Monday, November 1, 2010

Spinning the Democrat Loss

By Alan Caruba

It is now generally agreed that the Democratic Party will sustain large losses in the midterm elections. It will be interesting to see how their candidates and leadership explain why they lost.

My guess is that we shall hear a lot of talk about racism. This is the chief charge leveled against the Tea Party movement and it is utterly without substance. Democrats, however, are very likely to spin the loss as bigotry in general and, in particular, directed against America’s first black president. Obama has been rejected for reasons obvious to anyone who is unemployed, has had their home foreclosed, and an electorate aware of multi-trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.

The next fallback position will be, of course, to blame the economy, but the Democrats literally own the economy and have owned it going back decades to the 1930s when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected and reelected while prolonging the Great Depression for ten years until the economy was rescued by a full-employment program called World War Two.

Those were the years when Social Security, a huge Ponzi scheme, was introduced, followed by Medicare. Both are now insolvent and, like all socialist schemes, have “run out of other people’s money.”

The effort to take over one-sixth of the nation’s economy with Obamacare is a major reason for the Democrat failure at the polls. Forced through a Democrat controlled Congress through bribery and arm-twisting in the face of enormous public rejection and protest, the Democratic Party experienced a paroxysm of hubris that ignored the will of the People.

There is, too, a widespread sense that Congress, including some RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, has failed the People. The critical role of the “independents”, voters who do not identify with either party, will be manifested and it can no longer be ignored by either party. Last week, a Rasmussen Reports poll revealed that an astonishing 65% say that Congress has failed to perform its critical duty to maintain the welfare of the nation.

The statistics of government failure whether it is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, all give voice for a return to the founding principles of the nation; a smaller, limited central government.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, John Fund noted that “It took Democrats in the House of Representatives 40 years to become out-of-touch enough to get thrown out of office in 1994. It took 12 years for the Republicans who replaced them to abandon their principles and be repudiated in 2006. Now it appears that the current Democratic majority has lost voter confidence in only four years.”

What those inside the D.C. Beltway have failed to comprehend is that, in an era of the Internet and instant access to encyclopedic amounts of information about the legislative actions of Congress, they no longer can fool all of the people all of the time, nor even some of the people all of the time. A core of about 25% believes in liberalism. The rest of the population does not.

The voters, too, will have rejected a vicious Democrat campaign of personal destruction directed against Republican candidates, accusing them of sexual misbehavior, witchcraft, and other misdeeds that were not only lies, but totally irrelevant at a time when the nation’s economy is in serious trouble.

Along with the Democratic Party, the nation’s mainstream media will suffer a continuing loss of the credibility necessary to their existence. In media critic, Bernie Goldberg’s words, it was “a slobbering love affair” with Barack Obama that got him elected.

I think, too, that many saw the rally staged by Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert of the Comedy Channel as an insult to the seriousness of the nation’s problems. Having people like Muslim convert, Cat Steven, participate, or Sheryl Crow who advocates bizarre environmental ideas, simply degraded the event further. There were few laughs to be had from the small crowd that attended.

There will be payback as daily newspapers grow thinner, as news magazines like Newsweek get sold for $1 and the assumption of its debt. The network news programs will continue to lose viewers, while Fox News channel continues to thrive, along with a bevy of conservative radio hosts and commentators.

Ultimately, though, this is a loss to be laid at the feet of the first openly socialist president of the United States, Barack Obama, and it is testimony to the rejection of his political philosophy and his determination to “transform” the nation.

Washington, D.C., with its legions of lobbyists and the need to raise huge amounts of money to get reelected does strange things to the judgment of those in Congress. No matter how the numbers turn out following the election, Republicans must keep in mind that they did not so much “win”, as the Democrats lost.

The same forces are at work and will be on a faster schedule if Republicans do not prove responsive and fail to make the changes necessary to save the nation from economic ruin.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

6 comments:

TheJollyGreenMan said...

But Alan, you wrote that ...There were few laughs to be had from the small crowd that attended...

Yet according to Andrew Bolt's webblog on the Herald Sun in Australia, CBS reported the crowd that turned out for Jon Steward and his selected guests was Much Bigger than the crowd that turned out for Glen Beck.

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/they_wish1/

How big must a crowd be before you stop calling it Small?

LarryOldtimer said...

In the history of the US, there has been a minor depression (not "recession") about every 40 years, on average, mostly limited to the US, or geographic areas of the US. Outrageous promotion of stocks, resulting in stock prices far beyond their value, caused the crash of the stock market in 1929.

Economists never say a word about the most significant thing that followed: It was called then "The Great Drought", beginning in 1930. The "Dust Bowl" years saw more than 1,000,000 Americans, mostly farming families, become "displaced people". Grapes of Wrath ~ John Steinbeck, details the effects quite nicely. Topsoil of farms in 17 states was blown away by terrible winds, causing those farms to become valueless. Quite a different thing than just economics. A real and huge natural disaster occurred.

Temporary things did have to be done, but they should have been only temporary. It was aid those people needed, not massive permanent changes in federal law, which are at last going to bite us hard.

There should have been a mild depression in the 1970s, but our federal politicians, by great borrowing, staved it off. Greater and greater borrowing by our politicians has kept staving it off, making the underlying real problem get greater and greater. It now has become beyond containment.

Our freedoms and liberties have been run over roughshod by our federal government and state and local governments, beginning before Hoover, and magnified greatly by first Hoover, then far greater by FDR, and we, as a nation, have been placed in huge debt that it is impossible to ever repay. The present administration keeps making it worse on a grand scale.

I don't usually make predictions, but there is a really rocky road ahead, and two paths to take. One is virtual enslavement of Americans by our government, called socialism/communism, or we can restore our liberties and freedoms to ourselves and tough it out.

As the author Robert Ardrey wrote, "Man is a foul weather animal." When times are good, humans do nothing but fight with each other. When times are really foul, we cooperate and work together.

Alan Caruba said...

There were differing estimates of the crowd size, but comparative photos from the Stewart and Beck rallies demonstate the latter was far larger.

HokieFan said...

Most notable difference between the two rallies was that in the case of Beck's rally, most of the LARGE crowd showed up of their own accord; whereas, in the case of the Stewart rally, the crowd had to mostly be bussed in, and reportedly offered a "box lunch" to show up. I think Beck definitely has the pulse of the people...

Guy said...

But Alan, those pictures of the rallies are FACTUAL evidence, and as we all know, those on the left have no use for facts. Their reality originates in their own minds. They honestly believe that just saying something makes it true. It's a warped way of thinking that defines the left.

Their estimates of the crowd size have gradually increased with every report. On Saturday, by their own admission, the crowd was much smaller than Beck's. Miraculously, the story today is that it dwarfed the Beck rally ...

As thinking people, we know they're lying, because it's what leftists do. We also know the REAL truth is that Beck's rally dwarfed the Stewart rally in two categories ... in size, and more importantly as HokieFan pointed out, in sincerity.

I could get 50,000 people to my own funeral if I offered a bunch of low-life leftists free food and music, and chartered a bunch of buses to get them there. That's reality ...

LarryOldtimer said...

From what I have been able to glean, few at this particular "rally" were there for any other reason than freebies and entertainment.

CBS reported that the Beck rally had 85,000 people attending. The National Park Service said something like 385,000 people attended the Beck Rally.

The ringmasters of the Main Stream Media Circus tell the clowns and monkeys we see on TV what to do and say, and those ringmasters and the owners are Marxists. Many of those we see on TV are Marxists, or go along with Marxism for the absurdly high pay they get.

For these people, there should be a TV show called, "What's Your Price?" Same TV show for politicians too.