This diary was written by John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation. He wrote it for our Daily Kos GOTV blogathon but he is currently on the road and asked that we post for him.
It is probably true that we all suffer from a bit of "most-important-election-of-our-lifetime" fatigue.
They can't ALL be the most important.
And why would this one matter more, say, than 2008, when a president who was supposed to transform our politics was elected?
Here's a notion...
Presidents are only as powerful as their first round of mid-terms.
Franklin Roosevelt promised America a New Deal following his landslide win of 1932, but he only began to deliver fundamental change after Democrats and third-party progressives swept the mid-term elections of 1934. That's when Wall Street realized that they weren't going to be able to prevent that New Deal. The next year, we got Social Security and the Wagner Act.
Ronald Reagan was going to transform America after his landslide win of 1980, but his Republican Party lost a lot of ground in the mid-term elections of 1982. Social welfare programs that Reagan wanted to downsize or eliminate survived in battered but functional form.
Bill Clinton was going to give us national health care and end the culture wars after he defeated President George H.W. Bush in 1992. Then came Newt Gingrich's "Republican Revolution" of 1994 and we got punitive welfare reform and the Defense of Marriage Act, as well as a Telecommunications Act that ushered in a new era of right-wing talk radio.
George W. Bush only became president in 2000 with the help of the Supreme Court his dad helped pick. But in 2002, Republicans swept House and Senate races and there was no stopping the rush to war in Iraq and unprecedented abuses of power at home.
I've been a reasonably consistent critic of the compromises and missteps of the Obama presidency. I wanted single-payer health care, real banking reform and an end to the occupation of Afghanistan -- for a start.
But I can tell you this: The first two years of the Obama era will be a fond memory for progressives if Democrats lose the House. They will look like a golden age if Democrats lose the House and Senate. (And don't even get me started on what is at stake in elections that will decide whether progressives like Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold and Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva remain in Congress.)
Whatever promise Obama brought with him to Washington in January, 2009, will be dashed or realized based on the Congress that arrives in January, 2011. That's not a political appeal, an endorsement or a threat. That's a practical political reality -- based on the historical record of the American presidency.
Mid-terms matter.
And this mid-term matters more -- as it will tell us whether the hopes and dreams, the promise and the promises of 2008 were real.
For that reason, above all others, voting is not an option. It is an essential step on the American journey, as what we do November 2 will define the Obama presidency -- and the nation -- in every bit as meaningful a way as did the mid-terms elections of 1934, 1982, 1994 and 2002.