Sunday, November 9, 2014

Unsolitcited Advice For The President And His Party

President Obama's post-election news conference was a relief, after last week's disastrous election.  And, I have to admit, I wasn't expecting that.  Especially in the run-up to it, before he appeared at the podium, with reporters debating amongst themselves how far the President would go to offer terms of surrender.  Would he crawl in on his hands and needs?  Would he offer up a singed copy of the ACA on a silver platter?  You get the idea.

And, while there were a few moments of platitudes about cooperation, which is about all the similar GOP platitudes deserve, I was, for the most part, pleasantly surprised.

He didn't back off on his willingness to take executive action, especially with regard to immigration reform.  He didn't offer an apology for any of his accomplishments to date.  And he rebuffed the attempts of a reporter (from Fox, of course) to goad him into surrendering the last two years of his presidency to Congressional Republicans.

As Politico reported, there was no Clinton-style "pivot" designed to make Republicans or their supporters happy.  And that's exactly the right thing to do, after an election where two-thirds of the voters stayed home, and most of those people are your supporters.  And props to Obama for acknowledging that fact.

Like many of you, I have long been frustrated with the president's seemingly bottomless desire to start out on his knees in facing his opponents, and work his way down from there.  I'm taking the post-election news conference as a sign that those days are over.

They should be.  For him, and his party.  This is the essence of my advice to Obama and the Democrats:  break out of the "bipartisan" urge to surrender, and acknowledge what you are:  liberals.  Especially after an election in which liberalism won

Here are a few reasons why:

This election was not an anomaly.  It was the sixth year of a Democratic Presidency with a large number of red states in play.  There's nothing unusual when the party out of the White House loses seats after six years in power.  It happened in 1966, in 1974, in 1986 and in 2006.  Only the media, with its vested interest in being seen or read, says otherwise.  And it's high time for Democrats to stop worrying about whether the media likes them or not.  They don't.  So get over it, and get on with it.

You can win in a tough electoral environment for your party, if you don't apologize for who you are.  Going into this election, Republicans moved heaven and earth to make the Michigan Senate race a potential pick-up opportunity for them.  It didn't happen, because Gary Peters refused to run away from Obama.  Of course, it also helped that his opponent proved to have a talent for wackiness.  But so did other Senate Republican candidates, and they won.  Peters' willingness to stand up for his president and his party's values made the difference.  When 2016 rolls around, Democrats, and their patrons and voters, should look for more candidates like him.  Which leads me to this:

The 2016 electorate will not look like the 2014 version.  It will be bigger.  And younger.  The Republican base is essentially a dying base, that will diminish with each successive election.  President Obama and his allies in Congress need to remember that.  I expect that the president will remember that; I'm not so sure about his allies.  But I hope that I'm wrong.

The GOP controls Congress, but not the issues.  They spent the entire election running away from the issues.  Climate change is perhaps the biggest example; in fact, climate change cost them an election in this cycle, in deep-red Nebraska.  And it's not the only issue that going to haunt them over the next two years; with the expiration of the PATRIOT Act, the Republicans (to say nothing of the Democrats) will have to weigh the public's concerns about privacy in deciding whether or not to renew it, and to make changes in it.  This is one huge area where Obama and Democrats can take the lead, and recapture the loyalty of younger voters.  Students loans represent another.  As for the ACA, Republicans should be careful what they wish for; in its present form, the law has the potential to help people in states they control.  How far do they want to go in disrupting that potential?

It's no wonder that The National Review is telling the GOP not to govern.  The GOP has the election results.  Not the issues, not the majority of the people, and not the future.  Just a short-term election win in the long-haul struggles to make the greatest nation on earth even better.

Obama and the Democrats should not lose sight of any of this.  And neither should you, because ...

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