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Obama is no mensch! Narcissists can never be! (See 1 and 1a below.)
Obama's "thumpin." (See 1b below.)
As I noted in a previous memo, I have had little to "gloat" about in a political sense 'oer the last 6 years. What the recent election results reveal , to me, is a final recognition, among a broad spectrum of voters, that extreme and radical liberalism remains anathema.
Voters eventually realized, albeit late, what many understood all along. We are a nation of conservative centrists common sensers! Why? Because logic works while most progressive "bleeding heart" concepts have not.
This does not mean conservatives are heartless, though their rhetoric often seems otherwise. They are just not willing to sink their teeth into the emotional message but would rather think about the problem, do a little masticating before coming up with a more sensible and less 'mushy gushy' solution. Their problem is when their solutions also become lobbyist pay-offs.
When it comes to the immigration issue the press and media nerds know they will sell more papers and attract more listeners if they elevate the issue emotionally and there are always 'bleeders' to support and further the cause.
Now Republicans must recognize they must be careful to have achieved the victories they wished for because they must make progress against a recalcitrant, stubborn ideologue of a president who has dug his heels in and is inwardly inflamed by the 'thumpin' loss he, and those around him, are unwilling to recognize.
So far, I like the words from Boehner and McConnell. Obama cannot say he has not been warned he is playing with fire if he continues down his lonesome road.
Being 'pig headed' is out of character for a man with so much Muslim influence and persuasion.
Obama is no mensch! Narcissists can never be! (See 1 and 1a below.)
Obama's "thumpin." (See 1b below.)
As I noted in a previous memo, I have had little to "gloat" about in a political sense 'oer the last 6 years. What the recent election results reveal , to me, is a final recognition, among a broad spectrum of voters, that extreme and radical liberalism remains anathema.
Voters eventually realized, albeit late, what many understood all along. We are a nation of conservative centrists common sensers! Why? Because logic works while most progressive "bleeding heart" concepts have not.
This does not mean conservatives are heartless, though their rhetoric often seems otherwise. They are just not willing to sink their teeth into the emotional message but would rather think about the problem, do a little masticating before coming up with a more sensible and less 'mushy gushy' solution. Their problem is when their solutions also become lobbyist pay-offs.
When it comes to the immigration issue the press and media nerds know they will sell more papers and attract more listeners if they elevate the issue emotionally and there are always 'bleeders' to support and further the cause.
Now Republicans must recognize they must be careful to have achieved the victories they wished for because they must make progress against a recalcitrant, stubborn ideologue of a president who has dug his heels in and is inwardly inflamed by the 'thumpin' loss he, and those around him, are unwilling to recognize.
So far, I like the words from Boehner and McConnell. Obama cannot say he has not been warned he is playing with fire if he continues down his lonesome road.
Being 'pig headed' is out of character for a man with so much Muslim influence and persuasion.
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Republicans are sending in their "A" Team against Obama's "JV" Team (See 2 below.)
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Being green cloud in the sky and narrow minded educators lose big time! (See 3 below.)
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THE ISRAEL YOU NEVER SEE
Meanwhile, Abbas' has been encouraging terrorists to attack and kill Israelis.
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Obmacare was a lie all the time. (See 5 below.)
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Mitch may not be charismatic ut he is a very clever politician and strategist. (See 6 below.)
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Mitch may not be charismatic ut he is a very clever politician and strategist. (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1) Now That He Has Lost the Senate, It’s Time for Obama To Seal His Deal With the Devil
By boasting of enabling Iran’s bloody nuclear hopes, the Obama administration ushers in the age of Renfield and Dracula
By Lee Smith
Being president of the United States is often described as the most powerful job in the world not because the president can remake America with the stroke of a pen (he can’t), or because the United States is the most powerful nation in the world (although that helps), but because of the unrivaled power it gives the executive to chart America’s course in the world. At home, the president may not be able to do much about the roads, taxes, or even delivering the mail. Abroad, he can start and stop wars, make enemies into friends (and vice versa), and otherwise determine the tone and often the direction of the entire planet—or at least that part of the planet that responds to American economic, diplomatic, and military cues. Which is one good reason why that even presidents who come to office proclaiming their disinterest in foreign policy—like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—often wind up their second terms in office focused on the one policy area they can actually control.
With the Senate falling into Republican hands, then, the Obama Administration will naturally turn more of its attention to foreign policy. So, what’s on tap? The first and easiest prediction that any number of pundits have made is that the administration will circumvent Congress and push through a permanent agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons program when the deadline comes up Nov. 24.
Any deal with Iran, the administration seems to believe now, is better than no deal at all. In fact, as we learned last week, the administration has already helped Iran get across the nuclear finish line—and they’re bragging about it. Lost in all the noise about an unnamed Obama Administration official telling journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is a chickenshit ,” for example, was the even newsworthier comment of another unnamed official who crowed that it is now too late for Israel to stop the Islamic Republic from getting a nuclear weapon—thanks to the White House’s own deliberate campaign of deception.
The White House fooled Netanyahu into believing it was serious about the military option, the Obama aide said. And now, he continued, the Israeli prime minister has no options left besides to whine and complain. “Two, three years ago, this was a possibility,” he explained to Goldberg. What sidelined the Israeli leader, the official continued, “was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”
The president has long insisted that his policy was not to contain or deter a nuclearized Iran, but to prevent the clerical regime from acquiring the bomb. According to the administration official quoted by Goldberg, this posture was simply a lie. Now Israel is going to have to learn to live with an Iranian nuclear bomb because, as Obama sees it, it’s in the American interest.
And there’s more. The reason that the White House wants Iran to have a bomb is that it’s the quickest route to what it really wants—which is a larger regional accommodation with Tehran. As Obama has explained, Iran is a rational actor that pursues its interests. If you fight the Islamic Republic, it’ll just make it angrier and more dangerous, so it’s best to try to get on its good side. A world where the United States and Iran are friends and allies will be a safer, more peaceful place. Or so Obama and his advisers seem to believe.
Another way to understand the upcoming new era in U.S.-Iran relations is as the age of Renfield. As horror fans will recall, Renfield is a character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He’s not a real vampire, but a madman whose appetites—for vermin and the proximity to power—are fed by the master whose evil he enables. Renfield, observes Dr. Seward, the asylum’s supervisor, “has certain qualities very largely developed, selfishness, secrecy, and purpose.” In the age of Renfield, people align themselves with darkness because it has the appearance of strength. In an era of robust American leadership, administration officials tasked to speak to the press praise allies and curse adversaries openly; when they criticize friends, it’s done in private and without invective. In the age of Renfield, faceless parasites hurl insults at allies from the shadows.
In the age of Renfield, what America’s regional partners most fear about the Islamic Republic is what makes it most appealing to the White House. Yes, Iran is an expansionist power that threatens total war against its neighbors. But that just means Tehran is an ideal regional enforcer. Saudi Arabia can barely manage its own citizens—who go off to wage jihad in Syria—never mind control hundreds of millions of Sunni Arabs in other countries. And Israel commands the loyalty of only 6 million Jews. In contrast, Iran now asserts de facto control of four Arab capitals—in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. For Obama, a president who believes he was elected to get the United States out of the Middle East, it’s a no-brainer—the Iranians can get things done in the region precisely because they are so vicious. As Renfield says of the count, “he began promising me things, not in words but by doing them.”
As for Bibi, he got outmaneuvered like an earnest but comically stiff hero in a B-film remake whose girlfriend is busy making out with Dracula. Bibi got played by a whole team of Renfields who vouched for Obama’s baseline bona fides regarding Israeli security—from policymakers like Rahm Emanuel and Robert Wexler to former ambassadors to Israel like Daniel Kurtzer and Martin Indyk . Now that the cat is out of the bag, you’d think some of them might take offense that their personal honor was compromised by a White House that boasts about having helped an American adversary and deterred a longtime U.S. ally. You’d think some of them might be annoyed that they gave their word that Obama has Israel’s back—now that it turns out that Obama was bluffing and deliberately stringing the Israelis along. But no one’s making too big a deal out of Obama playing Renfield to the Islamic Republic’s regional Dracula because he made everyone who vouched for him into an enabler, too. Washington is full of Renfields.
