What happened is that the party in power got punished for the economy being bad. Never mind that the punishment consisted of swinging government control back toward the people who were largely responsible for the economic meltdown and who had no coherent ideas, just ideological dogma, for how to deal with it. People want instant gratification…and if the President and his party don’t deliver, even if it’s delivering the impossible, they tend to get punished.
The interesting question is really why the President still holds a slight lead in the polls despite the general state of the economy. And, the answer is that the public is almost, but not quite, as gullible as the Republicans want to believe and so enough of the folks recognize that the Republicans would only do worse.
Democrats lost the House, and the House ONLY, in 2010 for one reason: Koch brothers paid for an astroturf campaign based on flat out LIES, fueling outrage against NON-EXISTENT policies with hundreds of millions of dollars.
This.
We remember very well, and I explained it right above. The public objected to fake, make-believe, made up, ginned up LIES that were spread with hundreds of millions of Koch brothers money.
Post 34. HUNDREDS of things that fixed our broken economy, saved the biggest manufacturing industry in the country, afforded protections to women in the workforce, improved the lives of our military and veterans, and much, much more.
You can’t be serious. The grown-ups in the room were trying to get things done, not stall them even longer!
Flawed premise. The Democrats were enormously successful, which is exactly why the Party of the Elites had to resort to buying and lying to throw a wrench in their success.
Absurd. Republicans obstructed in spite of the public telling them quite clearly that they wanted what President Obama said he would do if elected, BY ELECTING HIM OVERWHELMINGLY.
Why do you insist on ignoring the fact that Republicans could only take control of the House from Democrats by LYING to the American public? If there were real objections to any of the laws being passed by the Democrats, why didn’t Republicans point any out? Here’s what a truthful Republican campaign would have had to have looked like in 2010:
[ul]
[li]President Obama stanched the bleeding of jobs; We have no alternatives, but vote for us anyway![/li][li]President Obama gave you everything you asked for in health care benefits (no pre-existing conditions exclusions, 80-85% of your premium going towards your care and not overhead, your college-age kids being allowed to remain on your family policies, small businesses being able to deduct health insurance expenses to be competitive with bigger companies, restrictions on arbitrary and excessive premium increases, the inability to drop you when you get sick); We have no alternatives, but vote for us anyway![/li][li]President Obama saved the auto industry from certain collapse, keeping us competitive with foreign manufacturers and saving millions upon millions of jobs in the process; We have no alternatives, but vote for us anyway.[/li][li]President Obama signed legislation making it easier for women to fight unfair pay practices in the workforce; We’d keep you barefoot and pregnant with your rapists’ babies in the kitchen, so vote for us![/li][li]President Obama closed the doughnut hole in Medicare Part D that we left gaping, costing our seniors and elderly thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses; We didn’t do it right the first time ourselves, but vote for us anyway![/li][li]President Obama brought our combat troops home from Iraq, which everyone wanted; We’d still have them there, so vote for us![/li][/ul]
And so on.
Since clearly that would not have been a winning strategy, we got lies about non-existent government takeover of health care, lies about non-existent death panels, lies about the recovery act, lies about everything from the party with no actual alternatives, let alone better ones.
Stop deluding yourself that 2010 was a referendum on anything real that Democrats had done. It was the farthest thing from it.
People went nuts in 2010? No, they went nuts in 2008, when the disaster actually happened. 2010 was two years later. 2010 happened because Democrats did things and the public didn’t like those things. So they elected Republicans to put a stop to it, and they did.
As for the Tea Party, I like them a lot better than the corrupt establishment GOP. I think Democrats hate the Tea Party primarily because they can’t be bought and are actually serious about governing as conservatives.
Voters clearly stated in polls, and still do, that they blame Bush for the economy. Democrats lost because of their policies. Democrats did well in the 1934 midterms, there’s no excuse for doing poorly in 2010. And they didn’t just do poorly, they did spectacularly poorly.
I eagerly await the excuses for 2012. Love Shayna’s excuse about the Koch brothers. Democrats outspent the GOP in 2010 by a wide margin. And they still lost.
I can think of something else that was different in 2010. Something that was unique in history for a midterm election. Something that appeared to inspire a whole political movement.
