Campaign

During debates, interviews, stump speeches, on the trail of one of the nastiest U.S. Senate contests I can remember in my home state of Illinois — and that’s saying a lot —  Republican Mark Kirk almost always landed a bull’s-eye when he took aim at Democrat Alexi Giannoulias. His three-word bullet was Michael “Jaws” Giorango, a “outfit” guy to whom Broadway Bank, when Giannoulias was a senior loan officer there, loaned millions. If the bad guy’s name had been, say, Michael Jay Graham, Giannoulias might be heading to Washington.

Even before Tuesday’s midterm elections, a lot of adjectives were used to describe American voters today: frustrated, disappointed, angry, betrayed.

Looking at the results, I suggest there are two adjectives missing: fickle and dumb.

Voters are fickle, indeed. Yes, they want change. But it seems they want change simply for the sake of change.

The focus of the next year for President Obama will be the economy: He told reporters at his first post-election press conference today that his “No. 1 concern” would be to restore jobs and reduce the deficit. The middle classes now know that he feels their pain.

He certainly never mentioned foreign policy goals among his priorities, and no White House reporter asked him about them. Foreign policy was not among the voters’ concerns during the campaign.

Like most political junkies, I was up until the wee hours of Wednesday morning tracking Tuesday’s election results on television, on my BlackBerry and through my Twitter feed. And, like about half of political junkies, I wasn’t too happy with the results.

What happened in the 2010 midterm elections was historic and impressive. Republicans, on the brink of extinction after the last two “tidal wave” elections in 2006 and 2008, made significant gains across the country. Tuesday, the market corrected itself. After two straight bullish election cycles for Democrats that established the largest congressional majorities in years, a Stephen Colbert-type nightmare bear market recouped the gains the Democrats had made. Republican gains were mostly in conservative districts held by Democrats but won by John McCain in 2008.

At first glance, it would seem last night was a huge victory and vindication, of sorts, for Sarah Palin. I certainly thought so in the excitement of the moment. Now I'm not so sure.

While I don't agree with all of Palin's positions, I've admired her tenacity and have defended her at times because of the unfair beating she took from the mainstream media after the 2008 presidential campaigns, and the arrogant mishandling and trashing by establishment GOP campaign staff. She now stands on her own, and is capable of accepting both credit and blame, criticism and praise. In that regard, she has won.

On an MSNBC panel I joined yesterday, there was talk — yet again — of sexism in the midterm elections. I participated with members of the media establishment who jointly agreed that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) low approval numbers among independent voters (8 percent) are a function of sexism that continues to taint politics.

I’m not going to say sexism doesn’t still exist in the political arena. Certainly female candidates face unique challenges, and many are forced to defend personal decisions — about marriage, relationships and children — that male candidates do not. In fact, there’s perhaps no other place where women’s proper role in society is scrutinized more than in the political realm.

Two personal big winners on election night were Harry Reid, who conquered an army of political opponents after he was treated as politically dead, and Marco Rubio, a serious and thoughtful conservative who will soon be mentioned as a future presidential and vice-presidential candidate.

Reid taught other Democrats how to fight back. He fought back ferociously and defeated the Tea Party, Karl Rove, interest groups and the Republican power structure. Reid is now the rock star of Democrats, and the relationship between Reid and President Obama is now the No. 1 power relationship in Washington.

My New Hampshire governor, Democrat John Lynch, won a landslide victory here in a historic fourth term. He ran on a positive business model that echoed that of Virginia Sen. and former Gov. Mark Warner‘s (D) when he was voted one of the best governors in America in a Wall Street survey. Lynch, last man standing on this creative approach, should be considered the most successful Democratic governor and a candidate for the 2012 presidential race if President Obama bows out. The Lynch/Warner business model should be the new Democratic template. But for now the Democrats’ future is MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann at the news desk giggling at Michele Bachmann. And the future is Michlle Bachmann. And the future is the slow realization that Sarah Palin is a real part of American life and will continue to be. The question today is who will be her running mate in 2012, Mitt Romney or Texas Gov. Rick Perry?

In many ways, it was the best-case scenario for the Republican Party.

They swept the House in dramatic fashion, and while they didn’t quite win the Senate, they got the next best thing: Harry Reid is still going to be the chief spokesman for congressional Democrats.

It is now the conventional wisdom that the demise of the hated Republican establishment was overstated. Rob Portman and Roy Blunt cruised to easy victories, and those two are the best examples of the best of the Republican establishment.

Republicans would do well to acknowledge early that they could easily lose their majority in two to four years. Recognizing that reality doesn’t hasten its arrival. The electorate is simply that volatile. And the sooner that’s acknowledged, the freer the GOP will be to do the right thing.
 
What they choose to do with this awesome 60-seat gain in the House rests solely in their hands. They should seize this moment and tackle the most pressing, intractable problems our country faces. Not sheepishly move to issues that will not better this country in wholesale ways. Am I talking about “overreaching”? No. Rather, they need to address the calamitous problems that have gone unabated for far too long. Read more...