Yeah.
We lost.
Everywhere, it seems.
The results of the drubbing (and I don't really know another word for it) we took last night are finally settling in with me. I didn't watch Rachel or anyone else, reruns of the Big Bang Theory were more entertaining. I had to laugh, because tears were the only other option and I wasn't wasting any on the folks who ran last night.
There will be endless analysis of the beating. Let me save you some time. We sucked.
Candidates everywhere ran away from the President like he had "Ebola" stamped on his Kenyan Birth Certificate. A man whose campaign ran one of the most successful reelection campaigns in modern times was pushed aside by Democrats who were too chickenshit to embrace him. It happened everywhere.
I have some measure of wonderment about the vaunted "Obama For America" data bases, and voter turn-out mechanisms...were they offered by Obama to the Democrats and if they were, were they used effectively? Anecdotal evidence says, NO! But then what do I know. I just voted.
Here in NC, we had an awful Blue-Dog (but she was our Blue-Dog) Democrat in Kay Hagan against a truly awful Koch-sponsored TeaBagger named Thom Tillis. Tillis has managed to gut the state treasury and transferred most of it to Art Pope and his cronies, while also killing education, allowing Fracking and generally being a pain in the ass. Now he gets to do that in DC, probably for Life since he's from NC.
Hagan ran away from Obama like he was a bad one-night stand, as did Allison Grimes in Kentucky. Clay Aiken, whose first dip into the waters of politics against a woman who voted to shut down the government (Rene Ellmers) and then had the cojones to say she needed that government salary to live on (and her hubby is a doctor, surgeon if memory serves) lost in a district that's not exactly wealthy in NC. Gerrymandering didn't help Aiken, but he shot himself in the foot by not embracing or even reaching out to the White House because Kenya, ObamaCare and OMG he's a black guy.
A lot of my friends are posting today that they're fed up with the North Carolina Democratic Party. I suspect that's not a unique sentiment among NC Dems this morning. I'm not sure if the NCDP people need to go or the NCDP just go away as an institution...it doesn't appear they can win elections at all. I don't know how other state parties stack up, but the NCDP has to be among the worst. Check out "Patsy Keever's letter" to see the voter-shaming correspondence she sent out to Democratic Voters. I think it was written by a five-year old.
Oh, and in Maine, one of my favorite places in the US, nice job with the vanity candidate sending Paul LePage back to the Governor's Mansion. People, there are two major parties in elections in this country. We're not a coalition government. Ralph Nader must be so proud of that guy in Maine for standing up for his principles and allowing LePage back into the Governorship. So Effing Proud. You want to love the Greens or any left-leaning third party? Fine. Just remember that every vote for them is a republican vote in a tight election. Because that's the reality of our political system. You may hate it, rage against it, deny it, but at the end of the day we have to live with it.
Other races similarly showed that the republicans made the race about Obama and not ideas. Joni Ernst in Iowa, a hateful Dominionist xenophobe won the seat occupied by a long-time champion of the middle-class, Tom Harkin. She campaigned against Obama, refused to talk to the local media and spent her Koch Dollars well to secure her Life-time sinecure. Iowa. She's now become a telegenic king-maker for the media, starting with Fox and ending with Press the Meat (maybe she'll take over McCain's spot as know-nothing of the decade). Think about that. She will be all over the talk shows with her winning smile and racist crap and know-nothing talking points for years to come. But she was smart enough to campaign against Obama, so what else did she need?
Wendy Davis started strong, and ended up in a wheelchair. Seriously. We knew she was a long shot, but she had a shot until that. Another self-inflicted wound. I could go on, but you all can read the press clippings like anyone else, you know the damage done.
Now the media will parrot the message of the deficit hawks, war mongers, and everyone else who was a "winner" last night. Endlessly. They will make noise about Obama's "obstructionism" and his "unwillingness" to work "across the aisle" during every 24 hour news cycle until 2016. They want Access and they want Access to the winners not the losers. They will carry the message of the winners, not the whiners. Endlessly 24x7x365 and we have no message. Last night proved it.
I'm glad I watched The Big Bang Theory last night. It was the last few moments of laughter until 2016. We have to do better. We have to find better candidates. We have to run on our values, not the media's ideas of what our values should be.
We can't run Hillary either. If you thought last night was a disaster, HRC 2016 will be the ugliest night in American Political History. And we don't need any American Dynasties in our party. Hillary won't call out the republicans, she's too concerned with offending anyone. She won't say what needs to be said, she'll use politician words that have two meanings, neither of them good or definitive; it's what she does.
The elephant in the room now occupies a Chamber. We need a strategy, a messenger not afraid to call out those who would ruin our country, and we need to GOTV in 2016. Then maybe I won't have to watch reruns of comedies instead of Rachel.