REPUBLICANS WILL BE EMBOLDENED TO DESTROY OBAMA IF THEY WIN TUESDAY

Don’t expect a new form of peace and harmony if the Republicans win a majority in either house of Congress Tuesday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is on record saying that the Republican goal is to see that Obama is a one term president. The best way to ensure that is to defeat and destroy his presidency, right now.

My hope is that if disaster does, indeed, come from these elections, someone will stand up and remind the voters who is responsible: them. If divided government is what you want, if you truly trust the Republicans, then you should live happily with the results and take some responsibility down the road.

The Republicans in the House, if indeed they manage a majority, will feel entitled and most importantly empowered. They will want to assert themselves. It should be remembered that it was those on the fringe (of reason or verifiable sanity) who survived the Republican wipe out of '08. So, now they will be combined with fired up conservatives and fire breathing Tea Party pals.

The Republican party in Congress has been trending radical almost since the time of Reagan, and certainly since the time of Newt in 1994. The continual cry, and it is not just posturing, is to, once and for all, get it right and be far right. Each defeat brings new calls for more and more pure right wing thought and more push back against any other form of governance. The far right members of Congress, in the main, survived 2008 while the last moderate Republicans ate bugs for breakfast.

You don’t really change your battle plans if you are winning, do you? The Republicans won in 1994 by being tough on Clinton and opposing almost everything he did. Then, they took the White House in 2000 in the aftermath of their failed impeachment of Clinton. If they come into power now, they will feel renewed zeal for the obstructionist methods they have perfected over two decades.

There are always multi-level games going on. Sure, the Republicans will try to get some small gains for small business and do minor corrections to the health care plan. None of this matters much to the general public or toward larger impression of what is happening in Washington. Lacking the ability to pass substantial changes into law, the choice is between obstruction (a Republican forte) or luring Obama into some sort of trap where they can appear to be the heroes in saving the day. They see little to gain by cooperation.

The real issue right now, today, is the economy. The standard rule in American politics is that the party in power looses when the economy is down. This is almost always true in presidential years, but the growth of national cable news and the creation of the never ending campaign cycle has increased the public's awareness of the power of mid-term voting, so the rule has been moved up by two years.

Most Americans, rightly, hated watching the long, slow torture of the health care bills, a fact which forms the backdrop of today's voting. Well, sadly, they are in for more bickering, less agreement and a lot more noise. The message the Republicans will take from this election is that fighting back pays off; being seen as the underdog protector of middle America, even when you are not, can result in big votes. They will now, being more monomaniacal than inventive, proceed to try to ride the wave through 2012. This is exactly what the Republicans did with the bad smell they created with the impeachment of Clinton, which enabled Bush to slide into the White House.

If the Republicans win big today, I would give them about ten minutes before they declare the Obama administration dead or on life support. They will play whatever victories they get to the hilt and say, once again, that they represent the new majority. Be ready. Compromise has been turned into a dirty word.

Obama has, for the most part, made all of the legislative gains he can expect in terms of bold new programs. One strategy going forward would be to force the Republicans to propose actual alternatives to each matter they wish to repeal and to do it individually, not in large bills. If they wish to take apart health care, they should propose an alternative measure to replace the one they wish to delete.

The President can also look to the extra-official, extra governmental aspects of his office to offer leadership to the country. In some ways, passing legislation is a poor way for a president to lead. It makes the president, and the executive branch, too dependent on the shifting winds of public moods and the half cooked opinions of newly minted members from districts which do not take the inspirations, or views, from the American mainstream. Congress always swims more in the wake of the president than he of them, as long as the presidency is managed carefully and executive power is executed vigorously. Remember this fact.

Obama has attempted to engage the larger aspects of his job, but it has been in a secondary, almost off hand way. Going to some manufacturing plant and making a speech about jobs is not enough. With his enormous speaking ability, Obama has the potential to by-pass a bickering, small minded Congress to encourage direct citizen action.

