A struggle ruinous for the victor

Terrence Heath wrote a three part essay on why the GOP win is Pyrrhic. First, the definition: A Pyrrhic Victory is one that is so costly that another such victory will cause defeat. Put another way, the struggle is ruinous for the victor. That sure caught my interest.

We'll start with what happened to the Democrats. Heath believes the GOP didn't win, but the Dems lost. Why? The Dems promised change and didn't deliver.

Obama kept striving for bipartisanship, even though the GOP repeatedly and firmly rebuffed his efforts, starting before Obama took office (yeah, the GOP claims that the Dems didn't reach out, perhaps because they knew it was a futile exercise). So the Dems continued to barter away the change they ran on, the change the country needs. And they got very little for it. The list of bills that died through filibuster is long. The Blue Dog Democrats, who obstructed a lot of Dem plans, lost half their caucus last week. Even conservatives apparently didn't want them acting like the GOP. Because the Dems did such a rotten job of fulfilling the change they were elected to accomplish their base stayed home. The GOP won by forfeit.

Boehner and McConnell have been claiming all week that America wants the GOP agenda. Commentators have said about the Dems, "You can't sell what people don't want."

But the GOP agenda is identical to what they've been pushing since at least 2004. It didn't work and America knows it didn't work. Which is why they voted strongly for Dems in 2006 & 2008. We don't want what the GOP is selling. We don't want cut taxes and hope. We don't want a country that works for the top 1%. We do want what Dems campaigned on in those same years. But the Dems didn't deliver.

The GOP is not popular with Americans, their approval is below the Dems. Their policies are considered toxic to American life. Heath lists many GOP agenda items and the poll numbers to show how little support they have. So back to that forfeit.

There were 45 million fewer votes cast in 2010 compared to 2008. That's down by a third. So it is silly to say "The people have spoken!" in favor of GOP policies. Why is the voice considered louder than it was two years ago? The people have spoken, and continue to speak. But neither party is listening. The Dems listen too closely to (and are cowed by) what the GOP is saying and the GOP listens only to corporations.

The GOP cannot deliver on what America wants. The Tea Party can't either. And over the next two years they are likely to deliver nothing at all.

The Dems can, and we might even give them another chance to try to do the work we elected them to do in 2008. But only if they prove to us they mean it.



More commentary about why the Dems lost:
Sara Robinson points to an ongoing perception that has worked against Dems and is on bright display by Tea Party members. A complaint by the Tea Party is, "I've gotten where I am all on my own. No government help at all. Why should I pay taxes so the government can coddle those slackers?"

It's an amazing self-delusion. The list of government programs that help the middle class starts with public schools, goes through home mortgage interest deduction, and ends with Social Security and Medicare, with a slew of other programs in between. The problem is that many people don't see these as government programs. "Keep government out of my Social Security!"

The reason for that misperception is the programs for the poor (food stamps and minimum wage) are frequently debated in Congress. Programs for the middle class aren't -- Congress knows not to touch them. In addition, most of these programs don't have an obvious connection to government because a private company handles the transaction (like student loans) or it is something so small as a single line on a tax form.

So what do we do to counter that misleading narrative?

First, make the hand of government more visible. Obama started it by cutting out banks in the student loan process.

Then start saying that in America opportunity is a group effort. This affirms the social contract (which the GOP works hard to shred). It puts a stop to the politics of rage that says I pay taxes and get nothing in return. It demands they give credit to the sacrifice of others that made their personal and societal wealth possible. A true patriot would thank Uncle Sam.




Rachel Maddow has a 15 minutes segment on conservative lies. The conservative media machine is big, well funded, and self-contained. Something gets to be true because they use each other for reference and verification. These crazy stories can no longer be debunked because they no longer listen to anything outside their sphere. When challenged, they don't back down, they say, "I heard it somewhere." This is dangerous because some of these people are now in positions of power and basing important decisions on things that aren't true.

I (and others) doubt that media outside the conservative sphere don't spend a lot of time trying to debunk this junk. It could be because there is so much of it, but I wish for more important and dangerous lies they would at least try. This likely contributed to last week's Dem defeats.