Midterm Elections: Another "Perfect Storm" for Obama?

On several occasions this past year, when I tried to understand the political policy strategy underlying President Obama's actions since his election, six things repeatedly came to mind. They were:

1. The Best and The Brightest; a book by David Halberstam describing the origins policy that shaped our Government's participation in the war in Vietnam.; and
2. The Smartest Guys In The Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind about the collapse of the financial giant Enron;
3. The television pictures of the ethnic demographic, gender, and age mosaic of faces of Obama's supporters who had gathered in Grant Park in Chicago on that historic night of November 4th, 2008 to greet Senator Elect Obama, Michelle and their daughters;
4. Obama's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize;
5. The TV clip and sound of Velma Hart voice, speaking to the president at one of several "Town Hall" meetings during which she told the president that she "was exhausted from defending him" among her friends and colleagues; and,
6. An Op Piece I had written for CNN.com in connection with Obama's pending inauguration in which I wrote, "'We Shall Overcome' was our national anthem in the Civil Rights Movement under Dr. King's leadership. President-elect Obama, like a masterful musical composer with perfect pitch, successfully updated, translated and rearranged "We Shall Overcome" to a "Yes, We Can" surround-sound mantra for the cell phone, YouTube, Face book, MySpace and Internet-blackberry generation. This may be the most enduring 21st Century tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr."

As anyone knows, who has composed or played music, unless your ear has been irreparably damaged, your ability to recognize difference between the 440 vibrations of note "A" from the 426 of the note "C" remains with you for life. When the "keys" of the music being played change, if you want to participate in the playing or its presentation you have to adjust your voice or instrument to the correct key, if you want to stay in tune. Otherwise, you will be noticeably "off key" and "out of tune."

Sometime and some place during the past two years, Obama stopped listening to the variety of music being played by ordinary people about the day to day condition of their lives.

Announcements of various domestic programs as if from Zeus or the Oracle of Delphi that did not result in near term tangible kitchen table benefits, that materially and perceptibly changed the day to day condition of their lives were not validation of the Hope and Change they had been asked to believe in.

Either the president or his advisors stopped listening or, in the case of Obama, his hearing became so severely damaged that instead of his prior "perfect pitch," he is now virtually tone deaf. Otherwise, why would he and his advisors keep repeating that their problem is in the "communication" of their message, not the message? Now this is really upsetting. It means that neither Obama, his cabinet and White House advisors understand that their problem of communication is a problem with the message.

They chose the priority of health care reform over 24/7 attention to the economy and rising unemployment and housing foreclosures and attention to the banking crisis without equal attention to the growing public perception that banks, wealth and Wall Street were being given preferential treatment over the millions of voters who were unemployed, and lost their homes. but who had no one to bail them out.

New York Times columnist Bob Edwards reminded us just of the reality of what many voters feel and sense, but don't completely understand." The clearest explanation yet of the forces that converged over the past three decades or so to undermine the economic well-being of ordinary Americans is contained in the new book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by political scientists Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of the University of California, Berkeley

They, "argue persuasively that the economic struggles of the middle and working classes in the U.S. since the late-1970s were not primarily the result of globalization and technological changes but rather a long series of policy changes in government that overwhelmingly favored the very rich."

"Those changes were the result of increasingly sophisticated, well-financed and well-organized efforts by the corporate and financial sectors to tilt government policies in their favor, and thus in favor of the very wealthy. From tax laws to deregulation to corporate governance to safety net issues, government action was deliberately shaped to allow those who were already very wealthy to amass an ever increasing share of the nation's economic benefits."

"Last year was a terrific year for those at the very top," Professors Hacker and Pierson note in their book. Investors and executives at the nation's 38 largest companies earned a stunning total of $140 billion -- a record. The investment firm Goldman Sachs paid bonuses to its employees that averaged nearly $600,000 per person, its best year since it was founded in 1869."

"Something has gone seriously haywire in the distribution of the fruits of the American economy."

Edwards and the authors Hacker and Pierson only confirm what Arianna Huffington has so passionately described in her recent book Third World America

Obama's "tone deafness" to the reality of the daily lives of those whom he asked to support him to achieve "Change they can believe in" came across to many people in the media as supercilious and "arrogant".

Columnist Christopher Caldwell wrote in this past weekend's Financial Times, "He (Obama) has governed in sprit of condescension. He has snubbed the voters he seduced; cut them cold, given them the high hat. An alternative history of the president's first two years in office would look not at the moments when he provoked voters' disagreement, but at the moments when he insulted their sensibilities."

In support of this contention, he cited the following examples:

1. Obama's response to the Harvard African-American Professor, Henry Louis Gates and white Detective James Crowley of the Police force in Cambridge, Mass. Caldwell says to the average person it looked simply like "A powerful politician who intervened in a local police matter to tip the scales of justice in favor of his friend."; and
2. The First Lady's summer visit to Spain which he said "it is hard to pin down exactly why this bothered voters, but it is easy to see that it did because of "the vast security entourage" that had to laboriously and expensively rolled out... so that Mrs. Obama and her friends could enjoy the sun" in contrast to persons undergoing economic hardship back in the United States' oil lapped shoreline of Louisiana;
3. In explaining to a group of wealthy donors in Boston last week why the Democrats are having difficulty winning the support of voters in the Midterm elections, President Obama is reported to have said, "Part of the reason that our politics seem so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared, and the country is scared, and they have good reason to be."

Caldwell is just one of media alliterations which say that fundamentally Obama is "a snob" and "an elitist" to those many people outside the beltway who have never been to New York, San Francisco, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago or Boston.

The results of the Midterm elections -- a loss of Democratic control of the House and, at this writing, the possibility of a decent chance of the same thing happening in the Senate -- also reminded me of a Commentary I posted here on June 14th of this year, titled "Obama's 'Perfect Storm'?" At that time, I was referring to the Obama Administration's efforts to navigate through the political maelstrom arising from Israel's bloody interception, in international waters, of the Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara, that was seeking to challenge Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, Arizona's new illegal immigration law, continued high employment, British Petroleum gigantic oil spill in our Gulf coastal waters, decades of our failed "War On Drugs", U.S. Secretary Arne Duncan's report that "our nation faces a dropout crisis when 25% of our students -- and almost 40% of our black and Hispanic students -- fail to graduate high school and escalating casualties in the war in Afghanistan.

The intransigence of Israel and the Palestinians in their adjourned "Peace Talks" has replaced the Mavi Mamara incident. The national epidemic of housing foreclosures has replaced the halted BP oil spill.

Do the Midterm elections indicate a lull in the storm? Or, is it is too early to determine whether the "Perfect Storm" will abate or become more severe?

If the voters were trying to send Congress and the president a message, what is the message? Is it merely: lower taxes, less government, reduce the federal deficit?

Or was the election more about voter anger and outrage over the state of the economy with its consequent high unemployment and massive foreclosures? Whatever the content of the voters' message, the form and language they been using to send the message has been scary; unprecedented in the amount of money the Tea Party and Republicans spent in so far, in this century, on transmitting their message.

There is story told about reaction of an of average looking middle age white man who was watching the funeral train of Franklin D. Roosevelt pass along the East coast. He was reportedly wearing overalls workman's clothing, standing with tears running down his face. Someone standing nearby watching his apparent grief asked them, "Did you know the president?" The man replied, "No, I didn't know President Roosevelt, but he knew me."

Voters in the Midterm Elections may have spoken for most people today whose sentiments, unlike the man who was mourning the death of President Roosevelt, suggest that Obama, with damaged "perfect" pitch does not hear or know them.