Thoughts on the election [Bryan]

Some people have asked for my thoughts on the election, so I guess I will bore you with some post-election analysis. I don't have too much to say. The majority always loses a lot of seats in the midterm after a presidential election, especially under a weak economy -- happened to Reagan in 1982, Clinton in 1994, etc. This explains 90% of what happened on Tuesday. Still, there were many odd things about election day. Ohio voters, for example, supposedly furious, just furious, about "bailouts" and the economy, elected Rob Portman, who was the chief architect of the Bush economy, and John Kasich, who was a big shot Wall Street banker over at Lehman Brothers, to U.S. Senator and Ohio Governor, respectively. U.S. voters, supposedly furious about the deficit and tax increases, took it out on Democrats even though Democrats have both cut taxes to record lows and also cut the deficit since Bush's final year (down to $1.29 trillion from Bush's $1.4 trillion). Weird.

Surprisingly, though, I would say I feel actually kind of proud to be a Democrat this week -- prouder than I usually feel. The reason is this: Democrats had to make a lot of tough calls and cast tough votes over the past two years. They voted on health care, economic recovery, credit card regulation, spending cuts to Medicare, and so forth, votes that are easily vilified by powerful interests groups and that are based on long-term policy impact over short-term political calculation. When a party has control over Washington, you can see what the party actually cares about, and I think the Democrats come out looking pretty good. The Republicans used their power, when they had it, to give the wealthy tax cuts, to cut regulation for corporations, and to start stupid wars. The Democrats used it to try to give health care to children with preexisting conditions, to help women get equal pay for equal work, to revive the American auto industry, to take care of veterans, and so forth. Rachel Maddow sums it up well:

Democrats had a choice when they became the governing party. When they won those last two elections and they took control of the two branches of government that are subject to partisan control in our country, they could have governed in a way that was about accumulating political capital with the primary goal of winning the next election. They could have governed in constant campaign mode. Or they could have governed in a way that was about using their political capital, not accumulating more of it, about spending the political capital they had to get a legislative agenda done, to tackle big, complex, longstanding problems that had languished.

The record of legislative achievement of the last 21 months was not designed to win the midterm elections and it will not win the midterm elections. The pendulum will swing back toward the Republicans and we'll go back to divided government again. The legislative agenda of the last 21 months was policy, not politics. It was designed to get stuff done for the country. And in that sense, it's an investment in long-term political reward, not short-term political reward, as Democrats expect after a list of accomplishments like this to be judged as the party that took on problems when it had the chance, even if they had to pay a short-term political price....The fact is, that Democrats got a lot done, a lot of hard stuff done on hard problems in a short amount of time.

If you have the time, you should watch Maddow's full set of comments here: