Wayne O’Leary

It Really Was the Economy, Stupid

You could almost feel the big, red wave coming. In the midterms Democrats, confronted by a radical-right Republicanism intent on disparaging their leadership, demeaning their accomplishments, and dismissing their approach to governing, had no answers. Their response ranged from assuming a defensive crouch to shriveling up into the fetal position.

As a party, the Democrats seemed tired, dispirited and listless. It was obvious they, like the country, were disillusioned with Barack Obama, whose shortcomings as a manager and politician had, by the sixth year of his presidency, overwhelmed his more intangible strengths in the area of vision and inspiration.

Admittedly, the president was battered post-2012 by events beyond his immediate control: ISIS, Ebola, Russian aggression, the IRS and VA mini-scandals. Nevertheless, his reactions lacked the verve and clarity of the early years, and Democrats, who had tied their party fortunes to a cult of the Obama personality, were dragged down with him.

Rather than defending their ground and playing the hand they were dealt, Democrats as a whole entered the lists in 2014 determined to run Republican-lite campaigns and deny their Obama connection; it made their situation untenable. By deserting their president in his hour of need, the party’s midterm candidates looked cowardly, duplicitous, and unappreciative; they were with him in the good times, had never heard of him in the bad times. Barack who? Naturally, the public, not being stupid, saw through the charade and voted for the real anti-Obama candidates, not the ersatz alternative.

There was more to it than that, of course. Democrats fielded a host of weak candidates this cycle, taking a page from the Republican clown show of yesteryear. Not that the Democrats running were clowns, but they did run bad campaigns all across the board — Udall in Colorado, Coakley in Massachusetts, Braley in Iowa, Grimes in Kentucky, Pryor in Arkansas, Begich in Alaska, Crist in Florida, Nunn in Georgia; the list could go on.

The worst implosion was probably that of Alison Lundergan Grimes, the highly touted Senate candidate in the Bluegrass State, who ran not just away from Obama but literally against him, as an unreconstructed Clinton loyalist from 2008. The party’s nominees couldn’t even motivate their base voters, who failed to show up on Election Day, contributing to a record-low 36% turnout nationwide.

Not only was the Democratic field lackluster, it was short on strategic and tactical smarts. Reinforcing their fatal perception as “the mommy party,” Democrats went out of their way to find available female candidates, many of whom failed to connect with voters — witness the rolling disaster that was the perennially nominated Martha Coakley of Massachusetts. They also focused excessively on gender-related social issues.

In a year when voters were overwhelmingly concerned about the economy, combating “the war on women” became the central Democratic campaign theme — to the exclusion of almost everything else. Senate hopefuls like Colorado’s Mark Udall and the overly hyped gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis of Texas talked about little other than reproductive rights and contraception until it was too late. Udall, a good senator apparently led astray by brain-dead political consultants, became the tragic butt of jokes as “Senator Uterus.”

Democrats have become utterly transfixed by their electoral edge with women, the celebrated gender gap. Their intense desire to exploit this perceived advantage by running distaff candidates and concentrating on a narrow range of issues thought to be of paramount interest to women has ironically created a reverse gender gap. On Election Night, PBS analyst Mark Shields allowed as how Democrats now have a gender problem with men, especially white, working-class men. White males have, in effect, been invited to leave the Democratic party, where they feel increasingly unwelcome, and become Republicans; they are doing so in droves — to the Democrats’ peril.

The excessive focus on gender and social issues generally was exposed in 2014 as the Democrats’ Achilles heel. Nearly half of those who voted (45%) told exit pollsters that the economy was the issue foremost on their minds; it ranked far ahead of all others, with healthcare a distant second. Democrats thought their economic success, as conventionally measured (lower unemployment, higher corporate profits, additional private-sector jobs, a thriving stock market), would speak for itself, freeing candidates to parade their social-issue bona fides and otherwise portray themselves as bipartisan centrists. But voters didn’t think the economy had been fixed for them, just for the One Percent.

There was precious little campaign talk from Democrats about reversing economic inequality and closing the cavernous wage-benefit gap that has only widened since the Great Recession officially ended. The problem is deeply structural and multi-faceted; it won’t respond to simplistic solutions like increased education or minimum-wage increases. There is a hunger for a substantive economic-populist moment, but that was recognized and articulated by only a relative handful of Democrats from the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party, and it played little role in the election.

The bottom line coming out of the midterms is that Democrats need to act like Democrats again and stop playing on the GOP’s turf; too many seem to have internalized the notion that this is now a conservative country, leaving them no recourse other than sounding and acting Republican. It’s a self-defeating exercise, as Alison Grimes, the poster child for this tactic, proved conclusively.

Republicans usually say what they believe; Democrats seldom do, presenting themselves too often as the ultimate bipartisans, anxious to compromise away their beliefs. That’s not the way forward. Better to lose on principle in the short run and lay the groundwork for an eventual victory that means something. The sad spectacle of Democrats ceding the economic high ground to Republicans, a hallmark of 2014, was nothing less than an admission of impotence.

The ball is now in President Obama’s court; he’s become liberalism’s last line of defense for the next two years. Given the president’s famous aversion to ideologically based partisan politics, his pragmatic desire to “get stuff done,” and his pre-election reluctance to campaign, like Harry Truman, against a do-nothing Republican Congress, things don’t bode well for the progressive movement.

Obama may become Bill Clinton in drag, helping Mitch McConnell to enact his agenda. On the other hand, he may surprise and become at last the president he should be, wielding his veto pen against the forces of darkness.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2015

Populist.com

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy.