As the electoral wave ap proaches, pundits and news analysts have morphed into meteorologists, reading the complex undercurrents that will merge and swamp Democratic politicians nationwide on Tuesday. They’re all concentrating on the Republicans.
One group says the motive force is a school of rich Republican sharks swimming together in secret even though everybody knows who they are. Another says a conservative sleeping giant has been roused like Poseidon from the depths to which it had fallen in despair in 2008. A third says disgruntled moderates are directing the tides, and so Tea Partiers better sit down and stop rocking the boat.
Pointless.
This election isn’t about how much money Republicans raised (less than Democrats, actually, but still a huge amount). It’s not about Tea Party activism, important though that populist force is proving to be. And it’s not about how Republicans succeeded in appealing to moderates.
This is an election about Barack Obama. It’s a referendum on him and his party.
It isn’t about the Republicans. They’re not being anointed.
Obama and the Democrats are being scourged.
In fact, in nearly every state where Democrats have succeeded in concentrating the public’s attention on the GOP candidate, the Republican appears to be losing by a substantial margin — Carl Paladino here, Linda McMahon in Connecticut, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Meg Whitman in California.
If this were a generic anti-Washington, anti-incumbent, throw-the-bums-out election, Republicans now serving in the House would be in straits comparable to those of Democrats. They’re not. The number of Democratic House seats in play is close to 100 — out of 435 total seats. The number of GOP-held seats in play: fewer than 10.
Voters punished the GOP in 2006 and 2008. It appears they’ve decided that the punishment they inflicted turned around and punished them right back. They are, it seems, prepared to visit it anew, doubled and redoubled this time.
Analogies abound — to the 1994 election, to the 1964 election, to the 1894 election. The appropriate analogy, though not in scale, is to the 2002 election. Only this year is the mirror image of 2002.
In 2002, voters went to the polls after something of great consequence (9/11) had taken place to which George W. Bush and his party had responded. No one doubted that the response was consequential — the Patriot Act, the war on al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the ouster of the Taliban government, the opening of the Gitmo prison and the slow-moving but relentless buildup to war in Iraq.
The question was whether voters believed what had been done had been good or bad for the country and for them.
The answer was by no means a foregone conclusion even then. The economy was slow; the nation was still in mourning. Libertarians on the right and much of the liberal left were horrified by the supposed excesses of the new “security regime.”
Candidates ran with Bush and ran strongly against Bush. Quickly, the midterm election in 2002 became “nationalized,” unlike most midterms — meaning that voters weren’t only making judgments on individual races but were using their vote to express their support or opposition for the general response of their government to 9/11.
When the dust cleared, in a surprising reversal of historical trends, the Republicans had improved their position in the House and won seven seats in the Senate, which restored the control they’d lost the previous year.
In 2010, Democrats went to the American people with a potent record of accomplishment undertaken in the wake of an event of great consequence — the financial meltdown of September 2008. They passed three major pieces of legislation against nearly universal Republican opposition, including the national health-care system they’d been laboring to create off and on since 1948. Two auto companies were taken over.
The difference is that in 2002, Bush and the Republicans ran on their record. In 2010, Obama and the Democrats are running away from theirs. It’s not that they don’t believe in what they did. It’s that the voters don’t believe in it, and they know it.
There was really no sense in running away. As we all know from the fates of sorry extras in bad disaster movies, you can’t outrun a tsunami. You can only let it hit, hope you survive and then see what you can make of what’s left afterward. Or what’s right. johnpodhoretz@gmail.com