Ira Stoll
The Future of Capitalism
11/1/2010
Nine Ways the Democrats and their Friends in the Press Will Spin the Election Results
In the context of historic midterm elections, it’s not that big a deal. Expect to hear a lot of this one if the Democrats hold on to control of the Senate. In 1994, President Clinton and his Democratic Party lost both the House and the Senate to the Republicans. And Mr. Clinton didn’t even get his health care bill passed. As recently as 2006, President George W. Bush and his Republican Party lost control of both the House and the Senate. In 1946, Harry Truman and his Democratic Party lost both the House and the Senate to the Republicans. And in 1954, Dwight Eisenhower and his Republicans lost both the House and the Senate to the Democrats.
The Democrats have been saying all along that between the financial “reform,” ObamaCare, and the stimulus, they’ve had the most domestic achievements since the New Deal; it’s not surprising that the public reaction is similar; Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party lost 72 seats in the 1938 midterm elections for the House of Representatives, which is more than most predict Obama and his Democrats will lose. Bottom line spin: Obama did better than Clinton, George W. Bush, Eisenhower, Truman, or FDR.
…The voters are ignorant. Example: Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the November 1 New Yorker: “Even among the small minority of voters who have some familiarity with Senate rules and their baneful consequences, few know that the Democrats had their filibuster-proof majority—sixty votes, not all of them reliable—for just seven of the Obama Administration’s twenty-one months.”
Another example: John McCormick and Heidi Przybyla in an October 29 Bloomberg News article that runs under the headline “Poll: Americans Don’t Know Economy Expanded With Tax Cuts.” The article explains that while “The Obama administration cut taxes for middle-class Americans, expects to make a profit on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to rescue Wall Street banks and has overseen an economy that has grown for the past five quarters,” Americans somehow haven’t gotten the message.
And, related, it was a communications problem. “You can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R,” is how President Obama put it in his interview with the New York Times, conveniently absolving his policies from any blame…
…It’s Bush’s fault. This was a big winner for Mr. Obama and the Democrats in 2008 so don’t be surprised to see him try it again the morning after the election of 2010. He’s never really stopped blaming Bush. Here he is in a speech yesterday in Cleveland: “We had a recession that was so bad we lost 4 million jobs before Joe and I were even sworn into office… We lost almost 8 million jobs before our economic policies could even be put into place…. the Republican leaders in Washington, they had a different calculation. Their basic theory was, you know what, the economy is so bad, we made such a mess of things, that rather than cooperate, we’ll be better off just saying no to everything. We’ll be better off not even trying to fix the economy. And people will get angry and they will get frustrated and maybe two years from now they will have forgotten that we were the ones who caused the mess in the first place.”…
Read the entire article at The Future of Capitalism.
H/T sisu
Update: Toby Harnden in the Telegraph of London has similar thoughts, It’s the (fill in blank), stupid! Top 10 Democratic excuses for losing the mid-terms
It’s Wednesday morning, you’re a Democrat and you’re waking up after a terrible night. You’re hung over and you can’t quite remember what happened. You’re pretty sure you lost the House of Representatives and – who knows? – perhaps even the Senate as well. You have a vague recollection of Harry Reid being sent back to Searchlight, Nevada. It might have been a hallucination but didn’t you lose another Kennedy seat in New England too?
You reach for your remote control to check out what the pundits are saying but can’t find it. Perhaps someone threw it at the television set when Illinois went red (or was it Wisconsin?). Never mind, you don’t need to listen to the excuses because they’re all been aired beforehand. Here’s an idiot’s guide as to why the Democrats lost…
