One of the issues that would receive the most resounding consistent poll responses in our country is frustration with gridlock in Washington DC. Nearly everyone would agree that they are frustrated with the gridlock, which would cause some pollsters, analysts and politicians to cite a common agreement.
But the respondents would NOT agree. Many bemoan the inability of a “liberal” agenda to proceed, while others lament the failure of a “conservative” agenda from being advanced. The common frustration with gridlock is a misleading, superficial characteristic. When you scratch the surface, the seeming agreement fades.
In some respects it is ironic that I should be citing this underlying disagreement as an example of our failure to identify issues clearly because I take pride in discussing issues with people of different persuasions and finding that we really have a lot of areas of agreement.
For example, I don’t like labels much because people don’t always reflect their labels. For example, each of us can have a different Meyers Briggs personality type at work than in our family or at our church or other activity.
I find that liberals and conservatives share a deep concern about individuals.
However, sometimes people exaggerate our differences and sometimes they exaggerate our similarities.
The Republicans shot themselves in the foot in many respects in this campaign. They did so from the beginning and it was predictable that they would continue to do so. I felt it would be difficult to defeat President Obama for many reasons, but one of the most significant reasons was that the Republicans would reliably undermine themselves.
I’m not confident that we’ll learn from this election. But I must admit that, while I am optimistic that there are a lot of things we can accomplish, I tend to be pessimistic as to long-term trends.
I think the best news about this election is:
1. The Republicans lost some key elections.
2. The Republicans retained the House.
3. The vote count was close.
Why are these the good news aspects?
The arch-conservatives in the Republican Party hurt the Republican cause in terms of popularity with liberal Republicans, independents and conservative Democrats. Their absolute resistance to taxes, for example, was irrational and ill-respected. Their determination to oppose President Obama as broadly as possible was counter-productive. They made it easy for President Obama to distract the public from his administration’s ramrod strategies. Indeed, he did not even have to distract the public very much, the Republicans did it for him.
Some people told me that they were voting for President Obama to send a message to the Republicans that they don’t like the arch-conservative position. I responded (and still fear) that the conservatives would blame the loss on having had a moderate Republican candidate.
The loss of some Senate races might deter them from thinking that the loss ‘is the liberal Republicans’” fault. I’m not optimistic about that, but I do see it as a ray of hope.
On the other hand, it is important that the Democrats not be able to ramrod their ideas. We need the Democrats to make reasonable compromises with the Republicans. If the Republicans did not maintain control of the House, the Democrats would have run rough-shod again.
I'd like to see honest effort to resolve our difficulties reaching across the aisle. I think that is going to be hard to do, not just because radical Republicans are determined to resist but also because radical Democrats will continue to push President Obama to ramrod things home and to expand the power of the executive branch, which I think is problematic in the long-run.
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid succeeded in convincing President Obama to let them play hard-ball when he was first elected. If he tries to change his stance in his second term, they will “double-down”, convinced that if they push him hard enough, they can get him to give in on the issue.
Meanwhile, the Pelosi-Reid leadership has caused even moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats to distrust the administration. That is going to be hard to change
Lastly, any party winning an election wants to think it has a mandate. Hopefully the close popular vote will encourage Democrats to be more realistic.
What else might we learn from the election?
Perhaps we could learn that it is not necessary to cater to your most extreme supporters. At least, I hope it is not necessary. I’ve seen both parties cave in to their extremists, but it has been most notable in Senator McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin and Governor Romney’s espousal of conservative positions.
Governor Romney’s resurgence near the end of the election occurred because he dramatically abandoned the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Had he not felt that he had to cater to them earlier, he might have won the election.
The Akin/McCaskill election also demonstrated that point. Look at all the money that supported Akin even though the donors had wanted him to abandon the race.
The Akin/McCaskill election was predicted to be very close. I kept saying that it wasn’t going to be close at all. It would seem to have been very hard to vote for Todd Akin. A lot of people will say I was right. I guess so, but it is stunning that Akin could get the number of votes that he got. I find it hard to imagine voting for Todd Akin. His vote count is evidence of our deep divide and the determination of people to against the other side no matter what.
There is another very interesting aspect of the Akin/McCaskill campaign. As explained to me by a strong McCaskill supporter, she spent $2 million on the Republican primary in support of Todd Akin because she felt that he was the only candidate she could beat.
Personally, I believe that what she did was immoral. Perhaps I’m jaded, but I believe that most people in our society will consider investing to influence the “other party”’s primary to be immoral only if they are supporters of the “other party”. If it is their party that is doing the investing, they tend to think of it as smart politics.
Our lack of strong ethics is one of our greatest problems.
Earlier I mentioned the misbelief that we could perhaps unify people based on their frustration with a gridlocked Congress. We might be able to do that somewhat with a third party that is moderate, but I don’t think that would attract enough voters to be successful.
Polls results showing displeasure with Health Care Reform are another example of misinterpretation of poll results in my opinion. Republicans kept believing that those poll results indicated that they had a lot of electoral support. But I kept telling people that a meaningful number of the people who were upset with Health Care Reform wanted a single-payor system. They were not likely to vote Republican!
The Republicans left a lot of blood on the stages of their primary debates. Their strong intent on defeating one another for the nomination undermined whichever candidate would get the nomination. This was another way they made the Democrats’ job easy.
One of my friends is optimistic that people will learn that spending a lot of money on negative ads is not successful. Here again, I am less optimistic. The fundamental root of our problems is that our voters do not discipline candidates. We reward and encourage them to air misleading commercials. As I have often mentioned, I tend to vote based on which candidate I feel I can trust, even if I disagree with them. I suspect most readers think I’m crazy to do that, but if we could discipline ourselves to encourage honesty in our politicians, we’d gain tremendously.
Bottom-line: we need more conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans in Congress. That lesson can be learned from this election, but I doubt that the Democrats, the Republicans and the public will learn that lesson sufficiently.
No comments:
Post a Comment