The Great Obamalacking of 2010"Mm, your tears are so yummy and sweet! Oh, the tears of unfathomable sadness! My-yummy!" -- Cartman, South Park
Admittedly, it has been a lot of fun to watch the wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Left after the savage beating they received on election day. However, it's more than a little disturbing that almost no one on the Left seems to think they lost because they actually did a bad job.
In other words, according to liberals:
- Obamacare,
- the failure of the stimulus,
- Obama bowing to foreign leaders,
- the way they handled the BP oil spill,
- trying to close Guantanamo,
- not reading bills before they passed them,
- cash for clunkers,
- talking up amnesty,
- trying to pass card check and cap and trade,
- taking over student loans,
- refusing to seriously address the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
- taking over GM and Chrysler,
- doing nothing to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,
- dropping the Black Panther intimidation case,
- expanding the bailouts
- and raising spending up to frightening levels had nothing whatsoever to do with why they lost.
What did? Well, here are the extremely lame excuses that seem to keep cropping up again and again.
1)
The voters are racists: Really? Did people somehow fail to notice Obama was black when they voted him into office? Moreover, how is it that voting out white liberals like Russ Feingold and Alan Grayson is racist? Is it just because they're in the same party as Obama? If so, was it racist to vote in Republicans like Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, and Allen West?
How is it those "teabaggers" are supposedly diehard racists, but they were usually the biggest supporters of conservative minorities who ran for office? 2)
The voters are stupid, angry, and had a temper tantrum:
Ever notice that voters never have "temper tantrums" when they're replacing Republicans with Democrats? That's just democracy at work. But, when it goes the other way, then suddenly America is a giant romper room and liberals are the condescending nannies who need to teach the whiny babies how good socialism, government, and appeasement are for them. Here's a crazy thought:
Maybe the voters are the real adults and after punishing the Republicans for not putting away their toys, they're punishing the Democrats for getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar. 3)
It's the economy, stupid: Had the economy been thriving instead of tanking, there's no question that the Democrats would have done better at the polls. Still, a bad economy during a mid-term election is hardly a rarity, and this was the worst shellacking a party has suffered since 1948. If you want a fairly comparable example, look back to 1982 during Reagan's first term when the economy was about as bad as it is today. The results? The GOP lost 26 seats and actually gained one in the Senate. The economy may have been a factor, but it's impossible to argue that it was a decisive factor in the great Obamalacking of 2010.
4)
Obama compromised too much with the Republicans: Laugh if you want, but you hear this EVERYWHERE on the Left. According to liberals, Obama would have had a much bigger stimulus and single payer health care if not for his deep desire to work with Republicans. There are
many problems with this theory, starting with the fact that Republicans almost unanimously opposed those programs. Making some very minor changes, in an attempt to pick off Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, doesn't constitute any sort of meaningful compromise.
Moreover, for much of the last two years, Obama could have passed that legislation without any Republican votes, but more moderate members of his own party weren't willing to go quite as far as the Left wanted. Given that many of these very same Blue Dogs lost their jobs for going too far to the Left as is, if anything, it would have been politically smart for them to drive Obama much further to the center. Last but not least, there's very little evidence that pushing single payer or a bigger stimulus would have made the impossible-to-please professional Left any happier or made the bills any more popular or effective.
If the American people rejected Democratic policies as is, there?s no reason to think they would have embraced Dems had they done the ?Full Lenin? and gone even further to the Left. 5)
After the Citizens United decision, Republicans were able to buy the election: The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision was a victory for free speech and despite the Democrats? claims to the contrary, it didn't unleash any sort of flood of foreign money into the election process. Not only does election law require all foreign money to be firewalled off political contributions,
Democrats took in more "foreign money" than Republicans. Additionally, the
Democrats outspent the GOP overall. So, if money were really the issue, Democrats would have gained seats instead of taking a "shellacking."
6)
The Democrats didn't trumpet their accomplishments: This is another ever present theme of the Left -- the Democrats accomplished so much, but they just didn't tell people about it. Of course, there's an incredibly obvious reason for that. The American people hated the Democratic agenda with all the intensity of a nuclear blast. That's why
the Democratic Party's "accomplishments" were discussed in great detail all across the country -- by Republican candidates. 7)
Obama didn't do a good enough job of communicating his policies: But, wait: I thought Barack Obama was supposed to be the greatest political communicator since Reagan? Wasn't this a man who was elected largely because he could give a great speech? Moreover, hasn't Barack Obama spent more time publicly discussing his policies than any other President in history? Hasn't the mainstream media incessantly discussed, promoted, and told us how wonderful Barack Obama's policies are?
Claiming that communication was the problem is sort of like claiming the problem with the desert is that it's not hot enough and it needs a little more sand.
I wonder which excuse Xo is going with
