The reason the midterm messaging has been so frustrating is that what’s finally landed wasn’t inevitable. But as this ad for Sharron Angle illustrates, with polls now finding her 4 points ahead, the Democrats failed to make the election about a clear choice, which would have demanded they provide a constrast, but also a plan going forward, so what’s happened is that the midterms have turned into a referendum on Pres. Obama. They’ve played defense the whole way instead of offense.
The Nevada Senate race was always the representative contest that most reveals the midterm mood. Two candidates that are disliked by voters representing two parties that no one likes, with “none of the above” getting plenty of attention.
A good sign that Harry Reid is in real trouble is when you see him doing media. He’s bad at it so it’s always a last ditch, dire option. A glimmer of movement has however shown up, via Jon Ralston, with Clark Cty Dems providing a “surge.” Harry Reid’s machine awakens?
So Sharron Angle’s closing argument is simply about tying Reid to Obama, then reminding Nevadans that the President told people not to come to Las Vegas to spend cash, which hurt middle class workers throughout the state, but especially in Sin City, which is the state’s economic engine.
It magnifies Pres. Obama’s tone deafness on white working-class voters who are now flooding back to the Republicans, because Democrats didn’t make the message about helping them, which could have come through a moratorium on foreclosures, as Hillary’s lead provided, but also many other issues on the economy, including the tax cuts provided in the stimulus that’s gone virtually unmentioned. That said, there really is nothing to save Obama or the Dems from their conservative compromising policy prescriptions on health care and financial regulation, which yielded mush and pissed people off, with far too few talking about specific changes that must be made going forward to make these things right.
The White House evidently never believed what might happen if the midterms became a referendum on Obama. They looked at his numbers, which remain high, because the man is well liked, but misinterpreted them, as many pundits, Dem strategists and talking heads have also done, thinking that his likability transfers to giving him a pass in the voting booth.
As much as people want to equate this election with ’94, even ’80, there is no comparison. The old Republican propaganda engine, right-wing radio, is now joined by Fox News, even more independent groups, new media, FB, with Sarah Palin and the conservative candidates seen continually on Fox, driving the anti Obama message every day. Couple that with the fact that the Tea Party, however it manifests, is the engine through which even Independents are being driven, and you’ve got an outside force in play that blasts out the old Perot model, especially when you add women who are likely to walk away from Dems for the first time since ’82.
The unpopularity of Obama’s policy prescriptions is manifest in that they weren’t effective, because they cut in half what might have worked for a corporate solution that was doomed to fail from the start. Instead of change voters can believe in it became about same old, same old, which was made worse when voters didn’t feel what it was doing for them.
Obama and the Democrats blew the midterm messaging a long time ago. It’s going to cost them a lot next Tuesday, because it’s setting up a scenario that will likely bring Congress fully back into Republican hands in 2012.
After the midterms, if Republicans really do decide that only goal is to keep Obama from a second term, as Sen. Mitch McConnell promised recently, they’ll have the numbers in Congress to keep the country economically on teeter, which could do it.
Quick response — I have to get to work! I think you (and many others) are misreading the 2008 results. I know you (and many others) believe it to have been a mandate for massive change. I (along with just as many others) read it as a mandate to get away from George Bush, with hopes for change for the better in terms of the economy, in terms of our standing in the world, in terms of the way we feel about ourselves as a country. I would say those in the middle NEVER wanted the push for health care that resulted in this half-assed bill that will ruin the system we have in place, deeply flawed as it is, but which covers the majority of Americans. Instead, we’re all going to be hung out to dry with less choice, higher costs and an unsustainable entitlement program. I would say those in the middle NEVER foresaw the national debt increasing the way it has (and which deeply, deeply concerns many). And I would say those in the middle NEVER foresaw Obama being as deeply partisan as he’s been. I don’t know how he thinks he can go back to being president of all of us, when he’s spent his entire presidency slamming half the people. (I could go into all his lies, but I won’t).
