“Democrats ‘get clobbered’ in midterms, whines Obama,” Jim Treacher writes:
The economy stinks, Obamacare is a disaster, Putin’s smirking at us while he does whatever he wants… and the most powerful man in the free world is mewling like a fussy baby. Why is everybody so mean?
President Obama complained Thursday that Democrats “get clobbered” in midterm elections, blaming a “toxic” atmosphere in Washington for suppressing key Democratic constituencies.
“The challenge is that our politics in Washington have become so toxic that people just lose faith,” Obama told a group of top Democratic donors gathered at the home of former Miami Heat star Alonzo Mourning. “They say, ‘Y’know what, it doesn’t matter, I’m not that interested, I’m not gonna vote.’ And that’s especially true during the midterms…”
“…In midterms, we get clobbered, either because we don’t think it’s important or because we get so discouraged about what’s happening in Washington that we think it’s not worth our while.”
Ahh, return with us now to the 2006 midterms, in which Rahm Emanuel, then chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, assembled what Kevin McCullough of Townhall dubbed Nancy Pelosi’s Crash Test Dummies. As McCullough wrote immediately after the 2006 midterms, when Republicans lost both the House and Senate:
Nancy Pelosi will bring San Fran values to the Beltway debate, and Kennedy, Kerry, and Clinton will clamor to be first in line.
But how did she get there? In many instances – by taking advantage of terrible Republicans – and their own criminal wrong doing. But the main strategy was to convince a needed one-fourth of the electorate that the Democrat option on the ballot was not much different than the Republican option. Winning enough of the seats to take control of both houses, Pelosi is free to assign every committee chairmanship in the House, as is Reid in the Senate – to the most disgusting and vile liberal creatures imaginable.
The strategy was so sound it was as though they had taken the ideas right out of my book: MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking or at the very least from the scrap notes of Karl Rove.
Look at how the candidates described themselves: “pro-marriage”, “pro-life”, “pro-gun”, “born-again Christian”, “pro-business”, “anti-tax,” and in one case “former member of the Reagan administration.”
And understand this clearly, it wasn’t important that any of them demonstrate these beliefs – merely campaign on them. And in doing so,they campaigned only enough to make the point that in pulling the lever for them – the “common sense” voter wouldn’t lose on certain, and vitally important “values” issues.
They invoked Jesus, God, the Bible, marriage, and faith in decibel and volume that would have earned Soros-sized scorn, and Kos-site mockery — were the party to actually let them demonstrate any of it.
But in doing so, they tricked the masses into believing that their positions on such matters would stand as strong as the true-believers that some of them displaced.
That last sentence was particularly prophetic, as Pelosi’s Crash Test Dummies paved the way for both Obama’s governing majority in 2009 and 2010, when Obama had control over both houses of Congress, and most significantly, for Obamacare to be passed in 2010 on a hardline one party vote. Pelosi’s Crash Test Dummies were then slaughtered in the 2010 midterms after their deceptive “moderate” stance was proven to be uniformly false.
Because leftwing criticism is reserved solely for tactics and tone, never for the underlying strategy, immediately after the 2010 midterms, as MSNBC talking head Richard Wolffe wrote in the Daily Beast, Team Obama blamed Rahm for their defeat:
As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rahm Emanuel built a Democratic majority in the House. As President Obama’s chief of staff, he devised White House strategy toward Capitol Hill. So when the Democrats were going down in flames Tuesday night, where was Obama’s chief political architect? Half a continent away, campaigning for himself.
Half a continent away, campaigning for himself in the most pro-Obama place on the planet, largely sheltered from the Republican rubble crashing down on his party all across the country.
And his old colleagues in Washington aren’t too happy about it. Some of them shake their heads in disbelief that Emanuel would bolt at precisely the juncture when the Democrats needed to shape their strategy and message during the homestretch of what everyone knew would be the toughest election cycle in years.
“It was Rahm who always said, ‘We’ve just got to put points on the board,’ and that’s why we have a transactional presidency,” said one former colleague. “The only problem is that Obama is not a transactional politician. It was Rahm’s strategy and then he leaves a month before the election for his own personal political career. It’s extraordinary.”
There’s only so many times you can lie to the American people before they catch on — and Rahm and Pelosi’s Crash Test Dummies did just that in 2006 — both to centrist voters, and even to the Democrat hard left base.
Yesterday’s statement from Mr. Obama is yet another curious ahistorical gaffe from the man once touted by his backers in the media as the smartest in politics — maybe in the history of the universe, ever, — akin to his earlier brain fart in 2011 that “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, you know, for historic reasons,” which would certainly be news to Lyndon Johnson, John Connally, and Ann Richards.
But then, one reason why Texas has gone red is that, as Democrats have moved progressively (pardon the pun) further and further to the left — both in tone and in tactics — achieving traction in a state is rather difficult when voters know, as Moe Lane has written about how effete coastal Democrats loathe Texas, that you despise them as bitter clingers.
In any case, as Treacher concludes, “It’s only March, and the Dems are already panicking about November. Good.”
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