President Obama sounded a bizarre note upon his return home on Sunday when asked about upcoming ne gotiations with Republicans in Congress: “They’re still flush with victory, having run a strategy that was all about saying no,” he said.
The thing is it doesn’t matter what the GOP strategy was in the election’s run-up. What matters is what the voters said by the way they cast their votes. It was the voters who said no.
A remarkably original analysis of election results by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research makes this not just an assertion but a matter of fact. The study demonstrates that more than 20 seats lost by Democrats — at least a third of the overall loss — went to the GOP as a result of liberal policy votes.
In one sense, the survey should make Obama feel a little better, since Republicans needed 37 seats to take control. This means he can assign the Democratic loss of control in the House to the economy alone. Why? Because the survey estimates that 40 seats were lost to Democrats due to the economy’s weakness.
In another sense, it should make him feel far worse, because the 20-plus seats lost above and beyond the economy are — according to the Stanford survey — entirely attributable to Obama’s left-liberal policies.
Obama clearly wants to blame the economy’s woes for his crushing defeat, in part because he seems to assume he bears no blame for them. Yet that is, to be charitable, a profoundly problematic assumption.
Yes, he inherited a mess. But over the 20 months of his presidency he championed dramatic and expensive policy efforts to heal the economy — $863 billion worth of stimulus provisions and a hundred other smaller steps. Those have proved ineffective at best and at worst have served as a drag on recovery — as have other policies, in particular health-care reform and the uncertainty about the future it has created for businesses large and small.
Certainly, then, some proportion of that 40-seat loss can and should be attributed to his poor handling of the economy. Let’s weight the results in his favor and say he should shoulder only 25 percent of the responsibility. That would translate into 10 lost seats.
So you can assign a 30-seat loss to economic woes for which Obama was not responsible. If Dems had only lost 30 seats, they’d still control the House. But they lost more than 60. Thus, Obama must still bear responsibility for the loss of the House.
And more besides. For it was the 20-plus seats lost due to Obama’s liberal policies that turned the election from a wave into a tsunami — a wholesale rejection of his party fearsome in its intensity and destructiveness (an astounding 680 Democratic state legislators lost their jobs on Nov. 2).
The Stanford analysis (by professor David Brady, also deputy director of the Hoover Institution) addresses the effect on individual House members who voted both for health-care reform and the cap-and-trade bill.
Democrats who voted for both bills and whose districts went for John McCain rather than Obama in 2008 were wiped out. So were the ones in districts that Obama essentially split with McCain 50-50.
Perhaps even more interesting is this: A Democrat in one of these “50-50” districts who voted no on both health-care and cap-and-trade ended up with a 71 percent chance of getting re-elected — while one who voted yes on both bills had only a 6.5 percent chance of holding on.
These findings are supported by other surveys, like one by Smart Politics, a Web site run out of the University of Minnesota. It found that “just 11 percent of Democrats who voted ‘yes’ on the health-care bill in congressional districts carried by John McCain in 2008 were re-elected to the 112th Congress (2 of 18 representatives), 39 percent of those who voted ‘no’ in McCain districts will return to their offices in DC (9 of 23).”
These studies indicate that the president may be living in the realm of the delusional when it comes to the results of the election. “I am very confident that the American people were not issuing a mandate for gridlock,” he said on Sunday.
Really? Right now, “a mandate for gridlock” would be the most generous possible interpretation of the election results, as far as Obama is concerned. “A major public revolt” would be less charitable — and more accurate.
johnpodhoretz@gmail.com