I think it is safe to say that progressives did not cause the loss of a single seat in Congress through the use of primary challenges to incumbents or moderate candidates. But that isn’t stopping some people from whining.
Clearing primaries for members and discouraging liberal groups from spending against incumbents should be a priority for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, [Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA)] said. “It would definitely help, I think. You need to talk to those groups.”
DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (N.Y.) brushed aside concerns about contested primaries limiting his party’s chances.
“I have not had to worry about that yet,” Israel said. “I haven’t had to even contemplate urging people not to run. The net is wide open. And then we’ll make decisions as we go forward.”
It’s possible to screw things up by adopting unrealistic purity tests. We all saw that happen with the Tea Party. But it didn’t happen on our side. We lost almost every single competitive contest in the country, regardless of funding, the quality of the candidate, the campaign strategy, or the quality of the opponent. We lost because our base didn’t turn out and their base did. It’s that simple. Under the circumstances, nothing in the known universe could have saved Blanche Lincoln, or countless other backstabbers. But voting progressive wouldn’t have saved them either. In the last election cycle, the only thing that could have mitigated disaster would have been something that created real fear or real excitement in our base. Individual candidates had no control over that. As for excitement, our opinion leaders were too busy nit-picking to do anything but crush what little excitement that might have existed.
Sometimes, it’s just not your cycle.
In the last election cycle, the only thing that could have mitigated disaster would have been something that created real fear or real excitement in our base.
Or, turning the clock back about 18 months before the election, you could’ve listened to Krugman, Black, DeLong, and Roubini and taken additional action on the economy (i.e. real mortgage relief instead of the HAMP we got, effective action from the Fed, proper use of TARP funds to help the economy instead of giving free cash to the rich, etc. instead of believing in the magic free market fairy) instead of settling for 9.5+% official unemployment for all of 2009 and 2010.
I know, I know. Greatest Progressive President and Best Human Being in the history of the known universe, etc. etc. But if we are to learn from the past we must be honest — and an honest assessment is that the 2010 election debacle was most directly related to the economy, and that in turn was something that could have been mitigated using knowledge available at the time.
The question is, to paraphrase Dubya, “is our Obama learning?” — that is, has he learned anything from his horrible mistake? Apparently not.
You just saved me 5 minutes of my life writing essentially the same comment. Thanks. I owe you one.
I’m sorry. Did I miss the presidential election of 2010? Obama wasn’t on the ballot. Exit polls confirm it wasn’t about him. His rising poll numbers and the immediate rise AFTER the midterms was a HUGE clue that the midterms was not about him.
And for fucks sake. Keep going back 18 months if you want. Keep looking under that desk for George Bush did for WMD’s. Our real problem is in congress. Also check your facts on TARP. Curious that the witch hunt against Geithner has suddenly quieted down to level 1 – hmmmm…..I wonder why.
Duh. Obama wasn’t on the ballot so the mid-terms had nothing to do with him? Right. And the 2006 mid-terms had nothing to do with Bush. Get real.
In both 2006 and 2010 the ruling party was given a sound rejection by the electorate. In 2006 the issues were complex, as the economy was so-so. In 2010 the economy was horrible, so that was by far the dominant issue.
This is basic stuff. To say “Obama was not on the ballot” is to be in extreme denial.
And TARP and HAMP were both administered by … I hope this doesn’t surprise you … the “administration”. That is, the “Obama administration”. In both cases the law gave them wide latitude (unusually so in the case of TARP), and the choices the Obama administration made meant that neither was a help to the general economy.
You’re telling me to check my facts about TARP? You don’t specify — are you referring to the fact it was passed at the end of the Bush administration? I suggest you go back yourself and find out how many hundreds of billions were not spent until Obama was in office.
GreenCaboose, I don’t disagree. I would add a bit more context:
From what I’ve read about last fall’s election results, it seems like most Democratic losses (and by most, I mean at least 75%) can be attributed to the usual voting patterns for midterm elections, and to unemployment.
