After Tuesday's drubbing, Democrats will search for the hidden message of the election. But the message isn't hidden: The decisive blocs of voters that switched from Democrats in 2008 to Republicans in 2010 were angry and disillusioned -- with the economy, with a political system they see as helping banks and CEOs, not ordinary working families, and with both parties, Republicans (exit-poll favorability rating: 41 percent) as well as Democrats (43 percent). They want action to rebalance the economy so it produces jobs and gains for the middle class, not just Wall Street. Unfortunately, they're not going to get it.
That's because these voters have just handed Congress back to a party least likely to heed their call: the party that spent the last two years saying no to Wall Street reform, to an economic recovery package that included major tax cuts, to expanded health insurance and medical cost control, and to extension of the 2001 tax cuts for the middle class; the party that shamelessly courted lobbyists and corporate donors while claiming they were only against reform because it represented a "bailout" of these very same interests.
In exit polls, voters were asked who they blamed for the state of the economy. In order, they blamed banks, then the Bush administration, and only then the current administration. Yet those who blamed banks gave their votes by a wide margin to the GOP. Their votes have made Speaker-to-be John Boehner the second most powerful person in Washington only months after he staged an open rally for bank lobbyists, urging them to block Democrats and their "punk staffers." The rally worked: Wall Street swung toward the Republicans, joining health insurers, big business groups, energy companies, and the rest of the GOP's new money trust.
Midterm election losses are a virtual inevitability for the party of the president. A terrible economy makes them more certain -- and larger. The only thing that would have saved Democrats from big losses this time around was a huge organizational and fundraising edge. Thanks to the Tea Party and billions in outside campaign spending that favored the GOP, the edge was Republicans'.
If there is a hidden message in the election, it's one that we, in our recent book, Winner-Take-All Politics, call the "dirty little secret" of political science: most voters pay little attention to what happens in Washington and have only the vaguest sense of what is happening there. Most are completely unaware of how the filibuster has been used relentlessly to block action on the economy, and a majority mistakenly believes that the astonishingly unpopular TARP legislation passed under Obama, when in fact in was signed by George W. Bush.
We are taught to believe that voters call the shots. And they often do. Yet the vote is a blunt, heavy weapon -- one that voters barraged with negative ads and misleading messages, without strong guidance from grassroots organizations, often wield with little awareness of or regard for the collateral damage that will result. In this case, the damage is likely to be the crippling of goals and policies that most Americans continue to support.
One salient example sums up the whole: Republicans' big gains came with older voters -- in part because they were frightened by GOP attacks on the health care bill. Yet Republican budget blueprints -- from Paul Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future" to the GOP "Pledge to America" -- mean even bigger cuts in Medicare and the revival of the GOP's mothballed plans for partial privatization of Social Security and Medicare. Ask older Americans whether they would like to trash their cherished programs in return for massive new tax cuts for the richest of the rich, and the answer will be a resounding no. Only on election day, a strong majority of older Americans, in effect, said yes.
In John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, perhaps the most memorable line was uttered by an angry farmer about to lose his home (sound familiar?). Enraged and despairing but unable to pinpoint blame for his terrible loss, he asks, "Who can we shoot?" That's what voters were asking in 2010, and most had no clearer idea than the farmer of where responsibility for their plight lay.
The 2010 election was the political equivalent of the perfect crime: The GOP vigorously took on all reforms designed to rebalance the economy for the long term, tying Washington up in contorted knots, then were rewarded at the polls by voters dissatisfied with an ugly D.C. culture unable to produce economic renewal.
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are the authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
The Republicans have admitted their mistakes of the last 8 yeras and have promised to be more responsive and responsible.
The Dems have NOT EVEN ADMITTED their mistakes of the LAST TWO YEARS!!!
The "in group" mocking of voters is also counterproductive.
In the same way that the GOP Congress under Clinton blew their opportunity, so too did Democrats and liberals under Obama, including Obama himself.
