Yes, reality is on their side. In a big way. It should be a "killer app" level of an advantage that sweeps away the competition, if they can just figure out how to use it!
What it boils down to, is (surprise!) most of the things Republicans, and now teabaggers say just aren't true!
For instance:
"The stimulus bill was a waste of 700 billion dollars. The unemployment rate has gone up since the President took office. He said that it wouldn't go above 8 percent, and now it's 10, er, 9.7 percent."
Let's review the numbers:
Long before Obama was even elected, job losses were increasing rapidly. The stimulus bill was signed into law on February 13, 2009. Within 2 months, the job picture rapidly began to get better. The increase in the unemployment rate is due to the sum of all of the job losses that started increasing early in 2008. The reason it is nearly 10% instead of the 8% maximum that was projected is that the rate of job losses was much greater at the end of Bush's presidency and the beginning of Obama's than was realized at the time. All of the data was not in yet, exactly as Obama explained in his answer to Mike Pence at the Republican Representatives' retreat in Baltimore recently. If it were not for the stimulus, I would have to believe that the big negative bars would have continued to march on all through 2010, and we'd be that much closer to reaching the 25% unemployment rate of the Great Depression. And on top of that, we would be looking at much bigger deficits as government tax revenue completely collapsed.
The Republicans also try to blame the job losses on the Democratic Congress in place during 2007-2008. But the Democratic Congress could not pass any of their policies while Bush was still President. He vetoed them. And Democrats were still in charge of Congress - with much greater margins, after January 2009! According to the brain-dead Republican explanation, things should have gotten much worse. But instead in early 2009 the Democrats did pass a stimulus bill, that almost every Republican in Congress opposed, and the job picture started improving nearly immediately! Now you can argue that it didn't improve enough, but the US economy is a like a massive, complicated aircraft carrier that cannot just turn on a dime. You can't expect these bars to change from negative to positive immediately, no matter how much you gun the engines. And what would the GOP have done? They would have just cut taxes more. This is what we were doing when Bush was President, and all it lead to was massive job losses. The graph doesn't lie. It was Democrats who singlehandedly turned things around. And if we continue with the President's leadership, positive job growth will start to bring unemployment down.
How about another example? Even some Democrats seem to have been bamboozled into believing that the Massachusetts vote was a vote against health care reform. But many voters in Massachusetts say that this was not an issue for them because they already have that reform, and a large majority want to keep it! Yes, many selfishly and shortsightedly said that they didn't want to have to pay for it for the rest of the country (forget the fact that they never would have been asked to do so). And Scott Brown says that every state should decide for itself. This is exactly 100% wrong. And the reason is, that as Massachusetts is finding out, that you cannot control costs by reforming health care in only a few states. It has to be done throughout the country. The proof is that every other Western economy has already reformed their health care, and every single one of these countries has much lower costs than us, at the same time that many have longer life expectancies and much lower infant mortality. If we had the same cost per capita as the average European country, we would be paying less now for health care in total than we are now, even with everyone covered!
And a final, crowning example of the Republicans' break from reality:
Last night, at the Tea Party Convention, Sarah Palin called the President of the United States a
"charismatic guy with a teleprompter". (Note of caution: I could not find a transcript of the speech, so I don't know if these were her exact words). This is the same President that recently answered unscripted (unlike Palin's last night) questions from the entire Republican delegation of the House of Representatives. And not only did he not have a teleprompter, but despite the fact that these were "gotcha" questions (like Pence's referred to above, where he plaintively asked for more massive tax cuts for the rich in the name of "little David Carter Jr. and his dad"), he answered them clearly, demonstrating far greater knowledge on the issues, with far greater accuracy, than was displayed by all of them put together. He answered multi-part, pre-scripted, complicated questions, and answered all the parts of every question, in order, without missing a single one! It was the exact opposit of the Republicans' timeworn "discussion" by talking points!
And now Palin, completely ignoring the reality of what happened that day, has the unmitigated audacity to call Obama a charismatic guy with a teleprompter! It's just icing on the cake that she happened to somehow need the following most basic of prompts written on her palm ("Energy, Budget Tax Cuts, Lift America's Spirits"), which she clearly looked down at:
What is important about this little episode? How does it connect to the other points I've made previously? The link between all of them is the demonstration of how Republicans will say anything, even if what they say has been clearly and completely demonstrated to have no connection with reality. And they will repeat such things over and over again, until they become real. They make audacious claims - the more unbelievable the better. During the Bush years, they decided that they could do this. What freedom it is to be able to say anything you want! It is such a hassle to be have to tied down to actual facts! But what used to happen is that after a while, people would stop believing you, and just think you were a bunch of clueless idiots. What has changed in the last few years though is that inexplicably the mainstream media have begun repeating all of these reality-free claims, giving them equal time with far more accurate ones, in the name of "balance". The least they could do is ask questions that could instantly cause these fabrications to self-destruct, but no, they can't even be troubled to do that! The only explanation is that their corporate bosses indeed do have these supposedly intrepid "journalists" on very tight leashes. What other one could there possibly be? The latest example is the huge amount of coverage that 600 very confused people in Nashville have gotten at the Tea Party Convention. How is any of it in the least bit newsworthy?
As has been said many times, we willingly divorce ourselves from reality at our peril. The 2000's decade already made clear the danger of believing fantasies, as both the Iraq War and the economic collapse abundantly demonstrated. The Democrats have reality on their side. This somehow has to be made clear above the disingenuous chatter that in the MSM incredibly passes for news.