Black Tuesday

No surprise that the Democrats got their collective ass kicked last Tuesday. It’s damn hard to win a midterm election when the small percentage of the electorate that bothers to vote has no idea what you stand for. Most Democrats ran away from President Obama, with predictable results. The Party’s big strategic thinkers will now misread the outcome and determine that the only way to be competitive with the GOP is to slide further to the right, which is why voters have no idea who Democrats are in the first place.

Democrats are simply lousy storytellers. They cannot frame issues the way Republicans can, and therefore, time and again the Democrats fail to move voters. Republicans talk about “freedom” and “security” and “personal responsibility,” and all manner of “morning in America,” Ronald Reagan claptrap, and voters in red states lap it up like starving kittens.

Of course, millions of dollars in dark campaign money from the likes of the Koch brothers doesn’t hurt.

I expected the Democrats to take a beating. Stand for nothing and you will lose everything. And now? Well, we face two long years of a Republican-controlled congress. The corporate toadies and flat out nutcases in that diseased body will dump their wish list on the steps of the capitol and dance around like drunken sailors on an extended shore leave. The Keystone XL pipeline and Trans Pacific Partnership, tax cuts for corporations, attacks on the Affordable Care Act and Social Security, more privatization of essential services, total disregard for the threats posed by climate change – the panoply of Republican wet dreams. It’s going to be ugly and amusing at the same time.

If Obama had a spine he could at least dictate the agenda for the next two years, but when push comes to shove, Obama will support the GOP wish list as if it were of his own creation.

Bipartisanship usually means somebody’s getting sold out.  

My country has become cold and callous, mean-spirited and stupid. We criminalize the poor, herd our citizens of color into for-profit prisons, abandon inner city kids to a lifetime of dead-end jobs, turn working people into minimum wage slaves, burden college students with debt, and begrudge senior citizens a dignified retirement.

Black Tuesday, brought to you by the Democratic Party.