Accordingly, the next logical move for those who said Obama would strike to protect Israel is to rationalize that his not striking was actually in Israel’s best interests: All Obama did was to take away the keys to the F-15s. Had Netanyahu taken matters into his own hands, an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would’ve unleashed a wave of terror against Israeli and Jewish sites around the world. Moreover, it would’ve enraged the European powers that will soon be investing billions in Iran’s petroleum and automobile sectors.
The Europeans aren’t the only ones who’ll be gorging on table scraps—the nuclear agreement means there will be enough for all the Renfields of the world to feed. For Obama there’s a likely trip to Tehran to celebrate his historic achievement—reconciliation with the Islamic Republic after 35 unnecessary and costly years of enmity. For diplomats and policymakers there will be exciting meetings with their exotic Iranian counterparts. It was all a big misunderstanding, and now the old wounds—the toppling of Mossadeq, the takeover of the U.S. embassy—will be healed . Who in the end, besides the maniacs, is truly opposed to the benefits of peace?
There have always been Renfields, those who see darkness as strength. The academics and journalists who idealized the Soviet Union even after Stalin’s crimes were made public. The racists and anti-Semites whose hatred and fear is sublimated into collecting Nazi or Klan paraphernalia. The Hezbollah and Hamas groupies who flock to Beirut and Gaza to absorb the dark charisma of the resistance. The Islamic Republic always had its own Renfields, too, from Michel Foucault, who reveled in the orgiastic violence of the revolution, to former American policymakers like Flynt Leverett, whose case for the regime was never about its ostensible moderation but rather about his yen for its particular brand of violence.
What’s new is that an entire foreign policy establishment, led by the White House, has embraced the charms of the enabler. Bureaucrats who order the rape, torture, and murder of Iranian dissidents, the mid-level IRGC officials who manage the regime’s terrorist operations abroad, relations with Hezbollah and Hamas—they’re ready for their moment in the spotlight. Hey, did you see the Diane Sawyer piece on what Qassem Suleimani’s got on his iPad? Soon, an invitation to dine at Javad Zarif’s Tehran villa will become the hottest ticket in the foreign service: the tastiest, tenderest lamb shank, and the dill rice is to die for!
In honor of the new age of American policy in the Middle East, I propose a toast to Renfield—whose talents are selfishness and secrecy—the man of the moment. Raise your glasses high, gentlemen. Just don’t ask what’s in the glass.
***
Lee Smith is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is also the author of the recently published The Consequences of Syria.
At yesterday’s post-midterm elections news conference President Obama was also asked about the nuclear negotiations with Iran. His reply was consistent with the rhetoric he has been using about this subject since he first was running for president in 2008. He told the country his goal was to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and that no deal with Tehran was better than a bad deal. As with most everything else he has said on the subject during his presidency, this is an exemplary statement of what America’s policy should be. The only problem is that his actions flatly contradict this pronouncement. While that fact was already no secret, today’s revelations about the president carrying on a correspondence with Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei further undermines his narrative about being tough with the Islamist regime.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama wrote to the Iranian leader in the context of the campaign against ISIS in Iraq, a common enemy of both the U.S. and the Islamist regime. The content of the letters as reported by the Journal is not as much a concern as the fact that the administration has kept its key allies in the Middle East, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates out of the loop on the correspondence much as it did last year when the U.S. conducted secret talks with Tehran in order to facilitate the interim nuclear accord signed last November. President Obama apparently is far more interested in ingratiating himself with Khamenei than with Israel.
This news casts a shadow over the president’s assurances given in his press conference yesterday about Iran. The president said that the U.S. would learn whether a deal could be obtained with Iran sometime in the “next several weeks.” But what Iran has already learned about U.S. policy in the last two years is that the best thing they have going for them in the talks is that the president’s obsession with creating a new détente with the regime always outweighs his supposed commitment to stopping them. Though he boasted of how tough he has been on them—taking credit for economic sanctions that he opposed tooth and nail prior to their adoption—the record of the past six years is quite different. The president jettisoned America’s considerable economic and military leverage over Iran last year when he agreed to tacitly recognize Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium and allowed them to keep their nuclear infrastructure.
