The Republican Party has taken back the House of Representatives in a nasty push back against the president’s party.
There is nothing surprising here, when you consider history (the president’s party generally loses seats in a midterm) and the mix of politics (gridlock in Washington), economics (a jobless faux recovery) and culture (race and class bias, generalized fear).
The argument we are likely to hear as the days go forward is that the Democrats must move right and that liberals must trim their sales and lower their expectations. I’m not buying it.
The bulk of yesterday’s losses came from swing districts and featured Blue Dog Dems who generally sided with the GOP on the most important issues.
According to an analysis by The Huffington Post, 23 of the 46 Blue Dogs up for re-election went down on Tuesday. Notable losses included Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-S.D.), the coalition’s co-chair for administration, and Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.), the co-chair for policy. Two members were running for higher office (both lost), three were retiring and three races were still too close to call.
The Blue Dogs, a coalition of moderate to conservative Democrats in the House, have consistently frustrated their more progressive colleagues and activists within the party, especially during the health care debate. Blue Dog members pushed to limit the scope and the cost of the legislation and resisted some of the mandates of the bill. Last summer, seven of the eight Blue Dogs on the House Energy and Commerce Committee even threatened to block health care reform unless it met their cost requirements.
So, from a progressive point of view, there is no real loss here. (More on Russ Feingols later.)
And in real terms, this changes Washington only minimally. Let’s face it, it’s not like the Democrats were pushing real progressive change or had the guts to challenge the GOP’s obstructionism. How a Republican House will shift the balance is beyond me.
But I write this from my perch as an editor of local news, far from the maddening nonsense inside the Beltway. I am not a perfectly coiffed TV personality who must impose a narrative on results to make it conform with my own preconceptions.
There are a handful of things we know for sure:
- The Democrats control the White House and the Senate; the Republicans control the House and a majority of statehouses.
- The polls show significant dissatisfaction with the direction in which the country is moving — on both sides of the political divide.
- And progressives allowed themselves to become dejected, watching as their political messiah failed to be sufficiently messiah-like to remake the political world.
And this last one is key. We have to stop waiting for some white knight to arrive and fix things. We have to take control ourselves, impose a narrative and program that has nothing to do with the accepted wisdom in Washington, that by-passes the liberal elite and the Democratic Party. Waiting for a savior leaves us — and by us I mean everyone, not just lefties or even Americans, but everyone — paralyzed in fear and at the mercy of the folks who control the levers of power.
It was depressing to watch the results roll in, but we cannot allow the depression to paralyze us. The left must get mad and it must get active, must ensure that an alternative set of policies and programs are on the table and that conservatives and corporatists do not have an open field on which to maneuver.
Hank Kalet 