Lexington
The Democrats may not merely lose the House in November, but the Senate too. How did it go so wrong?
SOMETIMES in politics stating the obvious can get you into trouble. So it was a fortnight ago when Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama’s spokesman, admitted on a talk show that the Democrats might lose their majority in the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections. This earned him a scolding from House Democrats, many of whom already resent Mr Obama for forcing them to vote for unpopular bills and, as they see it, failing to campaign effectively enough to save their jobs in November. It is therefore safe to bet that Mr Gibbs will not be giving public voice to a new fear now spreading through Democratic hearts, namely that it is not just the lower chamber that is vulnerable in November. The Senate may be “in play” as well.
Only 37 of the Senate’s 100 seats will be up in November. The Democrats are defending a majority of 59 to 41 (though their majority includes two independents), which means that the Republicans need a net gain of ten seats to win control. Until recently this feat was thought to be beyond their reach, and many pollsters continue to think so. RealClearPolitics, a website that publishes an average of multiple polls, is projecting a Republican gain of only six. To gain ten, as the Wall Street Journal argued recently, the Republicans would have to win virtually every competitive seat without losing any of their own.
That is a very tall order. And yet Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, thinks that this could be another of those election years, such as 1980, 1986 and 2006, when most of the close races tip in the same direction and produce a shift of control. It is certainly the case that many once-safe Democratic seats, such as Wisconsin and Washington, are looking vulnerable. The Cook Political Report now judges it possible for the Republicans’ Carly Fiorina, the deep-pocketed former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, to defeat the sitting Democrat, Barbara Boxer, in California. As well as winning the House and Senate, says Mr Galston, the Republicans could hit the trifecta, capturing Mr Obama’s former seat in Illinois, Vice-President Joe Biden’s in Delaware and, in Nevada, unseating Harry Reid, the majority leader.
Since his chastisement Mr Gibbs has insisted stoutly that he expects the Democrats to hold on to both chambers. With more than three months to polling day, there may still be time for the president’s party to confound the doomsayers. But the panic in the party is palpable—along with a mounting sense of injustice.
Its Democratic masters say that the 111th Congress has been bold, busy and effective. Since starting work in the middle of an economic crisis it has authorised $1 trillion or so of stimulus spending, steered GM and Chrysler out of bankruptcy, pushed through health-care reform and overhauled financial regulation. True, unemployment remains stuck above 9%, but haven’t the Democrats just shown their superior compassion by overcoming hard-hearted Republican objections to extending benefits for the jobless? Don’t they have one of the coolest and most articulate of presidents? Why, only yesterday (or so it seems; it was in fact 17 months ago) nearly seven out of ten Americans approved of how Mr Obama did his job. So what have the Democrats done to deserve humiliation in November?
No answer to this question is painless to Democrats. Many explanations blame the fall from grace squarely on their own decisions. Was it a mistake to work so hard on a divisive health bill instead of the economy and, especially, job creation? Did they underestimate how bitter the average Joe would feel at the spectacle of the government bailing out the undeserving banks, and carmakers, and feckless homebuyers who had spent beyond their means? Has Mr Obama positioned himself too far to the left? Could he have done a better job of giving his administration a sense of direction and his countrymen a sense of hope?
What they did, and what they couldn’t do
The one explanation that comes nearest to relieving the Democrats of blame is that they were hoist on George Bush’s petard. The economy drives election results; Mr Bush wrecked the economy; the Democrats succeeded in staving off a depression; but voters will blame them anyway for the recession they could not avert. Not even this theory lets them off the hook altogether, mind: the pugnacious Paul Krugman, fortified by his Nobel prize for economics, has been arguing in the New York Times that Mr Obama’s original sin was his failure to enact a stimulus that matched the scale of the crisis he inherited.
To put the blame entirely on the economy may seem crudely deterministic. But consider the findings of a recent Pew survey on how this recession has changed America 30 months after it started. More than half of all workers have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours or been forced to go part-time. The typical unemployed worker has been jobless for nearly six months. Collapsing share and house prices have destroyed a fifth of the wealth of the average household. Nearly six in ten Americans have cancelled or cut back on holidays. About a fifth say their mortgages are underwater. One in four of those between 18 and 29 have moved back in with parents. Fewer than half of all adults expect their children to have a higher standard of living than theirs, and more than a quarter say it will be lower.
Another way to put this is that for many Americans the great recession has been the sharpest trauma since the second world war, wiping out jobs, wealth and hope itself. That is why fewer than half now think that Mr Obama is doing a good job. He and his party will need to present an astonishingly good argument to talk the electorate out of doing what will come naturally in a mid-term: casting a protest vote against the party in power. They have not yet provided one that is sufficiently persuasive.
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