Democrat Congressional Chairman: We'd Win If Not for Ebola and ISIS!

And they’d have pulled off the insanely complicated caper if not for those meddling kids…

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Rep. Steve Israel laments the intrusion of issues that require actual leadership into the mid-term elections, stomping all over the Democrats’ hopes to convince America to go back to sleep.

In a perfect world, Democrats would love to the 2014 midterm elections to be all about the economy.

But in 2014, the world has been far from perfect. And Democrats say it’s hard to grab the public’s attention and focus it on a slowly improving economy with crises popping up at home and abroad.

“August was Ebola. It was ISIS. It was Ukraine,” Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told a small group of reporters Monday morning.  “Global issues dominated. And in September, those issues continued to dominate. And so, part of the headwind was it did make it a little more difficult for us to break through on those middle-class economic contrasts when people were so focused on global issues.”

Just out of the frame, a man stood by playing a dirge on the world’s smallest violin.

The Republicans pounced quickly.

You think you’ve heard it all and then the chairman of the DCCC goes and blames Democrats’ electoral fortunes on Ebola. It’s time for Democrats to look in the mirror and realize they’re losing because President Obama’s unpopular policies are ‘on the ballot’ this fall,” said Matt Gorman, Republican House campaign spokesman.

And why is Obama unpopular? In part because as his own former Defense Secretary now recognizes, President Obama failed to secure the peace in Iraq, and he drew a “red line” on Syrian chemical weapons without any plan to enforce it, eroding American credibility and creating the vacuum from which ISIS rose. And in part because Obama is a divisive figure and the Democrats have followed him in intentionally creating divisions that they incorrectly thought would benefit them at the ballot box.