Being back home in the Midwest is always grounding. The most classic moment was a conversation in a restaurant with someone who was expressing anger at all incumbents and both parties who said to me "nobody is on our side."
That was the theme of yesterday's big day of political news. Three more establishment candidates in both parties were either beaten outright or forced into a runoff. More incumbents going down. Insurgents on the rise everywhere.
And speaking of being everywhere, the irony patrol must be utterly exhausted. While incumbents and establishment politicians are being slaughtered in every region and both parties, in conventions and primaries, politicians continue to make fools of themselves. What was Richard Blumenthal thinking? What was Mark Souder thinking? Oh, wait, thinking wasn't involved. Having an affair with a staffer who works with you on promoting abstinence-only videos is like something out of an Elmore Leonard novel, except funnier. But the irony award for the day doesn't even go to Souder, as tempting as that is: it goes to Mitch McConnell. As his hand-picked protégé was going down in flames to anti-establishment, anti-TARP bailout tea partier Rand Paul, McConnell was leading the Republicans in a desperate attempt to keep the financial reform bill from doing anything worse to his poor pathetic friends on Wall Street, all the while crying a river about how Elena Kagan wanted to hurt the free speech rights of big corporations. Politics doesn't get any better than this.
The tea partiers are wreaking their revenge at McConnell because he has deserted them in order to help Wall Street and other big corporations, just as Democratic primary voters are showing their disdain at incumbents at the same time. The bottom line is that voters are asking the age-old question "which side are you on" and finding that to their outrage, none of the politicians seem like they are on the side of angry voters. In order to have a prayer this fall, Democrats have to show the voters- both their base voters in the Rising American Electorate, and the swing voters in the working class who still don't have good jobs- that they are fighting for regular people, not the elite. When the Wall Street bailouts did not produce jobs as promised, voters' attitudes got set at the outrage level, and they still haven't been reset. It is time for Democrats to show which side they are on.
One friend of mine said to me this morning that "it's like most of our Democrats can't seem to read a poll." The New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections. The Massachusetts special election. The Utah Republican party conventions. The Mollohan party upset in West Virginia. Yesterday's results. How many wake-up calls do politicians need?
History has shown us that with very rare exceptions- 2002 being one- the President's party loses seats in the midterms. But what's amazing is how Village pundits go out of their way to point out how not everyone will vote for Democrats this fall. Here's Marc Ambinder:
The Democrats midterm message is easy to understand: we've done things to help you, and Republicans are obstructionists for the sake of politics, want to bring back failed Wall Street friendly ideas, and are increasingly captive to the Tea Party audience. This is a good message for the core of the Obama coalition, but does it work for the midterm electorate -- particularly this midterm electorate?
Obama ran on a fundamental promise to make government work for the better, and Republicans believe they've blocked him from achieving that goal, and that the economy, combined with their own scorched earth strategy, has left voters extremely skeptical of government intervention again. Midterms are about noise, not volume; usually, the most exercised partisans and their lackeys will react against the president in power, creating a referendum of sorts. Voters tend to be older and whiter.
The new Democratic platform does little to recognize this demographic. The party is getting annihilated among whites, even in states like California. Declaring that the Democrats are the party of accomplishments is one thing, but it really does not matter to swing voters in all those House seats straddling the Appalachian Trial, the industrial Midwest and the Rocky Mountain region that the U.S. is once again beloved in the world, that Obama is a man of science, or that he appointed a Latina to the Supreme Court.
The alternative is not to run away from accomplishments, of course. The angle that projects a "mommy state" isn't going to work -- "we made things less worse and protected you." People are hurting and feeling neglected. They've gone from shock to anger about the last few years. And Democrats still lose credibility when they talk about being part of the most honest, open, ethical government ever. Whether right or wrong, the public, after health care, sees Congress AND Obama as part of the politics as usual crowd.
Shorter Ambinder: Lots of midterm voters think you suck and no message will dissuade them of that. And this is new how, exactly? No "message" in the world will reach some of these voters.
Also, if Obama decided to govern entirely with the understanding of the makeup of the midterm electorate and an eye towards November 2010, and the advice Ambinder gives him, he'd probably be bombing Iran with one hand and signing gun rights legislation with the other. Also, who's to say the Village conventional wisdom regarding the midterms is always right? Conventional wisdom said young people don't turn out and don't spend any time on them. It also said black people with the middle name "Hussein" who spent part of their childhood in Indonesia and don't have much national experience don't get elected President. Then the 2008 election happened.
So I, for one, am willing to see if the strategy Tim Kaine outlined as the DNC effort- reach the 15 million voters who registered and turned out for the first time in 2008- works. I think that's a much better idea than trying to find a "message" that will reach voters who are unlikely to support you, or governing from the start to try and make sure they support you.
