Pots of Gold

Primary season is finally over. The candidates have been selected, the match-ups have been set, and now the real mud slinging can begin. Word on the street is; things look bad for the Democratic Party. They will likely lose control of the House of Representatives in November, and if they try really really hard, they could lose the Senate too. Nice work Democrats. Is there nothing you can’t screw up?

I guess none of this is particularly surprising. In mid-term elections – especially those coming in the midst of an economic downturn – the party in power always loses seats. People get angry when things aren’t going well and lash out at those they feel are responsible. There are only so many ways to express my incredulity at the fact that so many “independent” voters are so willing to return control of the government to the party and principles that spent the previous decade running it into the ground, so I’m not going to try to find another way this week. This week I want to focus on Democratic voters.

That’s right donkeys; I’m talking to you. Why the long faces? What’s got you so depressed that you would rather stay home on Election Day than vote for a Democratic candidate? Did you like it better when you were in the minority, and all you had to do was complain? Life was so much simpler then, wasn’t it. Are you playing a little rope-a-dope? Attempting to lull Republicans into a false sense of pomposity, then slug ‘em hard with the left hook of enthusiasm two weeks before the finish line? Because on the scrap heap of bad ideas, that one is somewhere below choosing to kick the ball away at the start of overtime in the Super Bowl. Are you perhaps convinced that midterm elections just don’t matter all that much anyway? I’m sure President Clinton could quickly disabuse you of that notion. Or is it that many of you are suffering from a near fatal case of unrealistic expectations?

This past Tuesday, President Obama hosted a town hall meeting with a group of supporters in Washington D.C. hoping to pump up the troops and get a little feedback. What he got was a room full of well-dressed people complaining that in the first 40% of his presidency, he simply had not done enough for them. I don’t fault them for being well dressed; it would be silly to show up to a meeting with the President in flip-flops and pajamas. But I would like to take issue with this idea that Barack Obama has somehow failed his supporters.

This President has accomplished three things that no Democratic president in the last 50 years (or more in some instances) has achieved. Burning an enormous amount of political capital in his first month in office, he passed an $800 billion economic stimulus package that kept many of us working when we otherwise would have lost our jobs, and according to an overwhelming majority of economists, kept this economy from sliding into the abyss. Burning whatever political capital he had left, he then signed into law the first major healthcare/health insurance reform since the passage of Social Security. Seven other presidents have attempted that and failed. He succeeded. And after that, running on fumes, he managed to slip through a financial reform bill, attempting to ensure that Wall Street can never again take us for the ride they took us on two years ago. Barack Obama accomplished an astonishing amount given the dung heap of an economy he had to work with and the absurd level of resistance he faced from his opponents.

But you wanted more than that, didn’t you, Democrats. Sure, you got healthcare reform, but you wanted a single payer system. You got financial reform, but you wanted Wall Street broken up like AT&T in 1984. You got $800 billion in stimulus money, but you wanted $1.5 trillion. You wanted an end to our foreign wars, but you got a reduction in one and escalation in the other. You wanted Guantanamo Bay detention center closed, but you got a Congress that refused to do it. You wanted comprehensive immigration reform, but you got a Congress that would rather demagogue and campaign on the problem than attempt to solve it. You wanted 10% annual economic growth and a Rolls Royce in every garage, but you got four consecutive quarters of 3% annual growth and a garage in foreclosure. In short, you wanted unicorns that crap rainbows, and what you got was a dose of reality.

During the Presidential election campaign you claimed you wanted to be talked to like adults. You claimed you could, indeed, handle the truth. It appears as though those statements were inaccurate. Nobody said recovery would be easy. In fact, it was made abundantly clear to everyone that climbing out of the most devastating recession since the Great Depression was going to be pretty damn hard. The fact that we haven’t recovered eight million lost jobs in 18 months is not a knock on the President; it’s third grade mathematics. The reason you didn’t get a Citigroup break-up, or a Gitmo closure, or a public health insurance option is because there simply were not 60 votes in the United States Senate to give them to you. The President doesn’t get a vote, and he can’t force any Senators to vote a certain way. It’s not his fault you belong to a party that couldn’t vote unanimously to back out of a parking space. The reason you didn’t wake up to a unicorn crapping a rainbow in your backyard January 21, 2009, is because unicorns don’t crap rainbows, and there is no such thing as a unicorn. Welcome to the real world. It sucks. Deal with it. Quit moping, get off the couch and vote.

Finally, Jon Stewart has announced that he will be holding a “Rally to Restore Sanity” on the Mall in D.C the day before Halloween. Not to be outdone, Steven Colbert revealed 4 minutes later that he would host a “March to Keep Fear Alive” at the same time and location. Regular readers of this blog know that I have great respect for Jon Stewart. I find it absolutely incredible that the most intelligent political analysis on television comes from a guy who makes fart jokes for a living. And accordingly, I wish him success with his rally. But I can’t help but worry that there simply isn’t much sanity left to restore.