Glum

For a while there I was relieved that Democrats had lost the House, relieved in that way you were relieved when your father finally got home after being threatened all day with, "Just wait 'til your father gets home." After a while there's no more dread, just an eagerness to get it over with.

But today I am glum because, as Kevin Drum points out here, it wasn't just the economy, stupid. The wretched economy probably cost Democrats 40-some seats, but they lost 60-some. So to some extent this election was a repudiation of Democratic policies. And this makes me sad because the policies were basically sound.

Nobody liked TARP; it wasn't even Obama's creation; it was President Bush's idea, but if Bush hadn't done it, global capitalism would have ground to a halt. Maybe in a few centuries people will have no more stake in keeping capitalism alive than we do keeping in feudalism alive, but we aren't there yet. Meanwhile, we're blaming the wrong guy for prescribing the right medicine for a serious, acute illness.

And then there's health care reform. The GOP didn't have the votes to stop it, but it looks like they had the moxie to demonize it. It's been said before, but it bears repeating: the bill the President signed was basically Mitt Romney's version of health care reform, the GOP alternative to HillaryCare in 1994, and yet the Republicans threw their own policy under the bus just to have something to run against. The cynicism is breathtaking, and you know what? It worked!

I know; I know; I sound like I'm shocked that there's gambling in Casablanca. Politics is a sordid business full of venal people. Being a student of history, I should not be surprised. LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, and southerners have been punishing Democrats ever since.

I am sure that one day the outcry over being forced to buy health insurance will sound as petty as the outcry over being forced to serve all comers in one's business establishment. I just wish that good politics and good public policy aligned better, that public servants didn't have to wait for history to vindicate them. Maybe then we'd have better public servants.

P.S. Drum's chart does show that the Democrats were bound to lose the House anyway, simply on the weakness of the economy. So given the choice between doing nothing and losing, and doing something and losing, they chose the latter, and that was certainly the right choice. Evan Bayh is full of it.

Comments

[Ben trawick]

Well said, Marvin.

[TJ]

I'd like to think - as you do - that the need to purchase health coverage will be as petty of a conversation as that of serving all customers in a business. Except, if I recall correctly from my news junkie web-surfing, a few months ago tea party favorite Rand Paul (now 'Senator-Elect' Rand Paul) mentioned that he personally felt that, like healthcare, Civil Rights had overstepped government's bounds and that business owners should have the right to serve (and not serve) whomever they want and for whatever reason.

Someday, hopefully health coverage will be merely a petty argument. But unfortunately, petty views such as Rand Paul's make me think that we haven't even made it completely there in the area of Civil Rights.