In the follow-up talks conducted this year, which have predictably gone into overtime far past the original timeline and may well extend beyond the new November 24 deadline, he has offered even more concessions, including absurd proposals about disconnecting the pipes that link the centrifuges spinning the nuclear fuel. He continues to buy into the lie that Iran seeks nuclear power for its “peaceful energy needs”—a joke considering its oil reserves—and seems more interested in reintegrating the brutal, anti-Semitic regime back into the international economy than in halting their support of terrorism or forcing them to stop building missiles that couldn’t threaten the West as well as Israel and moderate Arabs.
The president has continued to frame opponents of his weak diplomacy as seeking war, a point he alluded to in his remarks. But the real alternative to Obama’s campaign of appeasement was the tougher sanctions proposed by a bipartisan congressional coalition that he expended considerable political capital to defeat last year.
The problem isn’t whether the Iranians will sign a deal either before November 24 or after it. It is, rather, why the U.S. has abandoned the stance the president enunciated in his 2012 foreign-policy debate with Mitt Romney when he said any agreement must result in the end of Iran’s nuclear program. Last year’s interim agreement ensured that its nuclear program would survive. If the leaks coming out of the current talks are right, there’s little doubt that the sanctions will be lifted (by Obama simply ordering them not to be enforced rather than by congressional vote as required by law) in exchange for measures that will do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear threshold state. But, as he did last year, the president will claim victory and count on his press cheerleaders to back up his assertions that critics are warmongers.
As troubling as the letters to Khamenei may be, it is Obama’s diplomatic initiative that is the real threat to America’s Middle East allies as well as to the long-term security interests of the West. What those worried about this threat need are not more hollow promises from the president but transparency about an appeasement strategy.
1b) A Message Sent to a Grudging President
After a thumpin’, Obama doubles down on hostility, antagonism and distance.
By PEGGY NOONAN
The drubbin’, thumpin’, poundin’ was a two-part wave, a significant Republican rise in the U.S. Senate and a Democratic collapse in the governorships.
It was one of those nights neither party ever forgets.
Republicans won not only because of a favorable map. In solid Democratic states, they won big or came close. Nor were the results due only to low midterm turnout. Nate Cohn, in the New York Times , noted that turnout in Colorado was up over 2010, yet Republican Cory Gardner beat incumbent Sen. Mark Udall with room to spare. The sheer number of blowouts was mind-boggling. Sen. Mitch McConnell was supposed to win in Kentucky, but not by 15 points. In Arkansas the Republican challenger, Tom Cotton, beat Democratic incumbent, Sen. Mark Pryor, by 17 points. In Georgia, where the Senate race was assumed to be close, the Republican won by eight. Republican Pat Roberts, left for dead in Kansas months ago, won by 10.
Among the governors, Republican John Kasich won re-election in swing-state Ohio by an astounding 31 points. In South Carolina, incumbent Nikki Haley beat her Democratic challenger by 15 points. In solid-blue Illinois, the Republican challenger, Bruce Rauner, turned out the incumbent by five points; in solid-Democratic Maryland, the Republican candidate for governor won by a solid five. Scott Walker, perpetually under siege in Wisconsin, the focus of public-employee-union ferocity and targeted nationally by Democrats who needed to knock him off, also won by five.
It was not in the least a charisma election, a sweeping expression of support for a character or personality or movement. It was a message election. Sweeps like this come down to policy and governance. America on Tuesday told one party no, you’re not doing it right, we don’t like what we’re seeing, and your preoccupations (birth control, “War on Women”) are not our priorities.
The president said he was not on the ballot but his policies were. Those policies were resoundingly repudiated.
***
But that is only one of the amazing things that happened this week. The second is how the president responded.
A sweep this size tends to resolve some things. The landscape shifts, political figures accommodate themselves to it.
Common sense says a chastened president would acknowledge the obvious—some things aren’t working, he has made some mistakes—and, in Mr. Obama’s case, hit the reset button with Congress. Reach out, be humble. Humility has power. It shows people that you have some give—you get the message, you are capable of self-correcting.
That is not what he’s doing. The president is instead doubling down on hostility, antagonism and distance.
What a mistake. What a huge, historic mistake, not only for him but also for his party.