Or perhaps voters were motivated by the same things they were motivated by when they did the same thing in 1994. The public just doesn’t like it when Democrats have unified control. that’s because they stop listening to the public and try to ram through as much legislation as possible.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I have 2 broad responses. The 111th Democratic Congress was the most productive since WWII. And the Republicans put up the most obstruction since WWII. Taken together, the Democrats truly have performed remarkably and deserve greater credit. Seriously.
Legislative Productivity.
Most Congresses can point to a number of pieces of legislation passed, none of it major. Some Congresses have 1 big accomplishment: 1986 tax reform comes to mind, as does perhaps the Clean Air Act of 1972 or 1990. During 2009-10, the Democratic Congress passed two big laws, IIRC with not a single vote from the Washington Republicans. The stimulus package was the first: professional economists agree that the stimulus package worked. More. Four years ago we were entering a Great Depression. Now we have moderate growth, with a large gap between where we are and a full capacity economy, alas.
The second big accomplishment was Health Care Reform, something that nobody since Truman was able to deliver. You know those complaints about social-security-and-medicare? Those are a result of spiraling health care costs. The ACA is praised by health care economists as taking serious steps to constrain growth. Here’s an accessible presentation. The fact that it is expected to finally provide universal health care for all citizens while cutting the long term budget deficit shows what a finely crafted piece of work it is – again receiving no Republican cooperation. And personally I appreciate the fact that if I pay my insurance bills, I won’t have coverage yanked away for largely BS reasons.
There are other smaller things. The Lily Ledbetter Act. Reform of the student loan program, saving the government millions as the bank lobbyists scurried for cover. The Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights, bringing much needed transparency to the industry. Now some may disagree with some of this stuff. But to say the Democrats did nothing? Factually incorrect. Also see Shana’s laundry list of accomplishments. Nobody can point to a more productive congressional session.
**Record Obstructionism **
On inauguration day 2009, fifteen Republicans including Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich met and plotted their strategy at a lobbyist-backed restaurant. Michael Tomasky: “…before the president had made one concrete proposal, most of the leading congressional Republicans already agreed that they would oppose him and would do so, to the extent possible, unanimously.” Now maybe that reporter got it wrong. But if he’s correct, this is a problem, right? They should be considering bills on their merits, and do electioneering during election years. That’s the way the system is suppose to work. It’s different in parliamentary democracies: but in those cases, there’s no filibuster and one legislative body, not two. The US is suppose to do bi-partisan deliberation.
Now for some harder evidence.
During the worst financial crisis following the Great Depression, the Republicans put holds on appointments the US Treasury. Not because they disliked Obama’s nominations, mind you. Just because. Jon Kyl held up 6 of these appointments -six!- because he didn’t like it that certain gambling regulations were delayed for several months. None of the appointees had anything to do with gambling. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2010/01/08/173079/kyl-treasury-holds/
In Jan 2010, the Senate voted on a resolution to create an 18 member deficit reduction panel. The resolution was co-authored by Conrad (D) and Gregg (R) and had previous support from McCain and McConnell. Obama was for it. So the Senate voted it down: they got 53 votes which couldn’t overcome the Republican filibuster. That’s right: seven Republican co-sponsors of the bill including John McCain voted their own damn bill down. And this isn’t something trivial like highway speed limits. This is a freaking deficit reduction panel, something Republicans like to go on about when they’re not increasing the deficit with their tax cuts. Longtime observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein characterized the vote as: “Alice in Wonderland”.
Later that year, the Republican House would tax X, order Y to be spent, and hold the government hostage because they didn’t want to raise the debt ceiling to cover X-Y. Standard and Poors took a look at this banana republican posturing and downgraded US debt.
A final note. Why didn’t Stink Fish Pot know about this? He seems to think that the problem is in “Washington”. There was a book written this year entitled It’s Even Worse than It Looks by Mann of Brookings and Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Their thesis was that “The political system faces what the authors call “asymmetric polarization,” with the Republican Party implacably refusing to allow anything that might help the Democrats politically, no matter the cost.” Now these guys are regular members of the Washington talk show circuit. But they were given no TV platform to discuss their book: the story they were telling was simply outside of ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN’s framework. Ironically, the book was way more popular than their usual works.
Well, technically they had it for a short spell after Al Franken was sworn in on July 7, 2009 and before Ted Kennedy died on August 25th of the same year. I’ll add that the reasons for holding up Franken’s Senate appointment were predictably ridiculous.
