""I could make this the shortest postmortem on the midterm elections by simply running the figure "9.6%" in bold print at the head of the page and leave it at that. But I won't. As important as the abnormally high unemployment figure was in steering Tuesday's results in the GOP direction, there was more to the debacle than discontent over joblessness. Even if you throw in the comatose real estate market and the pathetic rates of interest being paid by money market funds to people on fixed incomes, you would have only a portion of the story of the Democrats' misfortune.
Like so many of the economic ills for which President Obama should not be forced to shoulder the entire blame, other factors mostly out of the president's control were in play — such as the long historical trend of the president's party losing seats in midterm elections, sometimes disastrously. The very magnitude of Obama's victory in 2008 and the broad coattails that carried Democrats from unlikely places to seats in Congress prefigured a big falloff in 2010. This "surge and decline" feature of U.S. congressional elections has operated with few exceptions in every midterm since 1934. """
Those who need to pin it on something might pin it on historical factors--the old "surge and decline" in particular. That, and the Foxnews-Herd Mind.
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