The Morning After The 2010 Election

Some initial observations:

Democrats Should Not Understate the Scale of the Defeat - While there was some good news for Democrats last night, this was a very bad night for Democrats and for center-left politics.  The swing in the House was the largest since 1938.  Young talented Democrats across the country lost, while dozens of new Republicans were given a shot at making it in politics.  The GOP made great strides in adapting to the new battlefield of 21st century politics, showing tremendous progress in using modern tech and media tools and using the new campaign legal landscape to their advantage.   The Republicans became more diverse last night, adding promintent Hispanics, Indian-Americans and African-Americans to their ranks.  And perhaps most importantly, the GOP gained the upper hand in the upcoming redistricting process, something that will lock in the temporal results of this election in Congress and in many state legislative houses for a decade. 

From a political standpoint, the Republicans and conservatives, so recently on their back, are a revived and much more powerful adversary than any Democrat would have imagined just a few months ago. 

The Lack of a Coherent Democratic Argument - As I look back at the last two years what is perhaps most remarkable to me was the inability for the Democrats to mount any kind of coherent argument in the closing months of the campaign.  They neither defended what they did nor layed out a case for what they were going to do.  Nor did they effectively mount a critique of the Republican argument which was, and remains, incoherent, immature and economically illiterate.  Perhaps the Republicans showed this election that you can beat something with nothing.  

The decision to essentially close the election with an attack on the Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove and mysterious donors legally funnelling money into Republican politics - rather than engaging frontally in the economic debate - is one the political team of the Obama Administration will be explaining and defending for the rest of their political careers.

The Continued Struggle of Everyday People is Driving the Extraordinary Volatility in American Politics Today -In the spring of 2005 Rob Shapiro and I observed that if the years of flat income and wage growth the American middle class had experienced in the first half of that decade continued we should expect a great volatiliy to enter American politics, and remain until wages and incomes started to climb again.  I think we saw that play out in 2006 and 2008.  Shortly after President Obama's historic victory, we observed again that if the Democrats did not get wages or incomes up and people back to work - or at the very least convince the public that they had a plan to do so that had a reasonable chance of succeeding - that they too could suffer the fate of the Republicans in the proceeding two elections.

We have now had three consecutive elections where the establishment has taken a beating (including in this cycle Republicans who lost to Tea Partiers in contested primaries).  If the economy continues to struggle these next two years we should expect this level of volatility to remain in our body politic. 

The Republican Party, While Politically Renewed, Is An Ideological Mess - The Republicans won the elections last night on an economic argument that has already been proven not to work, and that is built upon a promise they simply cannot keep.  This assertion deserves more justification than I will be able to mount this morning, but 2 quick points -

- In the 1990s we raised taxes on the wealthiest Americans and saw an historic economic boom, huge gains in median income for every day people, and deficits transformed into surpluses.  In the last decade we cut taxes on wealthy people and saw our deficits explode, spending increase, the middle class stall out and go into decline, which in turn dramatically contributed to our current economic troubles.   Based on our own experience as a nation over the last twenty years it is impossible to conclude that cutting taxes for wealthy people brings prosperity and growth.   Tricke down just hasn't worked as advertised.

- The core of the new Republican argument is that they will reign reduce the deficit by reigning in spending and keeping taxes low.  However, as we have argued in these pages again and again, not a single Republican who ran for federal office this year can actually produce a plan to reduce the deficit even by a penny over the next ten years.  If they keep the large tax cuts there simply isnt enough spending to cut to make up the difference.  I'm not exactly sure how the more radical small government folks in their coalition are going to come to accept that the Republicans have no intention, no plan and no capacity to reduce the decifit in the coming years but that is going to be one of the great early flashpoints in the next Congress.

It is Going To Be Just As Important for the President to Stand His Ground As to Find Common Ground - There is a strong argument to be made that the greatest mistake of the Obama Presidency was the concessions made to the Republicans to get to the stimulus through in 2009, which reduced the effectiveness of the stimulus while not garnering any Republican votes.  To accomodate Republican wishes the Administration made the stimulus smaller than most economists felt it needed to be, and made a third of the package tax cuts which few argued would actually stimulate anything. To a great degree the failure of the stimulus to provide the level of stimulus the economy needed came about through concessions to the right which neither worked economically or politically.

The lesson of the stimulus battle is that the President should make concessions to the Republicans when their ideas are constructive and will make things better in America.  He has no obligation to accept bad ideas just because they are Republican ideas.  And given what an ideological mess the Republican Party is right now, how immature and incoherent they are, there is going to be an awful of bad stuff coming at the Administration very quickly - which for the good of the nation must be rejected.

As the President prepares for 2011, he needs to reconnect a bit with the spirit of Truman as much as the spirit of FDR.  

What Happened to the 21 Century Democratic Coalition? More on that soon.

Update - And if you didnt see it yesterday check out this essay about the emerging electorate.