If the Obama Administration and the Democrats in Congress feel that recent losses in the House of Representatives and in various state governorships and legislatures require them to rethink their strategy and move more toward the middle, they will be giving the Republicans and Conservatives a victory that they never earned at the polls. After all, the President is still a liberal Democrat. The Democrats are still in charge of the U.S. Senate. There are still plenty of Democratic governors and state legislators. In my opinion as a liberal Democrat, the Democrats should move more to the left, and leave the middle for the Republicans.
The reason why the Republicans won this year was not because the Democrats are liberal and the Republicans are conservative. The Republicans won because of “the economy stupid.” The mass of independent voters, and many Democrats and Republicans, always vote their pocket-books. They do not care about, or know very much about, the big issues. They look at what is happening in the economy and how it is affecting or likely to affect their personal finances. They opposed the stimulus because they resented money going to big banks and stockbrokerages. They did not realize that much of the stimulus money was designed to go to jobs for lower and middle income Americans. They resented the health care reform bill because they believed that it would help only poor people and that it would raise taxes. They didn’t realize that it would benefit all people and that only the wealthy people would pay higher taxes. They also did not realize that the bill would actually lower the deficit.
Thus, it was not their political philosophy that hurt the Democrats. It was the continuation of a sluggish economy and unemployment from a recession started under a Republican administration and caused by Republicans’ anti-regulation policies.
So what should the President Obama and the Democrats do now? Should they retain the Bush tax-cuts for the wealthy as well as for the middle-class? Should they abandon all hope of getting legislation to stop global warming? Should they give-up on trying to have a public option attached to the health care legislation? Should they forget about trying to strengthen the Wall Street reforms? I say that, if anything, they should increase their efforts to pass these things and other liberal legislation. The last thing they should do is kowtow to the Conservatives and become more conservative themselves. By moving to the right the Democrats will have truly lost the election and given-in to the Republicans.
It is particularly important that President Obama not believe that the election was a referendum on his popularity. It was a referendum on the economy, which still suffers from high unemployment. Moreover, a large percentage of the people who voted Republican this time voted against Obama when he ran for president. President Obama won the White House by a 52 to 46 percent margin. That means that 46 percent of the electorate was already prepared to vote Republican two years later. All it took was a small shift of independent voters to insure a Republican victory in the midterm elections. There can be no doubt that those independents did so in the hope that it would improve their finances.
Conservatives will point to Bill Clinton who appeared to become more conservative after the Democrats lost control of Congress in the 1994 midterm election. But Clinton did not become more conservative. Rather, he recognized the necessity of working with a Republican congress in order to get anything done. In that sense, President Obama has it better than Clinton did. At least he has a Democratic Senate to work with. As President Obama has said, he will have to compromise with the Republicans in the House in order to get legislation, but he will not have to go as far as Clinton did. In addition, the Republicans will have to compromise with the President and the Democrats in the Senate if they want to pass any legislation. Otherwise they will revert to the kind of obstructionist party they were before the election.
I hope that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress do not take their eyes off the ball. I hope that they will not surrender their values as a result of this midterm election.
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Excellent essay; clear thoughts about the situation, post-election. I think you caught the voters' mood. The average voters don't follow things in DC to any real extent, except as concerns them as far as getting laid, getting a new car, their 2 week vacation in Hawaii, that sort of thing. They really don't know and don't care that Republicans support tax breaks for corporations who outsource their jobs. And they haven't a clue Republicans blocked extending their unemployment insurance saying that American workers were just plain lazy. The voters blame Obama because Fox News and big money tells them to. As I see it the big problem is that the Democratic Congress has been kow-towing the whole time to Republican demands, however illegitimate they are. Republicans with their shallow reading of Adam Smith, crowing about the Free Market, which doesn't exist; and then too, Milton Friedman's blithely immoral maxims in praise of greed and deregulation, are responsible for Wall Street burning the house down. The corporate/bankster coup of the Oval Office, with their privatizing profits and socializing losses. America, ruled by corporate greed, has lost its moral compass. For this latest economic disaster the Dems should have kicked the Republicans in the shins at every turn. And talked up the liberal successes. They did not! Therein lies the mystery. Why didn't they use their political capital? Why is Obama acting like a doormat toward John Boehner and Mitch McConnell who have sworn to destroy him? All the best, Bill http://thesavagepen.blogspot.com
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