So it’s no wonder people are deserting him in droves. Part of it may be messaging. A whole lot of it is governing. Why would women not desert Obama? I think, right now, economic issues are trumping social issues. Women worry about their family’s situation, their kids, paying for college, etc. These see nothing but crushing debt and a worse standard of living. Obama may talk pretty, but that doesn’t pay the tuition bill.
I came across a website a couple weeks ago. You may well know of it — hillbuzz.org. Whoever runs it is a former Hillary backer (and worker). He had a great item in a day or two ago — a response to something ole’ Rush Limbaugh must have said. And the guy ranted and raved about Obama and what he and the Democratic party did to Hillary during the campaign (in terms of thuggery, election-stealing, etc.) and how he has rejected the Democratic Party since then, because it’s not the Dem. Party he knew and loved and supported. I think he believes the Dems need to destroy themselves and then rebuild. It was very interesting — made me mad about the ’08 election and Hillary all over again.
The Dems (and I’m a liberal who like the hillbuzz guy is utterly disgusted at how a guy with no executive experience and no real experience of any kind, including political is in the WH) deserve everything they get come Tuesday. Every single thing.
um… You are simply wrong and in a big way. I appreciate you stopping by, but your comments very often omit what I’ve actually written. It makes your analysis faulty.
I challenge you to produce one post or essay where I wrote the ’08 election was a “mandate for massive change” that didn’t mean a turn away from George W. Bush. You won’t find it.
That said, to people who know what they’re talking about Obama’s election was a mandate to move in a decisive new direction. Why the hell do you think Republicans voted for him????
In fact, I railed against what Obama & Dems were doing on health care from day one and never stopped. I’ve been on cable, when I had the time to do media, talking about it.
Your assessment on Obama being “deeply partisan” is laugh out loud hilarious. If only, then maybe he wouldn’t have cut corporate deals that made his policies like hcr & finreg suck, aka not work.
He had a great item in a day or two ago — a response to something ole’ Rush Limbaugh must have said. … I think he believes the Dems need to destroy themselves and then rebuild. It was very interesting — made me mad about the ‘08 election and Hillary all over again.
That post from Hillbuzz was a lot like some of the emails I’m getting from others who can’t leave ’08 in the dust. It was evident in a FB back & forth that ensued from a puma individual who also rewrote history to her own liking.
The disgust you feel towards Dems is shared by many, but also those who feel the same about Republicans, but an open letter to Rush Limbaugh is simply falling for the “Operation Chaos” 2.0 nonsense that makes fools out of its followers, because it’s all about Rush.
1.”Quick response — I have to get to work!”
This is the LONGEST and one of the most out of touch with reality “quick reponce”s I’ve ever labored through.
2.” I think you (and many others) are misreading the 2008 results.”
Only if those “reading” it couldn’t read english
3.” I know you (and many others) believe it to have been a mandate for massive change.”
It was
4.”I (along with just as many others) read it as a mandate to get away from George Bush, with hopes for change for the better in terms of the economy, in terms of our standing in the world, in terms of the way we feel about ourselves as a country.”
EGGxactly.
5.” I would say those in the middle NEVER wanted the push for health care that resulted in this half-assed bill that will ruin the system we have in place, deeply flawed as it is, but which covers the majority of Americans.”
That’s right. They wanted FAR more extreme revamp, single payer or public option.
6.” Instead, we’re all going to be hung out to dry with less choice, higher costs and an unsustainable entitlement program.”
Nice regurgitaion of the teabagger/repugnantklan talking points. But you forgot death panels.
7.” I would say those in the middle NEVER foresaw the national debt increasing the way it has (and which deeply, deeply concerns many).”
Well since it started to tank WHILE the torturer in chief was still in office fu*king the country up the kiester for your “say” to be accurate the “middle” would have to be pretty fu*kin stupid wouldn’t they?
