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Cross-posted locally.
I tried to avoid writing a blowhardy, why we lost post-election diatribe. But my hand has been forced. By me.
We lost because we suck.
Hey! Wait a second! We don't suck! I don't! My friends don't, and my candidate certainly didn't!
Right. But collectively, we do. We the Democratic Party. We the American political system.
Republicans suck more!
I agree. Unfortunately, they disagree, and there are a lot of them.
Think about the last 10 years. After the closest election in history, the American electorate gave a ringing mandate to George W. Bush in 2002. Two years later, John Kerry came within a football stadium (60,000 votes, in Ohio) of being president. Two years after that, we took the House and the Senate. Then in 2008, we won with a wildly popular candidate and gained some seats in both the House and Senate. Now the House is gone, and we hold the Senate by a smaller margin.
We oppose term limits, but the American people have imposed them. On us. Because we suck.
In Massachusetts, John Walsh pulled an unprecedented miracle. He combined the lists of all 10 Democratic members of Congress, and identified that there were a million Democratic votes available. And boy, did he call it. The results.
Patrick - 1,108,104
Baker - 962,848
Total: 2,070,952
Difference: 145,526
Hurray John Walsh! (Seriously -- hurray John Walsh! And Clare Kelly, and a lot of others.)
ALL that effort, in one of the bluest states in the nation -- in a field of four -- and the margin was essentially 55-45. Great. Wondrous. Miraculous. Sustainable? No.
Barney Frank, Chair of the Banking Committee, one of the most powerful guys in Washington before the election, liberal hero, running against a seemingly affable and presentable young guy (but with no experience) -- 54-43.
Bill Keating, white knight district attorney, famously took on Billy Bulger, running against a candidate who became a national name because of a scandal that was said to "cut across party lines" -- 47-42 (with three other candidates on the ballot). These figures also from Boston.com.
We escaped with our lives from a national wave, but we still lost. Our delegation is less powerful today.
And as impressive as the effort was, I come back to that 1 million vote figure. There are six million people in Massachusetts. We can reasonably assume there are 4 million eligible voters. But only a million votes were available to the overwhelming majority party.
A lot of people are looking to figure out what happened, see what worked and didn't, which messages took hold, which tactics paid off. I am grateful for those people and really appreciate their efforts.
But the rest of us have to focus on what we all know. We lost because we suck.
More later on why we suck, but it comes down to this. We are not focusing on the things people care about. We are not giving them a reason to vote for us instead of Republicans. I am not saying, "It's the economy, stupid" -- far from it -- but, for lack of a better term, we are not focused on the American dream. Not the white picket fence of old -- I want to talk about Detroit, among other things -- but all aspects of it. The rent IS too damn high, and the landlord refuses to paint.
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