because every bank, brokerage, insurance firm and investment bank is throwing huge dollar amounts derived from wealth gained from building nothing into democratic campaigns with the return promise that the democrats will back off on reforms that would really help citizens.
I've said it before; until we remove all cash from the campaign system, progressive achievements will forever be blunted and diminished."