Pretty much anybody who cracks a newspaper knows that election night is going to be bad for Democrats. The only question is "how bad". By that, we're talking complete armageddon, or just "almost complete" armageddon.
It is largely a referendum on Barack Obama and his handling of the economy.
Now, to be fair, even if Barack Obama had masterfully led during the past 2 years, I think he'd be in trouble. I think the economy would still be screwed.
So, to claim that there was much he could have done to avert the upcoming trip to the woodshed that his party is about to face is a bit of a stretch. He was just doomed. He was doomed by events outside of his control, that were created largely by the policy decisions of his predecessors.
That also includes Bill Clinton who presided over the dismantling of Glass Steagall, which was instrumental in preventing another Great Depression for 66 years. Within 10 years of it's repeal, here we are.
There were other things that have worked against him since day one. For instance, Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. I know she's popular in the Bay Area. For that part of the country, she's fine. For the rest of the country, having her as speaker of the house and one of the most prominent Democrats in the country is about as much of a disaster as one could imagine. The only thing I could see that would be a comparable diaster on the right-wing side of the leger would be to have... I dunno... somebody like David Duke as the pointman for the Republican party.
The Republicans have been relentless as identifying the Democrat congress and Obama with Pelosi and have been able to make that connection in the public consciousness. This might not hurt the Democrats in the Bay Area, but it hurts them everywhere else.
People are angry, and not just because the economy sucks. They're angry at Obama for his what they sense are his priorities, which they largely can't figure out. And the parts they can figure out? That makes the voters furious.
The biggest of Obama's blunders? Had to be the utter ineptitude he showed when he chose to pursue his health care bill during his first year in office.
If there was any other way Obama could have gotten this wrong, I'd like to hear about it. Many independents and moderates (I like to include myself in the "moderate" category) wanted to see some action taken on health care.
We've got huge problems with health care in this country: specifically with health-care costs. Really, when you get down to it, medical technology can solve the problems it can solve. It can't solve the problems it can't solve. People understand this. When they complain about health care, though, the main complaint is that they can't get it because it costs too much.
Obama had a huge amount of political capital when he won the election. His approval ratings were astoudingly high.
The basic theory goes: you use up that political capital to do something good. When something good happens, you get more political capital you can use later.
Bush expended all his political capital on the wars, and when they didn't produce discernable productive achievements, he was out of capital and his party was out of office. That's a case study in how unwisely using political capital can result in having no political capital left.
Obama's health care bill is another.
Had Obama actually produced a good health care bill, I think he wouldn't be in quite the dire circumstances he is in, now. However, he made so many tactical errors that the bill that resulted is almost completely worthless.
First, in spite of being Mr. Hope and Change, the first thing he did was bring in pharma and insurance companies behind closed doors, cut them special deals which would allow them to continue to gouge the American people, and took any meaningful reform of health care costs off the table.
Basically, the biggest problem with health care? Cost? The first thing he did was make sure that costs would not be addressed.
In the end, the bill took much longer to pass than he thought. Largely because the bill really didn't offer much, he wasn't able to garner public support to push it through once it faced opposition by the Republicans whose votes weren't needed, anyway.
Ultimately, the bill couldn't pass, and it only became law through a very, very convoluted use of reconciliation between the house and senate bills.
There is one good thing that came out of the bill: pre-existing conditions can't be excluded anymore. Literally, just one good thing.
Meanwhile, the bill ensured that, for instance, the United States would not be able to negotiate drug purchase prices. Probably the biggest single purchaser of pharmaceuticals in the world is not allowed to negotiate on behalf of the American people for a fair deal.
This bill is so bad that it will, absolutely, make the health care situation in the US worse.
In the end, I suspect that Obama knew his bill wasn't very good. It accomplished very little, and didn't do anything to address the real issues with health care cost. However, he had wasted the first year of his presidency, and all his political capital on it. To walk away with nothing would have been even more disastrous for him, politically.
So, did he take half a loaf when that was all he could get? I'd say more like he took that end piece that everybody throws away.
People detest politicians whose only agenda is to maintain their political power. Obama's final passage of the health care bill was only intended to help 3 types of people:
1. People with pre-existing conditions can now buy policies, which are going to be priced so outrageously expensively that they can't afford them. This is small progress since in the past, they just couldn't buy policies.
2. The very people who are charging the US 2 and 3 and 4 times as much as they charge the rest of the world won big. Obama guaranteed, in law, that nobody will be allowed to stop them from destroying our economy.
3. It helped Obama because walking away with nothing, would have been a horrible disaster, he walked away being able to claim victory. Trouble is, the bill is downright bad. The American people have no tolerance for politicians who do bad things just because it benefits their political career.
Now, by focusing on health care, what he wasn't focusing on was the economy. What if, instead of spending all his political capital on a health care bill of dubious value, he had used it to get Wall Street regulatory reform.
We have regulatory reform? Well... yeah, if you think the health care bill was a victory, you probably love Wall Street reform.
What if he'd used all that goodwill early in his presidency, combined with populist outrage about Wall Street, to re-enact Glass Steagall?
What if he'd used all that to fund a government agency to wind-down the nation's 10 largest insolvent banks. (Right now, if you can name a bank off the top of your head, they're insolvent under mark-to-market rules).
What if he used that energy, combined with a special prosecutor, and the Sarbanes-Oxley law to throw 400 Wall Street executives in prison and ban then from ever working for an FDIC insured institution?
We can only theorize about that because Obama didn't do that. In fact, he did the exact opposite. He continued the Bush Administration's policies of ensuring that the bankers who caused this problem were richly rewarded with multi-million dollar bonuses.
If anything, Obama is WORSE as far as being a Wall Street toady. Bush actually let one of the Wall Street banks fail before Paulson discovered the benefits of a totalitarian, command economic model. Obama? As both a Senator and as President, has put Wall Street first.
Now, again, would this have helped the economy? I doubt it. The economy will fix itself when it fixes itself. If we spend billions, it'll fix itself. If we do nothing, it'll fix itself.
However, right now, the American people are feeling betrayed. They don't trust Obama. They think he only acts to preserve his power and to protect the politically connected. Which means if you're not a Wall Street Banker or a member of the UAW, it's darned hard to figure out any way Obama has done anything for you at all.
The American people believe in hard work and sacrifice. We all know this is going to take a while for us to fix. Trouble is, right now, we don't think our government gives a whit about us. The American people feel, and rightly so, that the only people who have to sacrifice are those who followed the rules and played fair.
The folks who cheated? Who got rich doing it? Deep down, I think a sizeable portion of the population feels that Obama represents them, not the guy on Main Street trying to make his budget work.
Nobody is willing to follow Obama now, and it's his own fault.
Granted, if the economy recovers in the next two years, Obama will get the credit and get re-elected. Though even so, his actions to date paint him as horribly out of touch and completely oblivious to what ordinary Americans deal with on a day to day basis.
Bill Clinton always had the potential to come back because he had the ability to make people believe that he cared about them.
Obama? I don't think anybody thinks Obama cares about them one whit. He needs to connect with the voters. He needs to stop doing what's politically expedient and start figuring out how to do what's right.
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