In his news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Obama was grim and grudging, barely bothering to hide suppressed anger. “Republicans had a good night.” He was unwilling to explain or characterize what happened. “I’ll leave it to all of you and the professional pundits to pick through yesterday’s results.” He took no personal responsibility: The people sent a message and it is that Washington must work “as hard as they do.” He was unwilling to say what went wrong, why his party’s candidates didn’t want him near them on the trail. His answers were long, filibuster-y, meant to run out the clock. It was clear the White House wanted to say he met with reporters for more than an hour. He did. At one point he tried to smile but couldn’t quite pull it off; it came across as a Nixon-like flexing of the rictus muscles. (I tried to describe it in my notes. “Hatey” was the best I could do.)
There were airy generalities—“This town doesn’t work well”—and a few humblebrags: “I have a unique responsibility to try and make this town work”; “I’m the guy who’s elected by everybody.”
Most seriously and consequentially—the huge mistake—is that Mr. Obama said he will address immigration through executive action unless Congress sends a comprehensive bill to him that he finds attractive. He said this just after a news conference in which the presumed next Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, in a post-election statement that was actually conciliatory and constructive, said any such move by the president would “poison the well” with Congress. It would be experienced by Republicans on the Hill as pure aggression.
The president’s use of broad executive action would kill any chance of compromise or progress with Congress. And the amazing thing is that this isn’t even in his interests.
What is in his interests is for him to go forward in a spirit of compromise and try to reach agreements on the Hill through negotiations. This would be a relief after six years of nonstop acrimony. Republicans need an end of acrimony too: They want to show that they’re not just shutdown artists, as their foes say, but that they are a governing party in whose hands the country is safe. After a few bills were passed, people would start to feel that they were seeing progress. This would help the president get a new sentence defining him. The current sentence is something like, “Wow, that didn’t work, he really had the wrong skill sets.” Two years of governing peace might get him, “He had a dynamic first two years, lost the thread, was re-elected, then there was a lot of mess but he stabilized and got serious.” That’s not a bad sentence.
It is confounding—not surprising but stunning, unhelpful and ill-judged—that the president is instead going for antagonism, combat and fruitless friction.
This is not just poor strategy, it seems to me to be mildly delusional. Chris Matthews erupted on MSNBC: “There’s something in this guy that just plays to his constituency and acts like there’s no other world out there!”
That’s true. And deeply strange in a politician. It’s as if he doesn’t think he has to work with others, he only has to be right. I think Mr. Obama sees himself as a centrist because he often resists the pressures of the leftward-most edge of his base. Therefore in his imagination he is in the middle, the center. If he is in the middle of a great centrist nation, how can they turn on him? The answer: They are confused. This is their flaw, not his. He’s not going to let their logical flaws change his game.
And so the future may well be nonstop combat between the Hill and the White House. If the president does a big executive action, the Republican Congress will no longer think negotiations and deals are possible. They will over the coming years send him legislation that they can pass with the support of their majorities and moderate Democrats. If he vetoes, they will try to override.
The Republicans will be set up as the party passing bills that go in certain directions on certain issues, and those bills will no doubt be generally popular, or popular with the Republican base. If the bills are vetoed and can’t be overridden, Republicans will say they are frustrated by that willful loner—that obstructionist—in the White House.
That will probably set up the GOP pretty well for 2016. It will keep the party’s activists in a constant state of agitated alert.
Once again the president is doing his party no favors.
This is no way to run a railroad. The president here is doing what he has been doing for a while, helping Republicans look good. That is an amazing strategy for a Democratic president to adopt.
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2) The Senate’s Talent Infusion
The Senate is about to change in ways that go far beyond GOP control. Voters aren’t just sending a bumper crop of Republicans to Washington in January; they are sending an A-Team.
This doesn’t give credit to voters, who on Tuesday elected one of the more solid and reformist freshman Senate classes in decades. Conservatives have been overhauling the GOP for years—replacing an older, lazier, spend-happy generation with Republicans who have run on policy change and principle. The tea-party wave sent 87 new Republicans to the House in 2010, churning over more than a third of the GOP caucus.
