I want to believe this Progressive polling post-mortem from Stan Greenberg & Robert Borosage. I'm just afraid it appeals too much to my preconceptions.
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by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
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Lots of trees, but no forest.
It’s way too easy to find single issues, and then find a group that agrees with whatever view you want to have on it. Leave Social Security alone? Find the Seniors. Keep abortion? Find college students and aging non-religious feminists, etc. Ideologues on both sides have been doing this forever, and have continued to do so in this election. It means exactly nothing under the rubric of THIS election.
This election was not about the particular shade of government you want, but REDUCTION in government and State’s rights. This is so clear from this election, it can only be a complete misunderstanding of true conservatism that would lead you to believe anything else. And it also explains the numbers in that article you cited.
But then I’ve been telling you that you, and the majority of your pundits on the Left, aren’t seeing the Tea Party, small government type conservatives for what they were for months now. This election went EXACTLY as most conservatives expected. CONSERVATIVES, not the GOP necessarily. That it seems to have thrown the Left just indicates how out of touch they are with people they’ve been miopically calling fascists and racists for the past two years.
Those who actually make the argument that the Right and the Independants, and even some from the Left, voted conservative because they think Obama didn’t go far enough in his plans, have to be dellusional. It was the people most outspoken in their support for Obama that had the toughest races and got beat most often. And if you think that a dislike for Bush’s policies automatically makes you a Lefty at heart, you are REALLY dellusional. Bush (overall) caused a lot of harm to the conservative movement, and we all know it.
The only real question for the immediate future is how many of the Democrats, newly freed from the chains of their leaders’ fantacies of knowing more than stupid racist “teabagging” Americans about what stupid racist “teabagging” Americans want, will now vote with the GOP on many things. We know at least one Senator in W.Va will. You will now see some bipartisanship NOT because the GOP goes along with the Left, but because the conservative Left is now free to speak its mind and/or will pay a little more attention to the people who put them in office.
The question for the more distant future is how many of the 23 Dem Senators up next time around will lose their seats, or by following the American people keep them, and how long before Hillary resigns as Sec State so that she can run against Obama and try to save her party.
This election was not at ALL surprising. If it really was to you, you should think about why. Maybe start by really reading that pithy little document the Declaration of Independence. It’s all really quite clearly laid out. Or maybe some Thomas Paine, “Government, at its best, is a necessary evil, and at it’s worst, is an intollerable one.”
I didn’t vote in this last election because I am angry with the democrats for their support of the coup in Honduras, Guantanamo still being open, the flotilla attack in international waters, the wars raging in the middle east, laura bush’s support for gay marriage but not michelle obama’s, and the list goes on and on. I didn’t vote Obama into office because of health care or the economy but because of foreign policy, and the past two years haven’t seen much of a change from the Bush years and it pissed me off even more when I read that Obama’s people told voters like me to suck it up. I would welcome an antiwar candidate from the left to challenge Obama in the next election. I can’t see myself voting democrat again for a while unless there are some real changes.
EXCEPT for the reality that Obama & Dems are hugely unlikely to meaningfully fight for any of these things in any substantial manner, because they’re amoral and unprincipled cowards who are only interested in getting reelected, pleasing their corporate donors, and not rocking the center-right DC boat or displeasing David Broder.
As always, the question isn’t what’s the right policy in terms of its own merits or its political appeal, but what pols in both parties are going to do about it. And if past is prologue, it’s likely to be relatively little. Despite Obama and the establishment media’s claim, the problem isn’t too much partisanship, per se, but too much far-right partisanship, and too little left-wing partisanship. This has been true since the Clinton years. Repubs keep moving things rightward, and Dems keep following them, ignoring the public and good policy ideas.
I don’t know how we get this near-term, with President Stockholm Syndrome in charge (that’s where they gave him the Nobel, isn’t it? how apt).
Except, of course, Obama, (If we’re to take him seriously) isn’t interested in getting reelected. He’s already stated multiple times that he’s fine with being a one term President.
Which should frighten us all: Even the most amoral and unprincipled are constrained by consequences when they understand themselves to be in a repeated game. But a single shot game? All bets are off.