Hm, what’s in this thread? People posting citation after citation, link after link, while adaher posts revisionist history and an insinuation that the people are on his side, though no proof has been offered on same. I don’t know why people even bother, though; if adaher and people like him cared about facts, they wouldn’t be Tea Party supporters.
Even before Kennedy’s death, his illness prevented him from attending and voting in the Senate. The last recorded vote I can find for him was on April 27, 2009.
This thread is a good example of how what’s good for the goose (Democrats) isn’t good for the gander (Republicans). From what I gathered, this seems to be the gist of it:
1.) If Republicans are unilaterally opposed to a piece of legislation, they’re obstructionists. If Democrats are unilaterally opposed to a piece of legislation, they’re principled.
2.) If some group Republicans side with Democrats to vote against some piece of legislation, they’re putting the good of the country ahead of party politics. If some group of Democrats side with Republicans to vote against some piece of legislation the Democratic party is pushing, they’re really Republicans in disguise and are playing politics with the country’s future.
Someone explain to me how this works?
…On second thought, don’t.
How many times did the House send a budget to the Senate only to have it voted down (or threatened with a veto by the president)?
How many times did they do it knowing that it would be without a doubt turned down by the Senate or President? To suggest that these were honest proposals is pathetic.
They were the ones that explicitly said they would not compromise one iota. Boehner even rejected the term itself. McConnell stated that his number one priority was to remove Obama.
So the Republicans are at fault for not passing a budget that would palatable to the Democrats? That doesn’t seem quite right. I have a sneaky suspicion that if the tables were turned, and it was the Democrats who passed a budget that Republicans rejected, you wouldn’t lambaste Democrats for passing a budget that Republicans find less-than-stellar. You would probably go on about Republican “obstructionism” or something or another.
I’m not playing this game again. I got tired of this before-- especially since people (and by people I mean the left leaning folks around here) seem to forget that Democrats explicitly stated that they would rather have the government shut down than to compromise on either entitlements or abortion. Of course, that’s okay because that’s just Democrats being “principled”.
(Seriously. Iirc, it was Boxer who made some ridiculous comment about “there being a line in the sand” or something or another.)
I asked this in the past and I’ll ask it again; so what?
You need to pay closer attention. Upthread, I gave an example of the 6 Republicans filibustering a bill that they had sponsored themselves. Not just voted against: filibustering implies they didn’t want anybody else to even consider the measure. “Alice in Wonderland” was the characterization of 2 political scientists, one left of center, one conservative.
Normally we leave sneaky suspicions out and just address what is being said.
There’s a difference between a couple of issues and a temporary shut down and doing it for every issue for the term. But this is the standard conservative argument “but they do it too!” that as I recall didn’t even work when we were kids.
Yeah, dunno how I can make the difference clear to you between “one of their guys said it” and “both of their leaders in Congress/Senate said it” (and did it).
Oh, no big deal. Just making it clear to our fellows that we have to fight fire with fire and documenting the reasons why.
Okay, so evidently reading isn’t among your strong points. Look at my post. Now look at your response. You should notice your response has nothing to do with my post.
You see, my sneaky suspicions are based on ACTUAL conversations on this very board, where the left leaning posters make up two sets up standards; those that apply to conservatives (and libertarians) and those that apply to liberals.
Good luck substantiating that Republicans do it for every issue. That’s going to require a rather large helping of partisan hackery, but amuse me.
If I wanted, I’d point out to you that you don’t know what an argument is. But I don’t want to. Rather, I’ll just point out how big of hypocrites some of you are, where you deem it to be acceptable for one party to engage in certain rhetoric/tactics but unacceptable for another party to do the same.
Ookay. Then you agree that the when 6 Republican co-sponsors oppose their own bill with the remainder of the Republican Senate that it is a good example of obstructionism? And that you can’t come up with an example with the Democrats doing the same? So there’s no equivalence between the two parties as observed by Mann and Ornstein?
Good to know.
Again, this wasn’t a minor act. This was a core effort on deficit reduction, opposed only because Obama supported it.
No, the thing is that I’m too lazy to sit here and engage in a pissing contest. But, hey, I’m perfectly content with you holding Democrats on some kind of moral high ground or something or another.
Anyone remember 2005 when Bush tried to reform social security and Democrats were (uniformly) opposed to it?