Like many others, I've spent the last week in a kind of daze, stunned by the victory of the Republicans last week. How could our country go so wrong? Why don't others see the disaster they are making? But what I think we ought to be doing is focusing less on the badness of Them, more on where we failed and what we can do about it, less on the badness of Them, more on how they are successful.
What's truly stunning to me is that the political failure is directly connected to the legislative success of the past few years. After eight years of incompetent government, we finally seemed to have a President who knew what needed to be done and could lead Congress to accomplish it. What happened? I think the problem is this: almost no one felt any benefit.
We passed healthcare; but people still don't have healthcare
... partly because it got watered down, partly because it got delayed.
We passed a stimulus, but people are still out of work
...because large capital centers, banks etc., are clearly not lending the money in ways that ramp up production.
We passed TARP, but people are still being foreclosed on and have a hard time getting a mortgage
...because the banks have refused to supply the public benefit that was supposed to flow.
As we retool, as the policy process cranks up for the next cycle and the next, what is needed first and foremost is a way to provide immediate benefits in the wake of legislation. Think how different things might have been if Republicans campaigning against healthcare had to face people who had suddenly, as if by miracle, started to benefit from a healthcare bill; if the same Republicans who voted against the stimulus had to face people who had recently gotten jobs from it.
My read on the message of this election is simple: people were scared and unhappy in 2008, so they voted for the guy who promised change. But they were still scared and unhappy this year, and they didn't see much change, so they voted for a new set of guys offering change, without in many cases looking too closely at what the changes were either time.
What was successful about the Republican message is that they were able to envision for people specific benefits that would flow from their change: less frustration (less government), less taxes. What we need to think through is a set of proposals that are equally concrete and equally immediate and then get behind them.