8. And I would say those in the middle NEVER foresaw Obama being as deeply partisan as he’s been.”
To paraphrase The Honorable Representative Frank, on what PLANET have you been living?!!!! Both in the ridiculous claim that people would not expect a DEM President with a DEM House and a DEM Senate to be Partisan and the even MORE ridiculous claim that this sorry excuse for a Democrat President Obama has BEEN partisan.
9.” I don’t know how he thinks he can go back to being president of all of us, when he’s spent his entire presidency slamming half the people. (I could go into all his lies, but I won’t).”
Why should you when YOUR post is a compilation of repugnantklan/teabagger misinformation and lies?
10.”So it’s no wonder people are deserting him in droves.”
Well, considering the shithouseratcrazy nature of the teabaggers and repugnantklan and the 13th century they want to take us back to, YES it is actually. Unless you of course ARE a teabaggin repugnantklaner, or a delussion person who hides in a shack in the woods crafting wonderful wooden boxes to mail things to college Profs and elected officials in.
11.” Part of it may be messaging.”
WOW! Even a broken clock is right twice a day!!!
12.” A whole lot of it is governing.”
See, there’s number two!
13.” Why would women not desert Obama? I think, right now, economic issues are trumping social issues. Women worry about their family’s situation, their kids, paying for college, etc. These see nothing but crushing debt and a worse standard of living.”
ALL the result of the repugnantklan under the torturer in chief, or are you to dim or short attention spanned to remember that?
14.” Obama may talk pretty, but that doesn’t pay the tuition bill.”
JEEBUS CRISPIES! A broken clock that was right THREE times innna day!!
15″I came across a website a couple weeks ago. You may well know of it — hillbuzz.org. Whoever runs it is a former Hillary backer (and worker). He had a great item in a day or two ago — a response to something ole’ Rush Limbaugh must have said.”
Yeah, LOTS of liberals rely on limpwithnoballs for points to make!
16.” And the guy ranted and raved about Obama and what he and the Democratic party did to Hillary during the campaign (in terms of thuggery, election-stealing, etc.) and how he has rejected the Democratic Party since then, because it’s not the Dem. Party he knew and loved and supported. I think he believes the Dems need to destroy themselves and then rebuild. It was very interesting — made me mad about the ‘08 election and Hillary all over again.”
So, we should all have to be flailed with the scuge of a repugnantklaner/teabagger House and maybe Senate? This guy is a freakin GENIUS ain’t he.
17.”The Dems (and I’m a liberal who like the hillbuzz guy is utterly disgusted at how a guy with no executive experience and no real experience of any kind, including political is in the WH)”
Oh yeah, anyone who is liberal believes in KILLING THE FU*KING PATIANT to cure a cold!!
18.” deserve everything they get come Tuesday. Every single thing.”
If Dems and the American electorate are stupid enough to vote in repug/teabaggin majorities, I actually agree with you.
Well, Beth, as a fellow resident of suburban Chicago, I think Obama had a mandate to try something different. Maybe not to remake the country, but to try some really different things, since the old ways did not work. Obviously the people were expecting more attention to jobs and hoping he would rescind the bank bailouts when he came into office.
If Obama had made a real jobs and infrastructure program, built alternative energy projects, shut down the bad banks, extended a Medicare buy-in at cost to those who wanted it, gotten out of Iran and Afghanistan (to name some obvious things) the Democrats would be cruising right now. These prescriptions would not have required rocket science, or socialism, but they would have helped secure a Democratic majority for years to come. And maybe getting the obvious things right would have opened up an opportunity for more change. You never know.
And while I agree with you that the healthcare bill has made things worse not better, the old system only worked for those Americans who have secure jobs at benevolent employers. It needed fixing, desperately, just not this “fix.”
