I’m mad as hell…
It’s Tuesday afternoon on Election Day and although many of us have already gone to the polls across the country, no one knows yet what’s going to happen, what it all means and if the country will be changing direction again. What we do know is that Americans are discontented and unhappy with the direction the country is headed, and once again looking for something different.
If the predictive polls are anywhere near accurate, the Democrats are going to take a terrible drubbing and the House, and maybe even the Senate, is going to shift to the Republicans.
Somewhere along the line, apparently, the Obama administration made some serious miscalculations.
So what happened?
First and foremost, they made the classical mistake that the Democrats are always prone to make, and that is they cannot distinguish between reality and the perception of reality. For example, is the new health care bill good or bad? We probably won’t know the answer to that question for 10 years. By that time they’ll have changed it a dozen different ways and ultimately we’ll end up with something like a basic national health insurance that covers all Americans. We will be about the last industrialized country to adopt a health care program. Most of the Western world already has health insurance; in fact, they’ve had it for years. That may be the reality, but the perception is totally different. “Obamacare” is a dirty word in most campaigns and almost everyone is running against it. If you ask most people what is it in the health care plan that’s got them so upset they couldn’t tell you. Hell, I couldn’t tell you what’s in the bill. But the truth is, politically it doesn’t matter. It’s what people perceive that matters. If people believe the health care bill is bad, they vote against anyone who is behind it. So it was the job of the Obama administration to convince Americans that the health care bill was a good thing. In that, they totally failed.
What they also failed to understand is we are now a three-party country. There are the Democrats and the Republicans who will invariably vote consistently either Democrat or Republican. And now there is the new and growing third party, the Independents, who are in some places called the “declined to state.” Whichever party gets the Independent vote wins. Obama got the Independents in 2008 and he’s losing them in 2010. The Independents tend to be somewhat fickle. Typically, they don’t pay much attention until the end of the campaign, so almost all of those commercials on TV or mailers overflowing your mailbox are directed to capturing those Independents. What we do know is that the economy is in the doldrums, improving but still lagging, unemployment is still high and doesn’t appear to be improving much, and as you would expect, most Independents are now trending Republican. Perhaps Obama has done as well as anyone could, given the circumstances, but it really doesn’t matter. If the Independents don’t feel better-and they don’t-they’re going to vote Republican.
But, most of all, what the Obama administration never seemed to understand was the depth of the anger we all feel. Every single person who I know has been devastated by this recession. Our house values are down by at least a third. Everyone has a son or a daughter, or son-in-law or relation, who has seen his or her job disappear and are now out of work. Every one of us is less optimistic about the future, and deep in our souls we all fear that America has peaked and that we are on a downhill slide, which we suspect may be irreversible. What’s made us so angry is not just the change in our fortunes, but also the widely held belief that it’s been caused by the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citibank and AIG; worse yet-they’re getting away with it. We’ve all paid the price and they’re off home free.
The breaking point for me was when the SEC decided to settle its case against Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide for a fine of $72 million. Compared to what he’s done the fine was chicken feed, a pyrrhic victory by the government. Yet there was the government pompously declaring a victory for the people in what appeared to me to be a total capitulation. I found myself enraged. I want to see this guy go to trial. No deals, just go to trial. Suddenly there are no federal grand juries. I want to see the principals in Goldman Sachs hauled before a federal grand jury and grilled relentlessly. I want to see the bad guys indicted, tried and convicted. I want their lives to be turned into the living hell that they’ve brought down on the rest of us. I want my pound of flesh. I know it’s small of me, but no one likes to be scammed. Make no mistake about it, these characters have scammed all Americans. Until the Obama administration understands that, they’re going to continue to find they have some very unhappy voters on their hands and you can expect to see a great deal more Republican victories.