Election
results are influenced by so many factors that interpretation is
always necessary, often contentious, and mostly unprovable. While
truth might be elusive, opinions most certainly are not. This is a
fortunate circumstance for those who opine for a living, and for
those conversationalists and bloggers who opine for a hobby, both of
whom can be disbelieved, but neither of whom can be disproved. Or,
to put it another way, competing for cleverness in interpreting
elections can yield profits for some and lots of fun for others.
Thus it
is with some humility but little fear of disproval that I offer my
simplification as explanation for the November 2014 election. I
believe that the Democrats lost the election more than a year prior
to the actual voting, specifically on October 1, 2013 and the ensuing
week, when the Obamacare .gov website failed. We can't even say
“crashed,” because it didn't get that far. Instead, it just
pathetically sputtered in anguish for weeks, and thus confirmed the
public's worst fears about government and about Democrats – which
is, that for all the reliance that Democrats put onto government, it
just doesn't work.
It was
the Republican mantra – largely and shamefully unopposed by the
Obama Administration and Democrats in general – that Obamacare
wouldn't work, that it was poorly designed, but also that government
itself just can't be relied on. So here was the test – rollout!
Places, Action, Camera! If it worked the way it should have, the
Democrats would have been able to trot around the track in splendid
victory, and their abdication of verbal defense would have been
excused by the actual demonstration of competence. There would still
have been the publicized failures in individual cases (many false),
but they would have fallen by the wayside as cascading numbers of
signups rolled in. Glory and Triumph!
Instead,
the failure was ignominious. Instead, the Democrats were covered
with the excrement excreted by website. There were were promises,
there were mutterings, there were statements, there were reports that
Obama was “really pissed off.” But mostly we awaited the advent
of the A-team and the 60 day fix, wondering why the A-team hadn't
been there from the start. It was pathetic.
But
actually, even then, with the lurid failure that was the rollout,
Obama still could have saved the day. If he was as reported “livid”
in private, he could have shown it in public and acted on it. Maybe
he didn't want drama because it cuts across the grain of his
personality; maybe through the years he has learned not to be an
Angry Black Man. But whatever it was that inhibited his rising up to
the occasion, it's a shame. If he had declared his lividity
publicly; if he had fired Kathleen Sibelius by the end of the
week; if he had taken the occasion to declare (as I urged at the
time in these pages) that governmental cyber-incompetence was
intolerable, and that the site would be up and functioning in 60 days
no matter what!, and that he
was launching a multiyear effort to make the government
cyber-competent beyond all suspicion, and that he was asking Silicon
Valley to help him in this the way that industry geared up for the
World War II, albeit on a more limited scale – if he had raised the
stakes that way, he could have triumphed in the end, and maybe even
gotten his approval rating up over 50% by election time. I think it
would have worked.
And
actually, if he had done that, Sibelius could have come out OK. She
could have announced her resignation, saying that it happened on her
watch and “mistakes were made,” implying “not by me,” and
that she was falling on her sword the way a good commander should.
She would have been defended and showered with praise for taking the
consequences the way a leader should, and she would not have been the
dead meat she is now. She would have “taken responsibility.”
Obama would have been “tough.” The government would be seen not
to have failed, but to have learned and moved forward, and Obama
would have made lemonade out of a lemon.
That's
what they should have done. But they couldn't do it. Obama is a
cool personality, self-protective and cautious, and truthfully, he
lacks the necessary decades of experience to be able to pull it off.
And Sibelius is just that good little Catholic schoolgirl who also
can't rise up and connect and draw us in. So even though the website
actually got fixed, and even though Sibelius actually left in a few
months, the damage was done. They were fried, and the Democrats up
in 2014 were fried along with them.
Damage
happened because suspicions were confirmed. Doubts were sown by the
super-aggressive Republicans, and government, truthfully, has failed
all too often in recent years. Democrats depend on defending
governmental action, and Republicans depend on attacking it as
incompetent, and thus call for downsizing rather than strengthening.
This background made the dramatic narrative of incompetence
believable.
There
are other features of the election to note. It seems ironic to me
that many of the Republicans who won on Tuesday were businessmen,
who, like Mitt Romney, trade on their reputations for being able to
“do things.” On the one hand, they say that government can't
work, but on the other hand they say that they can make it work. But
to the extent that the election shows anything beyond turnout of the
elderly white and non-turnout of youth and minorities, it is a
rejection of the Democrats, who aside from the key failure of
Obamacare.gov, ran such poor campaigns, just as they had not spoken
up for several years now, even fatuously not stating that they had
voted for Obama, or featuring how they could and would oppose Obama
policies. Sorry, folks, you can't do that if you're in his party.
You all have to hang together and sell the policies and push back at
the banalities of the opposition. You were politically quite stupid.
Stand up, be smart, be counted, and ooze empathy, and you will win
your fair share. Retreat, and you will be enjoying private life.
Lesson perhaps learned, let's hope.
So,
that's my thesis. My hope is for a Democratic regrouping and
rethinking not so much of policies, but of public stances. You just
have to be forthright and sometimes dramatic. You have to show
emotion and determination, and you have to be 'splainer-in-chief
yourselves. Nobody is going to give it to you. Chickens do come
home to roost.
Budd
Shenkin
