Thus spaketh Ezra:
The topic du jour appears to be the Obama paradox. How, some writers are asking, can the Democrats be both passing a lot of legislation and be headed for a defeat at the polls?
But there's no contradiction. No paradox. Instead, there's unity. Oneness. Om. This is night following day.
He goes on to explain:
Democrats won their massive majority because of an economic collapse. They've passed so much legislation because they have a massive majority based on an economic collapse. But the economic collapse isn't over. And having a lot more seats than the other party means 1) voters blame you for the condition of the country, and 2) you have a lot of seats to lose. What the bad economy and the huge majority giveth, the bad economy and the huge majority taketh away. Om.
Mind you - I don't think we won the last election solely because of the bad economy. We won in 2006 before the real crash. Surely the failures of the Bush administration had already put momentum in our favor. But I think Klein is correct that the size of our 2008 victory was largely a product of the economy. Nobody was expecting a 60 seat majority until economic dissatisfaction met with all of the other dissatisfactions of the moment and convinced even those in many red states that they wanted change.
We went from hoping we could squeak out a presidential victory (and worrying about things like the Bradley/Wilder effect) to claiming a national mandate for progressive change. Never mind that those 60 seats included folks like Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson - America had rubber stamped our fondest wishes. That is the story we told ourselves.
But from the POV of the folks in congress it was a different story. They rode in on the bad economy and many of them understood from the outset that a lot of them would likely ride out on it as well. You can argue that the smarter among them ought to have reacted by acting bolder, but the majority of them reacted by becoming extremely risk averse. They were not engaged in preserving the largest possible Democratic wave - they needed to preserve their own seat.
Herein lies the disconnect between those of us on the outside and the folks on the inside. We were free to imagine a mandate and became disappointed when we imagined it squandered. As I have said in many comments, we confused the first hurdle with the finish line. Moreover - many of us lied to ourselves about the agenda that had prevailed in the election. Having failed to nominate a full-throated "tear-down-the oligarchy" progressive for the presidency, we told ourselves that we had elected a trojan horse "tear-down-the oligarchy" progressive. And we imagined that the entire country wanted the same - even though our own party had rejected this approach in the primaries.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. The current insanity of the progressive movement is our belief that we can effect the kind of change we want without our views explicitly winning at the ballot box. We can decry those that do win as corporatists and label them sellouts for not doing our bidding, but to do so is to tilt at windmills. Real change will not come via trojan horse progressivism.
Bottom line: We will not see "better" democrats until we convince a majority of Americans to share our world view. We have not made the sale, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves for that fact.