Not to say Obama couldn’t have done some things better, but even if he had, we’d still likely be looking at a Republican House (albeit by a slimmer margin), or a Democratic House with such a slim majority that the remaining Blue Dogs would have de facto control of most major initiatives.
True, there were a number of things the Senate could, and should, have done in 2009 to address the critical economic problems. Cramdown and a larger stimulus (or the same size, but without the emphasis on tax breaks) both would have helped. I don’t argue the point.
Also, while it has been argued by many, including some in the Senate, that the lack of support from the Obama administration helped doom both of those efforts, I am not sure that they would have passed anyway, so I don’t make that argument.
Instead I focused on what Obama could have done within his control, without additional Senate support.
Regarding normal voting patterns, probably some of that is true. There traditionally are midterm losses for the party in power (but 2002 proved that isn’t always the case) and the voting demographics for midterms favor Republicans.
But consider that the Republican majority in the house is now huge — much larger than it was at any time between 1995-2007. You could say this is unprecedented in modern times, in that since the 1930 election the Republicans haven’t had anything like this except one, very strange, and only lasting one term, election in the mid 1950s. During the 1998 midterms there was general consensus that the GOP were close to being “maxed out” in terms of available seats. Now they have literally dozens more seats than were previously thought possible.
I suspect Citizens United had more to do with this than we realize, and at some point a few years from now (after we’ve had a enough post-CU elections to perform decent statistical analysis) that CU caused a dramatic shift in US politics towards the GOP.
However, despite all that, the fact remains that if you have an official rate of 9.5+% unemployment for the first two years of a President’s term in office you can expect his party to get creamed at the polls in the mid-terms. Period. And, alternatively, if the economy improves dramatically in the first two years the President’s party will do much better than expected.
The other fact which remains is that as early as March and April of 2009 very smart economists were telling the Obama administration that the stimulus was going to fall far short, yet Obama chose to take no further actions to help the economy until it was too late. (And no, I don’t count his photo-op “jobs summit” in early 2010 as an action.)
I find fault with the small stimulus, but I am among the people who argue it’s as large as he could have gotten. Maybe I’m wrong.
However, where I chew the administration out regarding the stimulus is their framing. Rather than telling people the truth, the administration thought it would be better to get the public to think they’re very successful at doing what they do, and therefore what they got was “juuuust right.” It was bullshit, and it discredited liberalism and 80-90% of macroeconomic thought among a large section of the populace.
So rather than pushing the line of “The economy is rebounding,” they should have said, “What I wanted was much larger, but these assholes won’t pass it.”
You do realize what Lynch is saying, right? “Wahhh!! We can’t have those DFH’s holding us accountable. We’d rather sell them out to our corporate paymasters.” That’s what he’s really saying.
yup.
More specifically he’s saying SEIU’s regional political director ran against me last year and got 35% of the vote despite jumping into the race just five months before the primary, and I don’t want to have to spend the next 18 months tending to my district and raising money to fight off another primary challenge.
P.S. With the new census, Massachusetts is losing a congressional seat, so Lynch also has to worry about being forced to run a primary campaign against another incumbent…depending on how the legislature redraws the congressional districts.
Right. Is his district bordering Capuano? Since Capuano might run against Scott Brown next year?
Yeah. Lynch represents the 9th district—basically it’s part of the city of Boston, and a good chunk of the South Shore. It’s bordered on the west and south by the 4th district (Barney Frank), on the east by the 10th district (newly elected Bill Keating), and the north by the 8th district (Capuano), which includes the rest of the city.
I think I’ve seen more than one analysis that shows the base DID turn out in normal numbers. It was the Republican base that came out AND the old people that they scared shitless over cuts in medicare.
A plausible case can be made that having such a long primary process made it possible for enough voters in the U.S. to get comfortable to vote for a “black” candidate for president. Primaries are not the problem. Lynch’s thinking is the problem. Politics is the “substitute” for more violent conflict over policy. Primaries are not coronations they are “combat”. Elections are not inaugurations they are “wars”. His theory if implemented is a prescription for losing the general elections but his thinking is what we have come to expect from D.C. types “District of the Confused” would be the polite euphemism.