So let me throw up my bias right up front.<\/p>\n
I don’t see anything in the Democratic Party’s performance over the last four years that is particularly egregious or inflammatory.<\/p>\n
Some low-grade scandal? Sure, Charlie Rangel and Rod Blagojevich buffooned their way into the headlines.<\/p>\n
But their antics were nothing on par with the champagne-and-grand-theft exuberance of the Abramoff-era GOP.<\/p>\n
And if Obama-haters are still obsessing about his birth certificate and his religious status, you know they haven’t found anything better?<\/p>\n
Has Barack Obama failed to right the ship of our economy in the year-and-a-half he’s occupied the White House.\u00a0 Sure, guilty as charged.<\/p>\n
But he did inherit a ship that was, as the firemen say, fully engaged.<\/p>\n
Are Democrats big-spenders, with no real plan to balance the Federal budget.\u00a0 Again, guilty as charged.<\/p>\n
But the GOP has a sorry track record on this front as well, and none of their candidates are talking about plans that will seriously improve the debt picture much.<\/p>\n
Do Democrats tax like drunken sailors?\u00a0 Maybe.<\/p>\n
But Republicans have only figured out how to cut taxes by borrowing, not by significantly shrinking the cost of government.<\/p>\n
My point here isn’t that Democrats deserve another two years in control of the entire Federal government.\u00a0 That’s debatable, and it’s up to the voters to decide.<\/p>\n
No, what I’m struggling to understand is the absolutely feverish venom the public seems to feel toward a Democratic Party that was the belle of the ball only two short years ago.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t help that the Democrats — whatever you think of their policies — have done pretty much what they told voters they were going to do.<\/p>\n
This wasn’t a bait-and-switch sort of deal, where Mr. Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senare majority leader Harry Reid promised one thing and delivered another.<\/p>\n
The agenda they’ve followed is, if anything, less ambitious and progressive than the one in their 2008 campaign playbook.<\/p>\n
I also think it’s hard to argue that Mr. Obama’s White House has been any more incompetent or inept than any other first-term administration in the last thirty years.<\/p>\n
Is he the greatest President since Abe Lincoln?\u00a0 No, of course not.\u00a0 But he’s also avoided scandal, comported himself with reasonable decorum, and handled a number of domestic and foreign crises with reasonable aplomb.<\/p>\n
One final wrinkle here is that the Republican Party isn’t exactly wowing us with its charisma or its fresh ideas.<\/p>\n
If anything, the GOP is swept up in its own civil war, with the tea party and the establishment leadership battling it out, and a national chairman who is so deeply unpopular.<\/p>\n
In my two decades of following politics, none of that long list adds up to the formula for a landslide.\u00a0 So what is it?\u00a0 Why are voters so angry and so hell-bent on change?<\/p>\n
The simple, dull, predictable answer is that it’s the economy.\u00a0 Democrats have inherited — and yes, now own —\u00a0 the most frightening slump in post-War history.<\/p>\n
One in five workers is in financial peril.\u00a0 Multiply that times families and dependents and you have a deeply frightened society.<\/p>\n
Yes, it’s arguable that the Democratic stimulus plan and the various bailouts prevented a full-on Depression, but that’s not good enough by half.<\/p>\n
Americans expected Mr. Obama to do two much larger things:<\/p>\n
First, articulate a clear path toward full recovery, using creative and ambitious means to get us there, preferably strategies that won’t balloon the Federal deficit.\u00a0\u00a0 That hasn’t happened.<\/p>\n
The White House spent a lot of its political capital on healthcare, cap-and-trade, the war in Afghanistan, and other issues that right now rank far down on America’s collective priority list.<\/p>\n
Secondly, voters wanted Mr. Obama to offer a clear message of hope.\u00a0 Not hope for his campaign victory — that was settled in November in 2008 — but hope for our own renewed prosperity.<\/p>\n
We wanted a cheerleader and an inspiration, and instead we got technocratic predictions and wonky dial-tweaking.<\/p>\n
It may be too late for the Democrats to ask voters for one more shot at this.<\/p>\n
But Mr. Obama can still use this election season to get his game-face back on, and to remember that fixing the economy is still his only real priority.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So let me throw up my bias right up front. I don’t see anything in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[886],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2565,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions\/2565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}