I am doing my best to rise from the post election depression gripping me, and think it is about time to post some commentary on what happened on Election Day last Tuesday. I’ll preface these remarks with the disclaimer that I’m sure many will not agree with me, so leave a comment if you want, but I’m not unsure of any of these ideas, so don’t expect me to agree with you. I will thank you however for leaving a comment.

What we saw happen on Tuesday night was the result of two independent factors. If either had been different, there would not have been such insignificant Democratic loss. You may be saying that Tuesday should have been another Democratic win, like 2008 was, and I have a comment about that, but I’ll leave it for the end of this post. Two causes. If we had overcome one of the other,anyone who is for progressive causes wouldn’t be so distressed right now. But neither were overcome, and it is what it is, for now.

America is one big divided country

The first thing I notice when I look over election results is that not much has changed since 2008, where we saw a very deeply divided country. It still is with Dems seeing things one way, Republicans seeing things diametrically different, and Independents split between these two viewpoints. Americans were angry then, and they are still angry now, and the way they expressed that anger was through voting out incumbents. The New York Times, illustrated part of this:

About half of voters said Congress should repeal the health care overhaul; the other half said it should be expanded or left alone. Those who wanted the law repealed voted for Republicans, and the others supported Democrats.

An even bigger share of voters — nearly three-quarters — said they disapproved of how Congress had done its job. Those voters chose Republicans by about a two-to-one ratio.

All the dissatisfaction with Washington can be summed up as there are those who don’t think the President and the Democrats have gone far enough, and those who think they have gone too far or they liked things as they already were. In my posts, I generally refer to this group as “the status quo.” This won’t change for awhile, and progressives are kidding themselves, not to mention creating their demise if they fail to grasp this fact.

Dems stayed home

The second thing that happened on election day, was that democrats didn’t turn out the vote while the status quo was super motivated to stop Obama’s plan for change. Those who claim that the rise and (they claim) success of the tea bagging candidates, demonstrate that the American people are upset with the President. They claim that this shows that voters do not agree with the Democratic agenda.  But if you really look at the numbers, this isn’t the case at all. Look at Barbara Boxer for example. She received an enormous number of votes, and statistically, did better than any of the so-called winners who label themselves as “tea party.” The reality, pointed out in the New Your Times post, as well as in posts like this on NewsMax, demonstrate that Independents and Seniors played the biggest role in the election going as it did. So, if Dems had turned out to vote in the numbers needed, what these independents did would not have mattered so much.

Who was disappointed with what

The media is framing the election, along with the GOP, that America wasn’t happy with the direction of the country, and people are disappointed with what Obama has accomplished. When in reality, quite a bit has been accomplished, and the dissatisfaction needs to be teased out just a bit more to be accurate. The GOP and the Fox watching public in general are dissatisfied and are doing everything in their power to regain all power. This is funded by big corporations and foreign entities including foreign governments. But what are Dems and independents dissatisfied with? I would posit that they are dissatisfied with wishy-washy Dems who are too busy playing both sides of the fence out of some fear of acting on real principles.  If the country and Dems in particular were really unhappy with Dems and the Democratic agenda, we would have seen more uniform Democratic losses everywhere. But what we saw, were Blue Dog Democrats decimated, why more traditional Democrats were less affected. Americans wanted change, and they say what the Blue Dogs did to so many critical bills as more of the same-old-same-old watering down legislation that is unproductive government.

People feel they have so little voice in government, and while I’m not entirely sure I agree with that, I do know that their vote is one way they see  they can exercise their voice. So, people who were unhappy with the way government has worked- not necessarily the direction it was going- but the process and speed and ability to function- did what they could to make that change. They voted for the other guy, or they didn’t vote.

Why no Dem win in 2010?

After all the devastation caused by Republican domination over the past decade, you might have thought that Dems were set to win this one hands down, but that didn’t happen, nor anything close to it. In fact, anyone who suggests that it was even a possibility might look like an idiot. Personally I chalk this up to a few factors. From the earliest days of the Obama presidency, you could see this coming. Obama adopted too many “Bush” policies and refused to call out the devastation that had been done. Bringing Geitner and Summers into the White House was outrageous since they were so integral to the system that had brought Wall Street close to complete collapse. Americans wanted a president who would call out the torture and war-crimes of the previous administration and bring all of it to an end. Why is GITMO not closed for example. His failure to follow through on any promises to the LGBT community, and worse than that, the appearance of actively supporting discrimination by continuing to fight in the courts created massive problems. Personally, I would have trouble pulling the lever for Obama if he had been on the ballot last week.

But Health Care Reform (HCR) was where things really began to fall apart and never improved. Early on, the White House lost total control of the message, and so while HCR  is actually good for the economy and good for the cutting the deficit, and good fir the American people, no one really knows this, and the lies and misinformation worked. Lies, misinformation and fear mongering, coupled with spineless Blue Dogs, and a lack of real leadership from the White House set the stage for this election. Really, Obama and the Democrat controlled Congress have actually accomplished quite a bit. But the attempt to get this message out or use it, was too little and too late tio combat the lies and misinformation that have been flowing non-stop for months.