Well, it isn’t, of course, but we have to blame someone. And, sadly, the Democrats have taken a pasting of historic proportions. For the past six years, the Republicans have been arguing about whether they need to undergo an agonizing reappraisal1 of what the Republican Party stands for. Now it’s the Democrats’ turn.
It’s easy to agree that Obama’s biggest unforced error was the disastrous opening of ObamaCare, which was entirely on him. One can add to that the whole decision to go for the gold with health care in the first place. For decades, liberals were humiliated by the fact that the U.S., along among all major nations, did not have universal health care, and I know it’s tough when all your cool European friends make fun of you, but social embarrassment should not be the basis of social policy. The Obama Administration never really recovered from the loss of Teddy Kennedy’s seat back in 2009, a loss entirely attributable to the decision to go for a “rational” health care policy instead of a politically palatable one.2 With the massive Republican victories both in Congress and at the state level, we can expect the war against ObamaCare to reach new heights.
The president’s other major weakness was the failure of the housing market to recover, which has left most Americans with less net wealth than they had more than a decade before, and well below the levels reached in 2004-2005, when the housing boom drove prices to unsustainable heights. This was far more the Republicans’ fault than the president’s.
After that comes Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, and Ebola. None of these is the president’s fault, and none of them is as important as people think. After all that bad luck, the president deserves some good luck, and I hate the Republicans so much I hope he gets some.
Afterwords
As I’ve suggested above, overconfidence is the great killer in politics. One can only hope the Republicans are as susceptible to it as the Democrats.
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Don’t know what an “agonizing reappraisal” is? It’s a gag left over from the Eisenhower Administration. ↩︎
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The loss of Kennedy’s seat was a harbinger of the harsh role chance would play for Obama. if Kennedy had died earlier, or later, the Democrats surely could have held the seat. As it worked out, blue-collar Democrats in Massachusetts, most of whom were well covered with heavily subsidized health care programs, could see that ObamaCare, which focused its subsidies on those without coverage, would be a loser for them, and reacted accordingly. ↩︎