The other thing I would say is that what all the how-to-win-the-midterms hullabaloo misses is this: to some extent, what happens in the midterms is out of everyone's control. Villagers use the public simply being in, as Mike Lux puts it, a foul mood about the economy, and the strong likelihood that Democrats will lose seats, to point to Obama and say "aha! Proof that the Obama style of governance, with its mommy-states and ethics reform and Latina justices isn't working!" I think that's reaching for a message just a bit too far.
It can be easy to become immersed in Beltway politics, in which names like Tim Pawlenty, John Ensign, and Harry Reid are instantly recognizable - or debates over the Stupak Amendment can rage on for hours.
One wonders how much of this filters down to the average voter. Does he or she really know what the public option constitutes? How important, really, are the 2010 congressional elections to the normal citizen?
Several days ago, some political comments made by a non-politically-obsessed friend provided me some insight into how "normal" people think.
The Washington Post this morning had a story on the front page about how President Obama may be treating some states as a no fly zone during this election year because he is so unpopular in those states. And on page two, they have a big article titled "Anger Doesn't Stop at Health Care Reform," about all the conservatives so very, very angry at Obama over everything. And on page three, they have a big article all about the tea partiers because, well, I guess the Washington Post editors were just feeling like the tea partiers hadn't gotten enough attention.
As one of the first people to start warning my fellow Democrats (back in Feb of last year) about the foul mood voters were in because of a broken economy not improving fast enough and special interests still seeming like they controlled DC, I have to make the observation that the traditional media still is not getting the story right. Yeah, no kidding, there is anger out there, but it's not all anti-Obama, it's not all based in the tea party, and there is a lot more nuance to it than the traditional media understands.
Here are some things to keep in mind about the anger thing:
1. Obama's approval rating has been hanging around 50% for a long time, not great, but given a tough economy that's not bad either. In fact, the latest approval number I saw was 53% - exactly the same percentage of the vote he got winning a big, impressive victory in November of 2008. His numbers are not plummeting, and most voters are in fact not incredibly angry with him. Mixed feelings, some disappointment, some discouragement, and a little cynicism for sure. But outside of the hardcore Republican right, not so much anger.
2. Speaking of the hardcore Republican right, there is nothing new or dramatic about the tea partiers. The same anger, the same demographic (white Christian men, tending more rural and older than the rest of the population) was around in 1993-94 when Clinton was in office, and the same demographic was the heart of the angry backlash against civil rights and peace protesters in the 1960s. The only thing new about this is the fact that the President is a black guy with an immigrant father might gin them up a little more than usual. But these angry white males (as the media called them in the early 1990s) represent about the same sliver of the electorate as they did then, maybe 20%.
3. To be clear, the tea partiers aren't the only angry people in America. There are plenty of working class swing voters who aren't inclined to buy into the tea party stew of racism, nativism, and Ayn Rand style libertarianism, but are deeply troubled that the jobs situation isn't improving and that no one in government seems to be looking out for them. There are plenty of progressive activists angry at the Wall Street bankers, the health insurance companies, and the other corporate interests that are screwing them, and are angry that too many politicians seem to be in their pocket. In both cases, Obama and his fellow Democrats still have the opportunity to reach them, still have the ability to make absolutely clear whose side they are on. If Democrats show those voters that they will reject those special interests, and fight hard for average folks' interests, they can still win this election. If they show voters that they are just as angry about what's been done to regular people as the regular people, they will have a better 2010 than anyone is predicting right now.
The media loves-loves-loves this tea party story, but the tea partiers really aren't anything new, and they don't represent a very big group of voters. There is a lot of anger out there, but most of it is righteous anger that Democrats can and should tap into - anger that Wall Street and other bad actor big companies have been allowed to destroy our economy, and that no one is taking them on for it.
We had another one of those stories this week: economists delighted because we only lost 345,000 jobs last month because that was not as bad as expected. Forecasters think the pace by which we are sinking is slowing, but even in the best-case scenario, they expect unemployment will continue to go up for awhile, and for the economy to not add many jobs for as long as a couple of years.
And that's the optimistic scenario.
Another year and a half of this kind of dreadful economy is going to put people in a real grumpy mood in November of 2010. I lived through this before, although the economy wasn't nearly as bad then as it's likely to be in 2010: the 1994 elections, when the economy was still recovering from another George Bush recession. They had put Democrats in charge because they were mad at Bush for that recession, but hadn't yet felt any improvement in the economy, and folks were in a bad mood.
I think people today understand the depths of the mess the second George Bush left us with, and so perhaps they will be more patient with this charismatic young President than they were with the last one. But the similarities in circumstances are still keeping me up nights.
Here's what needs to happen to avoid another 1994 for the Democrats:
