Not so much to celebrate these days.
Romney/Ryan are losing. Badly. Like everyone else, the ongoing gaffe-o-rama has been entertaining, to say the least. Romney, in his continued inability to relate to regular folks, is the poster boy the ever widening gap between the very rich and entitled elite and 99% of the rest of us.
However, a dark cloud has been spotted overhead and I wanted to talk about it. The unintended consequences of a campaign so clearly failing that Romney has been furiously fundraising. Not for nothing, Romney needs the money.
Money is moving away from the Romney campaign like rats jumping off the Titanic. It's become a failboat. That money isn't idle, though. It's moving into the states and Congressional and Senatorial campaigns. Third party groups are concentrating their poisonous attack ads in the states and Congressional districts where that money might make a difference.
And those campaigns, fueled by even more money, will become more difficult to defeat. As if there weren't enough viscious attack ads in the past, imagine the third party astroturf groups running even more. Couple that with state and local media not countering the outright lies and made up BS and it becomes harder to fight them. Yes, people hate attack ads, but they're run because they work.
If Republicans have shown anything in the past 2 years, it's that they can stop, block, and fillibuster anything and everything at the federal level. They can leave a President and even a Senate majority not just without the ability to do anything, but taking and holding America hostage to wring concession after concession out of a Congress that has no choice if they want to prevent a crisis. They've found valuable hostages, too, and have far too much experience at using them.
Wisconsin is a good example of the impact that vast sums of money (coupled with a lazy, corporate media) in steering elections toward Republicans. An endless stream of outside group attack ads allow a candidates own money to be spent on "I'm a good guy" ads so they can avoid the backspash of all that mud. It's the way Ron Johnson and Scott Walker were elected in 2010. It's the way Scott Walker survived recall.
Money pouring into state and Congressional media markets to smear Democrats and promote Republicans may more than offset those negative Romney/Ryan coat tails. Enabling a continued Republican majority in the House and narrowing or eliminating the Democratic majority in the Senate would create another 4 years of obstruction.
Republicans don't care if America fails. Quite the opposite - they see it as their path to future victory. They're silently cheering the continued high employment rate that their 2 years of legislative obstruction has ensured. They're privately delighted at the deficit that they've grown by holding an important bill hostage in return for the continuation of the Bush Tax Cuts for the richest Americans.
Democrats, with their unbelievably poor messaging, have been unintended co-conspirators in this. They have failed, over and over again, to tout each new benefit from the Affordable Care Act as they came into effect. They should be loudly and proudly proclaiming the end of the insurance cap, the free physical exams and routine tests insured Americans can now receive annually, the end of unlimited insurance company profits, and so on.
They should also be demanding "up or down votes" - a successful mantra used by the GOP whenever Dems were even thinking about a fillibuster. They should also point out the historic level of Republican fillibustering and other obstructionist practices. Sadly, they don't.
So, here's the plan.
We need to get more active than ever before. We need to phone bank, canvass, donate, and do anything else that is needed to make sure our Congressional and Senate candidates get elected. Ditto local and state candidates. Talk to friends and neighbors, make sure they're going to vote and that their votes are going to the right candidates. We can't match their money, but boots on the ground are more valuable and can reach farther.
We can't look at Romney/Ryan fail and relax. We need to do more. A lot more. We can't let them buy these elections.
.