I don’t exactly know who Obama has been “slamming.” He has made a few criticisms about business while throwing money at them, as I note in my comment on Ramsgate’s foreclosure post. This Kabuki theater didn’t work because the business community has expected abject foot kissing all the time in word as well as in deed. Incredible as it seems to some liberals, many of my colleagues here in the financial world actually hate Obama, viscerally. OTOH liberals like the majority of those who post here, hoped that Obama would actually do something to improve the economy. In a nutshell, that is why Democrats have no friends now.
Finally, I agree Hillary got a raw deal. If you read that horrible NYT article at the beginning of the ’08 campaign, the one that tried to match up Bill and Hillary’s calendars to see how many nights they spent together, that told you she had no chance. The NYT legitimized the hits right from the start.
WORD.
…then seconded.
Thanks much for the very kind WORD… nice to be appreciated…
Thirded…not a word I know but I completely agree.
Fourthed … though that sounds as if it should have either a “Go” in front of it, or “estate” behind it.
I post the fithed!!!
Fifthed! You nailed it, sunlight. “Ya gotta stand for something”. To think we were one vote shy of the Medicare buy-in for those 55 and older… Independents, Democrats, and even half of the Republicans supported the health insurance public option, job creation, Wall Street regulation, etc. – good things for Main Street.
CRAP! Make that sixeth!!!
If you insist. LOL.
Sunlight (and by extension Taylor), you know, you make some very good points. I guess I think that “try something different” wouldn’t necessarily include “running us into the ground.” Attention to the economy would have been really welcome, but Obama wants to be this transformative guy and make huge changes, in his vision, not necessarily ones we’d like. And I’d agree with you that health care works for those with jobs.
Slamming? He slams GOPer’s regularly, with that ridiculous, overused (that’s why it’s ridiculous) car-in-the-ditch metaphor.
I don’t have time to go into other things! Darn it all. This making a living stinks.
And Sunlight — where in the burbs are you? I’m in Geneva, far western suburbs.
Thanks much Beth. I am in Naperville, not far at all…
I just don’t buy that Obama wants to be transformative. We’re talking about someone who spent 12 years teaching at the very conservative University of Chicago Law School. His early advisors came from the same university’s Economics Department, made famous by free market extremists like Milton Friedman and George Stigler.
That “change” rhetoric is just there to fool liberals. Funny thing, it fooled conservatives too and made them angry at him as well. That’s the point I tried to make.
If you remember exactly what happened in September 2008, I would say that the Republicans drove the car over the cliff. The financial panic that Lehman’s fall touched off could have torched the finacial system within hours had the Treasury not intervened to save the money market funds. As an independent trader, I lived every minute of that. The “driving the car into the ditch” metaphor is too kind by half. Though maybe Obama would have more right to use it, if he actually did something about putting that car into drive rather than neutral…
I thought you were posting something as you ran out to work?! GOSH! I want one O those jobs that just last a freakin HOUR!!!!!!
And no, I hadn’t seen that NYT piece about how much they’d slept together. Good God above…
Beth~ I don’t disagree with some of your thinking but it always seems to me that you have this “blind spot” where Obama’s supposed liberalism is concerned.Put simply he ain’t no liberal~
Cent Uygur at the Huffington Post gets it. Obama doesn’t.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/what-obama-is-missing_b_775777.html
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Stewart got him to address real, substantive criticism of his record for the first time. Almost everyone else that has interviewed him has either wildly misstated the case or challenged him from the right. Stewart asked all of the right questions. And the answers were very informative. This is what I learned.
Unfortunately, Obama doesn’t get it. He’s not alone; almost the entire Washington media doesn’t understand what the hell we’re talking about when we say change. Obama said that he got 90% of what we wanted in health care reform and that people are complaining we didn’t get the other 10%. I totally disagree with him on the percentages (I think it was closer to 40%), but that misses the whole point.
We’re not quibbling over legislative compromises. (…) We’re not stupid, we understand the need to compromise and the fact that of course you can’t get all of what you want.
The real issue isn’t whether you changed some provisions and didn’t change others; it’s whether you changed the system or not. That’s the change we were looking for.
