Election Thoughts

I haven't written anything in a while - the world series, the elections and my clients have taken up a lot of time this month - the latter, of course is good news . I’d much rather discuss philosophy and politics, but no one will pay for my insights - yet.

Anyway, I listened to some of the talking heads analyze the election results, and the most common narrative is that "the voters rejected the Democrats because they are too liberal and they now need to move to the center." That is an absurd analysis. It assumes that huge numbers of voters embraced liberalism in 2006 and 2008, when the Republcans were slaughtered, but then switched back to being conservative in 2010.

We know quite clearly why the Democrats lost. In 2008, 18-28 year old voters constituted 18% of the voting electorate. In 2010 they constituted 9%. In 2008, black voters constituted 13% of the voting electorate. In 2010, black voters constituted 8% of the voting electorate. And I’m sure you can guess that the percentage of the voting electorate over 50 soared?

In other words, old white people (like me), who tend to vote Republican (present company excepted), came out to vote. Young people and black people, who tend to vote Democratic, stayed home. And given that most of the Republican victories were non-landslide victories, that’s the entire ball of wax.

I mean, come on. Should we embrace a simple, fact-based explanation repleat with easy to understand numbers, or an explanation that assumes extreme shifts in political philosophy for millions of people every two years?

The real question is, why did democratic leaning voters stay home? Well, here is an excellent description of the phenomena by Glen Greenwald:

“People are suffering economically and Democrats have done little about that. Beyond that, they failed to inspire their own voters to go to the polls. Therefore, they lost. By basing their power in Congress on Blue Dog dependence -- rather than advocating for the views of their own supporters and implementing those policies -- they failed, and failed resoundingly. Building their party around a large number of muddled, GOP-replicating corporatists not only creates a tepid and failed political image, but far worse, it prevents actual policies from being implemented that benefit large number of ordinary Americans. Democrats repeatedly refrained from advocating for such policies in deference to their Blue Dogs, failed to do much to alleviate the economic suffering of ordinary Americans, and thus got crushed. Anyone who thinks that Democrats lost because they were "too liberal" -- rather than because Americans are suffering so much economically -- is wildly out of touch, i.e., is a multi-millionaire cable TV personality who has spent decades wallowing in trite D.C. chatter.

. . . .

The Republicans have long lived by what they call "The Buckley Rule": always support the furthest Right candidate who can plausibly win. This year, knowing that it would be a wave election, one that would sweep in huge numbers of Republicans in districts where they ordinarily couldn't get elected, they changed that to: support the furthest Right candidate, period. That's because they believe conservatism will work and want to advocate for it. Democrats don't do that. The DCCC constantly works to prop up the most "centrist" or conservative candidates -- i.e., corporatists -- on the ground that it's always better, more politically astute, to move to the Right. Even in the pro-Democratic wave years of 2006 and 2008, the Democratic Party blocked actual progressives and ensured that Blue Dogs were nominated, even though the anti-GOP sentiment was so strong that any Democrat, including progressives, could have won even in red districts (as Alan Grayson proved).

With that strategy, the Democratic Party now reaps what it has sown. Its message and identity are profoundly muddled, incoherent, unclear, uninspiring, and self-negating. Worse, its policies are mishmashes of inept half-measures that, with a handful of exceptions, produce little good for anyone (other than Wall Street, the Pentagon and other corporate interests). They are perceived as -- and are -- beholden to Wall Street, special interests, and the corporations they vowed to confront. They are without any ability to confront the massive unemployment crisis and financial decline the country faces. And as a result of all of that, they lay in shambles. Anyone who can survey all of that and cheer for the strategy which Democrats have been pursuing -- let's build our majorities by relying on GOP-replicating corporatist Blue Dogs -- or who thinks that this election loss happened because "Democrats are too liberal," resides in a world that has very little to do with reality. And that's true no matter how many times they repeat the simplistic snippets of exit polls to which they've obsessively attached themselves.”

Well said Glen! No in fact, freakin brilliantly said! How Democrats can consistently dismiss the desires of their base (abandon the Public Option/leave the huge Wall Street banks in tact/ ignore civil liberties concerns and seek to enhance monarchical executive powers) and still hope to win elections is beyond me.

Joe H.