Confused Priorities and a Tin Ear

There are a couple of reasons that the Democrats are likely to lose big next year - confused priorities and a tin ear.

Obama and the Democratic leadership have their priorities and these do not match the public's priorities. All recent polls put jobs and the economy at the top of the list. They want to know that their government is working hard to put things right. They are also concerned about the war in Afghanistan.

What do they get? Six months of constant talk about health care with cap and trade next on the list. The Obama administration rushed through a stimulus package, bank bailouts, and auto maker bankruptcies in order to clear the decks for its real priorities. Troops were rushed to Afghanistan early in Obama's term and a request for more troops submitted in September is still waiting for a decision. The latest report is that Obama rejected the four options given him and asked for new ones.

The fact that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are all ignoring the public shows an incredible, collective tin ear. It gets worse.

The White House has released figures about jobs created or saved due to the stimulus. I doubt that the public is buying into this. Unemployment is at a 25-year high. Even the major news organizations have found major holes in the official figures. In one instance, stimulus money went for raises. The White House maintained that this counted as multiple partial saved jobs.

Obama's supporters say that he saved the world's economy and averted a second Great Depression. Maybe. Most of the saving that he did was followup from policies begun in the last couple of months of the Bush administration. Regardless, Obama was also responsible for creating the over-used Wall Street/Main Street meme. For much of the year, the Obama administration has been seen as propping up Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. Firms that were too big to fail have grown larger.

Liberals have been outraged by bonuses and pay packages that still approach the GDP of small countries. Conservatives are shocked by the way that the administration has taken over entire industries. without input by Congress or the Courts, the White House was suddenly running GM, installing its own CEO and decreeing which divisions would continue and which would close down.

The deficit is an example of both a tin ear and broken promises. In both 2006 and 2008 the Democrats pitched themselves as the party of fiscal restraint. They pointed out that we were running a surplus during the Clinton years which went back into a deficit in the Bush years. "Put us in charge again," they said, "And we will return to fiscal responsibility."

This was an outright lie. Even before Obama's inauguration, Pelosi announced the suspension of "Paygo" (rules that required all new expenditures to be funded through new taxes or cuts elsewhere). While economists like Paul Krugman argue that deficits are good in a recession, the top Democrats refuse to discuss the issue.

The Tea Parties have been fueled largely by a sense of betrayal at the Democrats' spending. Rather than addressing this, they are dismissed with a derogatory term referring to oral sex.

History is against the Democrats to begin with. Presidents with long coattails usually lose party members in the mid-term elections. They could try to minimize this by paying attention to the polls. Instead they have convinced themselves that the only reason that Clinton lost Congress was because he failed to pass health care. They are clinging to health care as their 2010 salvation, ignoring the fact that at least half the country thinks that this bill will make things worse rather than better.

Parties that ignore their constituents always end up regretting it.