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    The Short Lesson of the 2010 Elections

    By Doctor Cleveland on Mon, 11/08/2010 - 1:11pm | Politics

    So almost every op-ed page agrees that the lessons of the 2010 midterms are as follows:

    1) The Democrats should compromise more with the Republicans, because the Republicans now have about a 50-vote majority in the House.

    2) The Republicans should get to decide what counts as "compromise," because the voters are on their side.

    3) Obama should apologize to everyone, all the time, for everything he did in his first two years as President. He has been Rebuked by the People and should atone for his Sin of Pride.

    That's certainly one way to look at it. Here's another:

    The Republicans just made serious gains by not compromising. They turned Not Compromising into 60+ House seats. If last Tuesday night was a shellacking for Democrats, the last election (and truth be told, the one before) can only be described as a shellackety-ackety-acking for the GOP. Even their big angry red wave in 2010 couldn't put the Democrats in a hole as deep as Boehner and Cantor were standing in two years ago, with their sorry 180 seats to Pelosi's 255. Never mind the big Presidential loss they'd taken, and their lopsided weakness in the Senate. But they decided that they had not been Rebuked by the People, no matter what the vote count looked like. They decided they were the True Voice of the People and acted accordingly.

    I freely admit that being in opposition and being in the White House require different strategies. But even so, the post-election consensus among opinion journalists flunks the Listening to Themselves Test, badly. The Republicans just followed a political stragegy to major Election-Night gains, and the conventional wisdom is that the Democrats should not follow that strategy.

    This advice is either counter-intuitive or just plain stupid. If it comes with a reasonable explanation and an alternative strategy, it's counter-intuitive. If it's just announced as plain common sense, it's plainly stupid.

    Democrats should never pay attention to what the Republicans say (or vice versa). The Republicans have absolutely no interest in giving their opponents useful advice. Democrats should pay attention to what their opponents do. That's the lesson. If the other side beats you by playing aggressively and working the refs as hard as they can, you don't counter that by playing less aggressively yourself. Either you figure out a way to make their strategy work against them, or you hit 'em hard and cry foul as loudly as you can. That's what they would do.

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    In 2000, Bush squeaked into office on a supreme court decision in an election so close that no matter who got the White House a good portion of the country would probably have had reason to cry foul.  Predictably, there was some call for a bipartisan cabinet.  Surely, said the media, the President with no mandate will have to govern from the center.

    Nope.  Because to Bush, getting sworn in was all the mandate he needed.

    In 2004 Bush won re-election more convincingly.  But it was another squeaker, especially has measured by the popular vote.  Bush's popularity was also dwindling and if the election had been helf 2-3 months later he probably would have lost.  Chastened, he said "I have political capital and I'm going to use it."

    In 2006 he lost both houses of congress.  so he fired Donald Rumsfeld and sent more troops into the war everybody hated.

    Obama takes office in 2008 in truly convincing factor.  He just trounces John McCain.  He beats McCain so badly that two years later McCain finds himself vulnerable to an upstart Republican challenger for the Arizona Senate seat for the first time in decades.  He rides into Washington a popular, historic figure.  He tries to be gracious about it.  He keeps a Republican in charge at Defense.  He listens to Republican generals about the war.  He even graciously debates McCain and other Republicans in public forums and adopts some of their ideas.  And they say "no, no, no."

    Then they take one house in Congress and act like they've won the end of the Obama presidency.  One house, based on a lot of close races that could have gone the other way and they're acting like they run the whole show again.  Time for Obama to show them they don't.

    Sigh.


    by Michael Maiello on Mon, 11/08/2010 - 2:04pm

    My understanding is that President Obama is a reader and a thinker.  My question is this:  Who is he reading, and WHAT IS HE THINKING?

    To continue to say with a straight face that he knows the republicans want the best for the country after they have just said that the main thing they want is for him to go down in flames, reminds me of an abusive spouse kind of syndrome.  There is absolutely no one - right or left - who wants a leader who can't lay down the law.  I am so discouraged.



    by CVille Dem on Mon, 11/08/2010 - 6:45pm

    This is the lesson of 2010.

    I was going to call this post Revolt of the Screwed, but decided that I didn't want to get readers who were looking for porn sites. However, that is a good summary of what happened in the election: the middle class voters most hurt by this terrible recession turned against the Democrats with a vengeance. They were looking for someone to blame for their economic woes. The good news is that their first pick was Wall Street. The bad news for Democrats is that they associated Obama with Wall Street. The two most important and dramatic statistics coming out of the exit polling were (1) the 40% of voters who felt worse off economically in the last couple of years went Republican by 29% after going for Obama in 2008 by 42%; and (2) the 35% of voters who said Wall Street was more to blame than anyone else for the bad economy broke 56-42 for the Republicans. That first number is the biggest swing by far in any demographic group I have ever seen after looking at exit poll numbers for the past 25 years. I have seen swings in the 30s before, maybe even into the low 40s in some small segment of the electorate once or twice, but I have never seen anything close to a 71% swing before.

    I wrote early in 2009 that voters were going to be in a very bad mood in November of 2010, and that this would be a blame election, where economically stressed swing voters would be wanting to take their misery out on someone. I was certainly right about that, but here's the ironic thing: I suggested that since I thought it was unlikely we could get them to blame the economy on Bush since we were in charge now, that our best hope was to get them to blame it on Wall Street. They did, that 35% who laid the blame on Wall Street's door were primarily the middle class swing voter bloc in this election, but they associated us Democrats and Obama with Wall Street more than Republicans. The TARP bailout and Obama and Geithner's vigorous defense of it, the kid glove treatment of the big banks at the hands of Geithner, the AIG and big bank bonuses that closely followed, the failure to prosecute or break up the Too Big To Fail banks: it all came together in those angry middle class voters' minds as Obama being associated with the same Wall Street actors people were blaming for their economic problems. The fact that once the financial reform bill that had some important wins for the middle class was passed, Democrats barely ever talked about it again didn't help.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 11/08/2010 - 11:31pm

    That is most definitely an excellent analysis, thanks for pointing to it. I especially like that he includes this

    Check out these numbers from a Stan Greenberg poll done for the Campaign for America's Future. Stan did a careful analysis of which voters were the key swing voters, and what he found is striking...

    Rather than just the usual vague blather about having to move to the right or the left, he went out and found some specifics. Unfortunately, those very same voters helped elect some people who are going to make it much more difficult to get those things done that they want done.

    And then there's this

    These voters are the populists who Lee Atwater focused on in 1988, and the middle class populists we ought to be focused on now. The reason they are swing voters is that they think both parties- and yes, government itself- have let them down. They don't like partisan bickering because they want politicians to focus on their needs instead of trying to keep their own jobs, but they have no patience for bi-partisan deals that once again screw them on these economic issues.

    My bold highlighting explains their preference for Obama for prez in 2008. But the rest still doesn't explain what they think a bunch of GOP House Reps planning to cause gridlock will do to solve their problems.

    I'm not sure I understand the Atwater comparison, though.  Atwater in 1988, through Willie Horton and similar things, was striking at the idea of elite liberals worrying more about rights of people who don't follow the rules than the situation of those that do follow the rules? So the new Willie Horton is Wall Street? They don't follow the rules but the elitist Dems protect them and worry about them anyway? The comparison and his suggestions also imply that a lot of ruckus about things like taking care of DADT, the question of Gitmo detainees, and gay marriage would just make them angrier. And taking on immigration, though some have argued it might be a good time to do it, would also be folly?


    by artappraiser on Tue, 11/09/2010 - 1:02am