As I wrote last night, the blame rests squarely on Obama.
THE issue facing this country is jobs, or the lack of them. THAT is what voters are wanting solutions for, not this sideshow shit of "health care" or bailouts to bankers.
Actually, I don't think the nutroots should be paid much attention to, for after all, the nutroots were the ones promoting Obama over other candidates thanks to 24/7 media propaganda.
The Democrats, whether blue dog, "progressive," liberal, or whatever, NEED to focus on the economy and unemployment to the exclusion of all else.
Another look at the mess last night is here:
First of all, this obviously did not cost us any "filibuster-proof majority." We never had any such majority. At our high we had 58 Democratic Senators, plus the dependable Bernie Saunders (Socialist), and the Republican/Likud Joe Lieberman (Independent) who caucused with us butopposed us on almost every issue. Furthermore, we had to put up with the likes of Ben Nelson, who has almost nothing in common with the Democratic Party when it comes to any matters of policy, Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln who seem to think that ignorant crackers are the future of America (alas, they may be right!), the turncoat Arlen "Single Bullet" Specter who is not now and has never been an actual Democrat despite playing one on TV, and a number of Democrats beholden to, if not actually owned by, the insurance and finance industries and who have proven perfectly willing to buck the leadership and the President to serve their true masters. The best we've ever really had to support the actual policies that We the People voted for was maybe 53 or 54 Senators.
For another thing, Martha Coakley may be the very worst candidate for office I have ever seen in my life (and believe me I have seen a few -- Lynn Yeakle in Pennsylvania, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in Maryland, Creigh Deeds more recently in Virginia, and a multitude more). She not only did not make any effort to connect with the voters, she seemed, actively and purposefully, to strive to disconnect with them. I mean, she misspelled "Massachusettes" (sic) on a piece of her campaign literature. In the closing days of the race she managed both to insult the voters of Massachusetts and their #1 icon, Fenway Park, in a single sentence, after having traded Curt Schilling to the Yankees somehow. It was as if someone in college was doing an experiment to see if a candidate could be so arrogant, isolated and tone-deaf that he or she could blow 30% lead in two weeks. Their hypothesis was confirmed.
And also, this became sort of a backhanded referendum on health care reform. Brown ran against it. Of course, the thing that seems persistently absent from any analysis of this issue, which is being universally interpreted as a public rejection of government health care reform, is that Massachusetts already has a highly popular state-run health care system better than the ones being bandied about in Congress these days. If I lived in Massachusetts and was being asked to choose between them, I would choose the state plan. It was almost as if the voters of Massachusetts were demanding that the government keep its hands off their government health plan.
But lastly and of greatest importance, this defeat STILL would not have been possible to snatch from the jaws of victory, even with Coakley's outrageously blithering incompetence, Brown's checkered past and Swiss-cheese brain, and the bass-ackward nature in Massachusetts of the health care question, without the complete and utter demoralization of the Democratic base. This effect has been caused to an equal extent by Obama and by Congressional Democrats in their obstinate refusal even to TRY to bring about the "change we can believe in" that we tried to usher in by our votes back in November, 2008. Obama, despite his fair words, has by his actions almost seemed to be an agent of continuity rather than change, tinkering around the edges of Bush-era policies in every area, including social policy, fiscal and regulatory policy, and defense, rather than rejecting them outright as We the People voted to do. He has fought to save those policies rather than replace them, and this has thrown us into a deep depression as even our stunning and overwhelming victory has become yet another defeat, albeit in disguise.
Barack Obama has demonstrated what I am beginning to realize is extreme arrogance in his quest for an unachievable "bipartisanship." It's as if the guy thinks he's Superman, able to leap great divides in a single bound and achieve what is simply not possible to achieve, merely through the strength of the fact that he's so much better than anyone else.
But there is no victory to be had by that effort. When you strive for bipartisanship it hands the success or failure of your efforts over to your adversaries They have the sole power to decide whether or not you succeed or fail, and Republicans are petulant to a fault. They will only agree when they get 100% of their way, and even then they are quite willing to send the United States of America to hell in a handbasket rather than hand Barack Obama any policy triumph. We have very nearly given them everything they seek, thereby destroying the value of the policies we pursue, and still they do nothing but sabotage our efforts and insult our leaders at every turn. This only succeeds in sending our own base of supporters into deep depression, as will any hopeless cause.
I could have told this poster/blogger Obama's talk about "reaching across the aisle" and his admiration for Ronald Reagan as some kind of "transformative" figure were bad signs.
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