Any other conclusion is self-delusion.
Take a look at these figures from the Wall Street Journal:
• When the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007, the debt held by the public was 36.2% of GDP. It rose to 40.2% the next year. This year it will be about 63.6%, next year 68.6%, then 77% of GDP in 2020. And the Obama administration's budget estimates 218% in 2050.
The deficit in 2007 was $160 billion. In the next year the Pelosi-Reid Congress took it up to $458 billion, and when President Obama came into office in 2009 it hit $1.4 trillion. The current 2010 projected deficit is $1.6 trillion, which will lead to a tripling of our national debt from 2008 to 2020.
Now when it comes to budgets proposed by presidents ...
If Obama had simply kept Bush's spending policies in place, federal deficits over the next eight years would be 60 percent lower. In 2018, we'd have a deficit of just $188 billion, instead of the projected $996 billion under Obama's budget.
Seriously, guys, trying to sell your book and your thesis to progressives who want to be comforted in this time of defeat is understandable, but it's hardly a recipe for critical analysis. Progressives must face that their ideas failed to produce the desired and promised results and instead produced a resounding election defeat. I'm not going to gloat because it's unseemly and adolescent -- and too reminiscent of the arrogance that wound up dooming Democrats. But if you keep insisting the Republicans caused all the problems, and the dumb voters don't recognize and appreciate all the great things the ill-fated Obama-Pelosi-Reid machine churned out for them, you're not going to win backs many hearts and minds.
Of course its time to turn the keys over to some adults.....
It would really help if you could share where you got that government employee "average" salary number.
Also, do you mean local or municipal government, county, state, AND federal government employees in that number? You're probably most interested in federal gov. employees, though. Any idea how many people are employed by the federal government?
Thanks,
Michael
I went and did a little research.
According to USA today, "The federal government spent about $224 billion in 2008 on compensation for about 2 million civilian employees."
224,000,000,000 / 2,000,000 = $112,000 per employee
It's important to note, however, that "These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008." That brings the 112,000 number down below $72,000 per employee.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-04-federal-pay_N.htm
So your 120K number for avg. federal employee actual salary (straight payroll) is overcooked by $48,000.
Did Hacker and Pierson not hear the warnings of a backlash if they imposed their unpopular version of health care reform? What part of "governing against the will of the people" did they not understand?
George Will put it best, "It is amazing the ingenuity Democrats invest in concocting explanations of voter behavior that erase what voters always care about, and this year more than ever - ideas. This election was a nationwide recoil against Barack Obama's idea of unlimited government."
Don't think Will is right? Fine. We vote again soon enough.
After 2 short years (following 10 years of GOP Bush policies), many Americans are backing the GOP because they want those jobs and to be able to afford their homes. And they're willing to let the GOP and their corporate cronies run the show again just to get them, ignoring the damage they have done in the past and forfeiting progress in the future that would make America a great country again.
The big oil interests and insurance companies (which have sat on billions of dollars of low-interest loans that could have meant fewer layoffs) are behind this GOP plan all the way. They don't want Obamacare or investing in wind and solar power. And as long as big corporate bucks and the GOP can stand in the way of "stupid progressive projects", the American people, like Philcock, are going to get what they deserve.
Nov. 2 elections: give the keys back to we the people, who can re-distribute them to people who will actually represent their interests to the government, rather than the other way around.
Voters aren't dumb, Demo-rats had their shot with super-majorities in House and Senate, and WASTED THEIR TIME EXPANDING GOVERNMENT INTO HEALTH CARE, FINANCE AND ENERGY, instead of facilitating an economic rebound of the engine that drives ANY economy, the efforts and incentive of we the people, NOT we the "progressive" panels of self-anointed experts here to make decisions for everybody else!!
Of course, the reality of people wanting to run their own lives never sinks into the "progressive" cult, it and Nancy Pelosi will emerge again, with yet another face lift, spewing the same old crud: big government solutions for "fairness", "social justice" and the collective.