From the moment President Obama took office, there has been various efforts to define him by meme.
From this moment until 2012, some people are going to focus solely on Obama and try to define him by meme, and they'll use Democrats to do it. Consider this idiotic WaPo article:
How Pelosi's determination could hamper Obama.
Nancy Pelosi has been Speaker since Democrats won in 2006 and through the gains in 2008. She was instrumental in helping the President to secure his policy triumphs. Republicans hate her for that.
Boehner and McConnell have a 14 percent and 12 percent approval rating, respectively
No one in the media is calling Boehner and McConnell divisive.
In 2007, both Reid and Pelosi had higher approvals than those idiots, and no one called for them to step down after they got their butts whipped in 2008.
We know the
GOP's goal.
They're hoping that if their characterizations of Barack Obama stick, his Presidency will be seen as a failure.
First order for Democrats, stop allowing Republicans and their media shills to continue vilifying Democratic leaders.
The GOP shills are not going to write history, no more than Bush's people could define his legacy. FDR had his detractors, but they did not define his place in history.
Anyone looking at elections over the last 75 years and didn't prepare for the worse was kidding themselves. Democrats main goal should have been to minimize the damage. It might not be all that apparen, but they did that by keeping the Senate.
Being distraught and harping on the GOP house victory for the next two years isn't going to change anything. Democrats losing 30 or 60 doesn't matter when the other party gains control of the House. The Dems gained only 31 seats in 2006 to control the House (with about the same margin Republicans now hold). Dems gained another 21 House seats in 2008 to increase their majority to 257, which is 17 seats more than the new Republican majority.
Also, unlike 1994 and 2006, the party out of power failed to take control of both chambers of Congress, that is
significant. It keeps Republicans at a disadvantage.
Some Democrats are going to blame the President's agenda. Expect the media and Republicans to do the same.
Peggy Noonan asked in a WSJ commentary:
Was it worth it?, which is really more of
thisThe President had a
window of opportunity, and decided to take full advantage of it.
As Rachel Maddow
commented<...>
Democrats had a choice when they became the governing party. When they won those last two elections and they took control of the two branches of government that are subject to partisan control in our country, they could have governed in a way that was about accumulating political capital with the primary goal of winning the next election. They could have governed in constant campaign mode.
Or they could have governed in a way that was about using their political capital, not accumulating more of it, about spending the political capital they had to get a legislative agenda done, to tackle big, complex, longstanding problems that had languished.
The record of legislative achievement of the last 21 months was not designed to win the midterm elections and it will not win the midterm elections. The pendulum will swing back toward the Republicans and we‘ll go back to divided government again.
The legislative agenda of the last 21 months was policy, not politics. It was designed to get stuff done for the country. And in that sense, it‘s an investment in long-term political reward, not short-term political reward, as Democrats expect after a list of accomplishments like this to be judged as the party that took on problems when it had the chance, even if they had to pay a short-term political price.
<...>
President Obama and the 111th Democratic Congress racked up
historic achievements.
The votes are (mostly) counted. The Republicans have clearly and decisively won. But did the Democrats actually lose?
They lost the election, certainly. And many of them lost their jobs. But the point of legislating isn’t job security. It’s legislation. And on that count the members of the 111th Congress succeeded wildly, even historically.
<...>
And despite the losses, the election had its silver linings:
Progressives Caucus remains intact, becomes a plurality of House Dems In the Senate, 10 of 12 incumbent Democrats won:
- Arkansas — Blanche Lincoln (lost, not unexpected)
- California — Barbara Boxer
- Colorado — Michael Bennet
- Hawaii — Daniel Inouye
- Maryland — Barbara Mikulski
- Nevada — Harry Reid
- New York — Charles Schumer
- New York — Kirsten Gillibrand
- Oregon — Ron Wyden
- Vermont — Patrick Leahy
- Washington — Patty Murray
- Wisconsin — Russ Feingold (lost, heartbreaking)
Democrats retained seat of retiring Democrats in Connecticut (Richard Blumenthal replaces Chris Dodd) and Delaware (Chris Coons replaces Ted Kaufman)
Republican pick ups occured where incumbent Democrats retired or lost the primary:
Illinois
Indiana (Democratic candidate was a House incumbent)
North Dakota
Pennsylvania (up until Arpil 2009, this seat was held by a Republican)
The most telling race of this election cylce was in Nevada. Reid, the Senate face of the Democratic agenda, won despite the predictions.
Mark Blumenthal:
Not All Polls Were Wrong In Nevada WASHINGTON -- In Nevada, polls predicted the wrong winner of this week's Senate election. Or did they? While public media polls in late October consistently gave a slight advantage to Republican Senate challenger Sharron Angle, the internal campaign polls gave Democrat Harry Reid the edge and campaign pollsters on both sides attribute the difference to a combination of greater care in modeling the demographics of the electorate, more persistence in reaching all sampled voters and the added value of registered voter lists.
With 99% of the precincts counted, the Associated Press reports that Reid defeated Angle by five percentage points (50% to 45%), but the public polls told a different story. In Nevada, we logged 15 publicly released surveys fielded in October, and all but two -- including all eight fielded in the last 20 days of the campaign -- gave Angle nominal advantages of between 1 and 4 percentage points. While none of the margins on any one poll was large enough to attain statistical significance, the consistency of the results demonstrates that Angle's advantages did not occur by chance alone. Our final "trend estimate" gave Angle a nearly three-point lead (48.8% to 46.0%) -- enough to classify the race as "lean Republican."
But the internal polls sponsored by the campaigns were telling their clients a different story. The final tracking polls conducted for the Reid campaign showed Reid leading narrowly throughout the fall campaign, according to Reid pollster Mark Mellman. Their final tracking poll, conducted during the final week of October, showed Reid leading by five percentage points. "There was really no point," Melman told me, "where Reid was actually behind in this race."
Gene Ulm, partner at the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, confirms that their surveys for the Angle campaign showed a similar pattern. "We were typically tied in the low to mid 40s -- which as a rule are not good for any incumbent," Ulm said, while several days of tracking showed them "down by single digits."
<...>
Teabaggers to Congressional Republicans: repeal health care or risk severe backlashThat's a silver lining too.
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