Hi, I know it's been a while but life moves pretty fast you know.
There are some predictions that need to be made for next year's elections. The short version: It will be 1994 all over again, different reasons on the surface but underneath pretty much the same story.
Here's why, you can already see from lots of message boards and blog comment sections that many people in the Progressive movement are angry and feel like they've been had. The extensive movement of like-minded Liberals on the internet is a major difference between then and now but has it had any affect on the administration? No. I remember the first time I heard Kevin Phillips claim (in the book Bad Money) that the Democrats are now the party of wall street, he had extensive evidence to back it up that I won't go into now. And this is how the party is seen by the public, who also see the leadership as prioritizing wall street over regular people's jobs. This is correct and very unfortunate, also that mistakes that the administration has made were almost all very avoidable.
The link below is a polling analysis of economic conditions from the end of September (gosh, I've neglected this blog, I first started drafting it at the beginning of November), it shows why the average American is upset about the future. They don't care that the rump republican party is obstructing every proposal on principle, that the administration was handed the worst state of affairs since possibly before FDR took office, or that beyond just the administration party the business community is doing everything it can to prevent upsetting the beautiful economic arrangements they have crafted. People perceive the government as more interested in saving the economy for predatory corporations, bailing out the criminals that sank the economy in the first place and spending far too much money on those priorities while neglecting them. And, they are largely correct.
http://epi.3cdn.net/4fc2e76fd3593d283f_qtm6bx19l.pdf
I can't say I told you so, because I only started this blog recently and have been more concerned with being a good husband, father and student to pay enough attention. But matters affect me and people I care about as well, if we give up on politics we give up on democracy and let the bad guys win without a fight. Right now, things seem even more hopeless to me than they did before because under the bush tyranny, it was expected that everything would be as horrible as possible but now with a complete reversal of government control Liberals like myself had hoped that there would be at least some "change we can believe in" but those hopes have been dashed. The health care bill is looking worse and worse all the time, Democrats look either weak or completely bought by the corporatocracy all while movement conservatives wait in the wings doing whatever damage they can. The tea-baggers are dispicable, but their handlers are completely shameless in misdirecting popular mass anger in counterproductive ways.
So, putting it down in writing, I predict the worst kind of republicans to use popular anger to retake the house just like they did in 1994 and render the Obama administration impotent as the Clinton administration was, playing defense and just trying to head off the worst of conservative bloodlust.
