By Alan Caruba
It is now generally agreed that the Democratic Party will sustain large losses in the midterm elections. It will be interesting to see how their candidates and leadership explain why they lost.
My guess is that we shall hear a lot of talk about racism. This is the chief charge leveled against the Tea Party movement and it is utterly without substance. Democrats, however, are very likely to spin the loss as bigotry in general and, in particular, directed against America’s first black president. Obama has been rejected for reasons obvious to anyone who is unemployed, has had their home foreclosed, and an electorate aware of multi-trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.
The next fallback position will be, of course, to blame the economy, but the Democrats literally own the economy and have owned it going back decades to the 1930s when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected and reelected while prolonging the Great Depression for ten years until the economy was rescued by a full-employment program called World War Two.
Those were the years when Social Security, a huge Ponzi scheme, was introduced, followed by Medicare. Both are now insolvent and, like all socialist schemes, have “run out of other people’s money.”
The effort to take over one-sixth of the nation’s economy with Obamacare is a major reason for the Democrat failure at the polls. Forced through a Democrat controlled Congress through bribery and arm-twisting in the face of enormous public rejection and protest, the Democratic Party experienced a paroxysm of hubris that ignored the will of the People.
There is, too, a widespread sense that Congress, including some RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, has failed the People. The critical role of the “independents”, voters who do not identify with either party, will be manifested and it can no longer be ignored by either party. Last week, a Rasmussen Reports poll revealed that an astonishing 65% say that Congress has failed to perform its critical duty to maintain the welfare of the nation.
The statistics of government failure whether it is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, all give voice for a return to the founding principles of the nation; a smaller, limited central government.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, John Fund noted that “It took Democrats in the House of Representatives 40 years to become out-of-touch enough to get thrown out of office in 1994. It took 12 years for the Republicans who replaced them to abandon their principles and be repudiated in 2006. Now it appears that the current Democratic majority has lost voter confidence in only four years.”
What those inside the D.C. Beltway have failed to comprehend is that, in an era of the Internet and instant access to encyclopedic amounts of information about the legislative actions of Congress, they no longer can fool all of the people all of the time, nor even some of the people all of the time. A core of about 25% believes in liberalism. The rest of the population does not.
The voters, too, will have rejected a vicious Democrat campaign of personal destruction directed against Republican candidates, accusing them of sexual misbehavior, witchcraft, and other misdeeds that were not only lies, but totally irrelevant at a time when the nation’s economy is in serious trouble.
Along with the Democratic Party, the nation’s mainstream media will suffer a continuing loss of the credibility necessary to their existence. In media critic, Bernie Goldberg’s words, it was “a slobbering love affair” with Barack Obama that got him elected.
I think, too, that many saw the rally staged by Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert of the Comedy Channel as an insult to the seriousness of the nation’s problems. Having people like Muslim convert, Cat Steven, participate, or Sheryl Crow who advocates bizarre environmental ideas, simply degraded the event further. There were few laughs to be had from the small crowd that attended.
There will be payback as daily newspapers grow thinner, as news magazines like Newsweek get sold for $1 and the assumption of its debt. The network news programs will continue to lose viewers, while Fox News channel continues to thrive, along with a bevy of conservative radio hosts and commentators.
Ultimately, though, this is a loss to be laid at the feet of the first openly socialist president of the United States, Barack Obama, and it is testimony to the rejection of his political philosophy and his determination to “transform” the nation.
Washington, D.C., with its legions of lobbyists and the need to raise huge amounts of money to get reelected does strange things to the judgment of those in Congress. No matter how the numbers turn out following the election, Republicans must keep in mind that they did not so much “win”, as the Democrats lost.
The same forces are at work and will be on a faster schedule if Republicans do not prove responsive and fail to make the changes necessary to save the nation from economic ruin.
© Alan Caruba, 2010
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