This is a great country, with people of many political beliefs who are willing to work together to solve problems. The biggest difficulty we face is truly pulling ourselves out of the deep recession. Obama needs to call on our better nature and create both the spirit and the fact of national cooperation. A president, at any time, can make the nattering nabobs of negativism on Capitol Hill look like silly school boys and girls. He shouldn't be afraid to do so, especially if it means we, as a nation, are doing what needs to be done.

Doug Terry 11.2.10

(Some of this commentary was also published by the NY Times online site)

An added comment:

One possible conclusion to draw from this election is that the American public does not know what it wants and, in the words of Mark Twain, they “deserve to get it, real hard”. Why would the voters swing hard back one way, only two years after electing a competent, intelligent, well spoken and decent man as president?

Could it be that what we are seeing is, in effect, a cry for help, the rumblings of some sort of fatal discontent with our system which, again and again, gives voters choices they don’t like? Frustration comes when what you want done can not be effected by voting.  Ultimate frustration builds to boiling when you believe you can get nothing and that previous efforts have gone totally unrealized.

My view is what most American voters want is pragmatism and to forget about ideology. They want their jobs back, they want decent pay and they want to be able to afford to pay for a lifestyle at least somewhat similar to those they see around them. A new poll shows most voters don’t understand what Obama has done on their behalf, so why not send a loud message to Washington? 

In a nation where income, and wealth, inequality has grown over the last thirty years,  it is no wonder that people don’t necessarily see government spending as the answer. Many see it as a threat to what little they have gained or to their ability just to hang on. The rich have gotten filthy rich, the near rich have done really well and a small, upper sliver of the middle class as also advanced economically. Until the housing bubble collapse of 2008, a good portion of the rest of the population thought they were doing well, too. Afterward, it became clear that their “prosperity” was a misunderstanding between themselves and the banks. Oopps.

We are swimming in the aftermath of the ‘08 disaster and it is no wonder that millions of people are upset, angry and disappointed. The Tea Party groups and the Republicans have given some of those voters a direction in which to take their anger and we all have to live with whatever might come our way.

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FROM THE NY TIMES, A REPORT ON WHAT VOTERS HAD TO SAY TODAY (11.2):

 Kathleen Morse, a homemaker from Epping,     N.H., described herself as a centrist-leaning independent, but this time she voted for anyone with an R next to his or her name.

“I just went with it,” Ms. Morse said. “I mean, it can’t be any worse.”

MORE FROM THE NY TIMES:

...everywhere, people just wanted the bickering to stop. So they voted for people who they believed would be most likely to stop the politics of divisiveness and just get the country back on track.

 “I was looking for candidates who can cross the aisle and get things done,” said Gina Duncan, 52, a Democrat who reluctantly voted for Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, a former Republican now running as an independent for the Senate.

 Steve Bachar, 45, an investment manager in Denver, echoed that view. He said his biggest hope for the months ahead centered on one word: pragmatism. “The political discourse in the course of the past several years has gotten so that both parties are talking past each other.”

 It was a feeling echoed by Carla Kaiser, who was laid off by an insurance company and relies on unemployment checks.

 
“We as Americans need to pull together,” she said. “We need to stop looking at the Democrats and the Republicans and just look at the problems.”

Grover Norquist, quoted in the New Yorker, as saying in 2004 what the Democrats could be, once ultra right conservatives take over:

“They can be the weird-sex party, they can be the tree-hugger party, they can be the secularists-against-the-religious-zealots party. There are a lot of different things they can be.”

The link is in the blue box below:

 http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsde sk/2010/11/neck-and-neck-in-pennsylvania.html#ixzz149xWnDNm

QUOTES from Noam Chomsky on the current outrage of voters:

“If the polls are right, it is not the Republicans but the right wing Republicans, the crazy Republicans who will sweep the election.

I have never seen anything like this in my life.

 The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self destructive fantasies.â€�

Quoted in Death of the Liberal Class, a new book by Chris Hedges.