So, in the case of health care, as long as there was some effort to break the health insurance monopoly we would have all jumped in. We didn’t need single payer, we didn’t need Medicare buy-in for everyone, we didn’t even need the public option for everyone (all of those would have been great, but we were nowhere near them in this political cimate). We just needed something, something to start changing the broken system.
We would have settled for Medicare buy-in starting at age 55. We would have settled for the public option that only applied for 5% of the country, the last proposal. There were no wild demands, no mythical inflexible progressives demanding 100%. We just didn’t want the core of the system to be exactly as it was before. And unfortunately it is.
Yes, we got more coverage for more people. I’m not discounting the good sides of the bill, but at the same time you can’t be purposely dense to what we’re saying. Private health insurance is still our only option, drug companies still have massive monopolies, our premiums are still going up and we are still at the mercy of these corporations.
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If we continue to let special interests, corporate interests and lobbyists buy our politicians, there’s no hope on any of the issues. Then Obama is right, the best we could hope for is a little bit of change in the different fields. If you accept that false premise, then Obama did the best he could do within those constraints.
But we didn’t elect him to accept that premise, we elected him to change that premise. That was the change we were waiting for — and didn’t get.
Unfortunately, based on President Obama’s answers to Jon Stewart he still doesn’t get it and has no intentions of pushing that agenda in the next two years. And he will probably be just as flummoxed then as to why people aren’t satisfied with his efforts. Your timidity isn’t based on your specific policy proposals; it’s based on your lack of vision.
If he fought tooth and nail for complete public financing of elections in the next two years, even if he didn’t win, we would all back him 100%. We don’t need 100% success, but we do need you to at least head in the right direction. And we need you to understand what we meant by change.
Thanks Isis~
Thanks LL.
I know from your comments that you have never been a big fan of Obama. But for me, a supporter since 2006, this disconnection breaks my heart.
Disconnect!
“We would have settled for Medicare buy-in starting at age 55. We would have settled for the public option that only applied for 5% of the country, the last proposal. There were no wild demands, no mythical inflexible progressives demanding 100%. We just didn’t want the core of the system to be exactly as it was before. And unfortunately it is.
Yes, we got more coverage for more people. I’m not discounting the good sides of the bill, but at the same time you can’t be purposely dense to what we’re saying. Private health insurance is still our only option, drug companies still have massive monopolies, our premiums are still going up and we are still at the mercy of these corporations.”
That’s right, Isis. Something at the core, even a little bit to build upon. The Medicare buy-in would have been sunstantial as that is where a great number of uninsured lie, due to job loss and 401K depletion. And who the heck is going to rehire them????
Isis~ That was one of my worries way back during the primaries when it became obvious to me that Obama was not what people thought. That people like yourself would end up disillutioned.It really worried me about the youth because now I think they have even more reasons to be cynical.
The young, first time voters are the ones that have always concerned me, too. I know a 20 year old 9at that time) woman who took a year out of college and spent many 60 hour and more weeks working for the Obama campaign. She tells me now that she’s “trying to stay interested.”
I agree with 90%. The remaining 10%?
I do think Obama’s approval rating are being inflated because there’s a real issue with polling about him, because he is the first AA president.
People are, in short, giving him far, far more leeway as a president in polls.
In private? I don’t believe that they are remotely convinced about that issue. I think they think he’s a complete idiot.
I can only speak for myself. I do understand he took over when we crashed. I do understand that TARPII was necessary.
But the stimulus bill was completely botched. So has his overall comments about the Teaparties.
No, I think his approval ratings are inflated.
He is, indeed, in danger of being a one-term president.
I worried about this possibility on behalf of minorities in the election.
I can only tell you now, I don’t care. Let the cards lay down.
I am now comfotable in saying, This guy is incompetent.
And although I totally agree with the the historical timing of his election?
I also think we better figure out how to survive our own demise here.