Voters elected exactly what they didn't want

by: Lucy Edwards

Sun Nov 14, 2010 at 09:52:16 AM EST

In a number of states the electorate chose the kind of people they said they didn't want running their government. Really makes you wonder, doesn't it?

If you listen to what a lot of voters say they want this year, especially in conservative states like Indiana where a huge chunk of the population identifies as Tea Partiers, it's candidates who are ready to break with the past, question long-held assumptions, relate to the concerns of regular people, and can bring a fresh perspective to the entrenched insiders in Congress.
And with that in mind, Hoosiers, by a 15-point margin, elected an old, wealthy Washington insider, who left Indiana more than a decade ago, and who's spent several years as a corporate lobbyist. Indeed, Coats intends to go to the Senate and vote on issues he handled as a lobbyist, and has no intention of recusing himself when his former clients will be affected by his votes.

I am hearing a lot of arguments about whether our message is wrong or we can't get it out. I suspect we need to find out what people think they know about our political system and the folks who inhabit it. Our message might be OK, although I suspect it is not at all, and we just can't get it across because we have no vehicles to do so. Or we might need to fix both.

I can tell you in my little corner there has been a long term accepted "wisdom" that Democrats shouldn't really talk about what they believe we need and why. I tried a bit to push the limits, and so did my fellow state rep candidates, but I doubt that anyone was really paying attention to what I said. The battle lines had been drawn somewhere else.

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