Several issues have been bothering me since the November 4 elections… Perhaps a separate diary should be devoted to each of them. But I will try to compress them in this one post. So bear with me.
First, I am not one for figure pointing (or maybe I am, but more on that below). So, with a sense of fatigue and near-resignation, I have to ask… Does it matter? Does it matter why the Democrats lost? Perhaps – in the long term, for when we are getting ready for the next election. But now? There are two years of even more gridlock, even more fighting, even more stagnation at the federal level. Two years more in which more carbon dioxide will be released in the atmosphere, in which nothing of substance will be done for the middle class and the poor, in which the immigrants will vainly await some sort of solution… Two more lost years of our lives, of my life. No, this is not about throwing in the towel… But it is about sadness… about what could have been and now would never be. Living through eight years of the Bush presidency was, truly the worst time in my life. I cannot bring myself to even begin to contemplate another Republican president – a Scott Walker, or a Jeb Bush… A Republican president, moreover, who can rely on House and Senate majorities. A Republican president who will get to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court? My heart is so heavy… Because when we elected President Obama in 2008 and re-elected him in 2012, I felt elated… The belief here, among us was that the country is finally on the right track… Remember those demographic trend-lines? Remember the ageing, nearly all-white electorate of the Republican Party? They were going to struggle for a generation to rebuild their party … they were nearly extinct we used to say… remember Rachel Maddow’s segments with the Republican elephant on a deserted island with the soundtrack of “One is the loneliest number…”?
Fast forward to today. Most Republican state houses since the 1920s… Not even 20 Democratic governors (I can only be thankful that we are in the middle of the decade and the census and therefore re-districting is 6 years away)… a structural advantage, today’s New York Times says, that may prevent Democrats from winning back the House for a generation… And Salon moans about a lost generation of Democratic talent (since so few elected officials at the State level are Democrats that the talent pool for federal office has shrunk dramatically).
We have to be honest with ourselves. Before ourselves. So many reasons can be found. But the inescapable conclusion is that we screwed up. Badly. I will resist pointing fingers again. But this “reality-based community” was almost as deluded as Republicans living in the “unskewing polls” bubble of 2012 were. Please go back to the site here, look at posts from the days before the election… I will leave you to draw conclusions for yourself. One consolation is that in the sixth year of Obama’s presidency, the number of Senate seats we lost to the Republicans is 8 – exactly the number that were lost by Republicans in 1986 – in the sixth year of Reagan’s presidency.
So yes… I am sad. Because the vote seems like a rebuke. Because this is exactly how it is and will be interpreted by most media.
But there is also anger. Casting around perhaps… focusing on different things at different times. I almost want to give up at times … voters deserve what they get right? Remember Ben Franklin, answering a woman’s question about the system of government the Founding Fathers had chosen, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” And in my crazier and angrier moments, I almost want to work for encouraging fossil fuel consumption – after all, the best solution will be to pump all available oil and get to a point when carbon emissions will simply vanish together with the last available gasoline…
And this is also why I am angry… VERY angry. President Bush, whose intelligence and knowledge cannot even begin to compare with Obama’s … President Bush, whose political skill ranks somewhere between a pickle and a sea-urchin, that selfsame President Bush pretty much got anything he wanted from Congress… Tax cuts? Presto! War in Iraq? Here it is! Deregulation? Voila!
So, I ask you… where is the agenda we were supposed to have passed? My God… for two years we had a House majority and 60 Senate seats! Believe you me, this will not happen again anytime soon. And before anyone here comes up with a long list of obscure stuff, I will admit it myself. Yes, getting ACA passed was a “big fucking deal”… But, but spending most of a year on it?! Come on! Yes, of course the stimulus package was important…. But months and months? We have to admit that a sense of urgency was lacking. We have to admit that what most of us liked in Barack Obama – his openness to cooperation with Republicans, nay his insistence on it – seems in retrospect to have been a luxury of wasting time and opportunities we did not have.
Which brings me to our most significant failure – immigration. Obama could have done it in 2009 or 2010… Congress would have passed some form of it. As I see it, this is a failure that will plague us for a long time. Because as someone who keeps a close attention to this issue, I have to say that any group of people who are hoping for and looking forward to immigration reform at this point regard the Democrats’ position with cynicism and disgust. On what do we base our projections of Latino or Asian voters continuing to favor Democrats? Because they have nowhere to go? The Latino majorities that propelled Obama to victory twice and saved many a Democrat’s ass (Harry Reid comes to mind) are predicated on Democrats delivering on what is the single most important issue for these people – immigration. Republicans know this. This is why they have opposed immigration so consistently – to deny the Democrats this ultimate prize… Because by solving immigration Democrats could have, at the stroke of a pen, created millions of motivated, new Democratic voters (many of them in places like Texas and Arizona). I have this question for you… What happens to our projections of voter turnout and overwhelming demographics if an enterprising Republican comes along with something along the lines of “The Democrats have always lied to you. They had the majorities to legalize you… They could have done it easily in the very first year of Obama’s presidency… But did they? No! But I have a plan for immigration reform – and I have the Republican Senate with me to make it a reality.” Remember – in the wake of the 2012 Romney loss Republicans suddenly realized they needed minority outreach. And you can tell me that after their 2014 victory the incentive to change has been dulled. But… anything could happen in a competitive primary season… A primary season moreover that is likely to feature Jeb Bush whose pro-immigration views are an open secret… And a Marco Rubio who actually already flirted with immigration reform. They can do it NOW, because in doing it now they will achieve at a stroke the kind of minority outreach they need. And they can lock up significant minorities (30-40%) of the Latino vote by doing it, or actually get to outright majorities. Unlikely?? Think again. Remember that until the 1960s African Americans were reliable Republican voters – after all the Republicans were the party of Lincoln. All that changed with lightning speed. Be wary of assumptions.
So I sway between sadness and anger… Stages of grief? Perhaps.
And many questions remain unanswered in my mind. Chief among them – if Republicans can railroad the country into following their outdated agenda… if they can lie, cheat, suppress voting, use dark money at will … How can they be bested from a position of honesty… a position that recognizes the problems instead of trivializing them for some form of fear-mongering, or sugarcoats them with platitudes or outright denial? How? “Primary Colors” comes to mind here, and Kathy Bates’ character in that movie… And so I keep pondering this.
Maybe you will regard this diary as a rant? Maybe you will find little of value in it. If that is the case, I apologize… to me it is more like a stream of consciousness.