The pace has been slower in the Senate, though it too has seen a steady growth in reformers: Marco Rubio , Ron Johnson , Pat Toomey, Jeff Flake, Kelly Ayotte , Mike Lee,Rand Paul , Ted Cruz . Up to now, their influence has been largely internal—putting the older guard on notice and helping shift the Senate Republican caucus mostly in smarter directions. Harry Reid ’s Senate lockdown hasn’t allowed for much more. But that’s about to change, as Republicans take the Senate reins, and as the reformers’ ranks swell with Tuesday’s victors.
Add Iowa’s incoming senator, Joni Ernst, who served in Iraq and Kuwait, and who made her opponent’s votes to defund the Iraq war a prominent part of her campaign. In Alaska, Dan Sullivan, who looks to win that Senate race, ran on his military service and his time working on foreign policy for Condi Rice in the White House. The voices of these younger veterans are going to resonate in any coming debate over the president’s cuts to the Pentagon budget. Expect, too, an interesting new dynamic vis-à-vis the Rand Paul wing of the GOP.
On domestic issues, nowhere are Republicans better offensively positioned than on energy. Colorado’s new senator, Cory Gardner, won in part by pummeling his opponent on fracking and Keystone, and by highlighting energy legislation he’d authored in the House. Mr. Sullivan, the former head of Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources, can and will talk all day about pipelines, drilling on more federal land, and energy regulations. Montana’s Steve Daines made a name for himself in the House with aggressive oversight of the EPA.
Washington is poised for a major battle over corporate or broader tax reform. Joining the fight will be Georgia’s new Senate voice, David Perdue, a successful businessman who made tax reform central to his campaign. Mr. Daines is a former businessman who loves the subject and helped rally opposition in the House to Internet taxation. North Carolina’s new senator, Thom Tillis, another businessman, has spent four years as speaker of the North Carolina House, where he shepherded a tax-code overhaul and budget reforms. These new senators are also likely to have prominent roles in upcoming budget and spending debates.
Nebraska’s Ben Sasse cruised to a Senate victory by 34 points, and he ran on a fully articulated plan for replacing ObamaCare. He wasn’t shy either about calling for entitlement reform, welfare reform, immigration reform and electoral reform—and to explain his detailed policy thoughts on each of those topics. Expect to see him everywhere.
This new Republican bunch isn’t like the 2010-style firebrands; they are, for the most part, principled yet pragmatic. Think of them as the latest iteration of a grass-roots movement that has grown wiser about Washington realities. The voters deliberately chose these personalities over more radical conservative voices in GOP primaries. Most of the senators-elect come to Washington with real mandates, having been elected in their home states with notable majorities.
A more dynamic Senate caucus meantime has the potential to lay the groundwork for, and give backing to, a reformist 2016 presidential candidate. Voters like to complain that Washington is too full of headline-seekers, empty suits and soulless political types. True. And voters on Tuesday did something about it; they elected some men and women of substance.
“The Republicans successfully made it a referendum on the president,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said on Wednesday, by way of explaining the union’s thumping. “In the few places where you had issues like education and you had a good candidate who could get through the torrent of negative ads, we were able to win.”
Kudos to Ms. Weingarten for her optimism and ironic humor in the wake of defeat. Reformers like Republican Govs. Rick Snyder in Michigan, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Nathan Deal in Georgia and Sam Brownback in Kansas did cut through a torrent of negative union ads and prevailed.
Teachers unions this election provided an object lesson in how to lie with statistics by lambasting school reformers across the country for “cutting” education spending. According to one ad, Mr. Brownback signed the “largest single cut to education in Kansas history.” Florida Gov. Rick Scott stood accused of taking a $1.3 billion sledgehammer to schools, and Mr. Snyder of slashing $1 billion from education.
Yet in Kansas, total per pupil spending has increased to $12,960 from $12,283 since Mr. Brownback was elected in 2010, despite a $412 per pupil decline in federal aid. Mr. Snyder has increased education spending by $660 per student over his four-year tenure, while Mr. Scott has increased annual state funding for schools by 20%—nearly $2 billion—over the past four years.
The teachers unions also whacked Mr. Scott for expanding private-school scholarships for low-income kids, eliminating tenure, and linking pay to performance for new teachers. “Florida’s private-school voucher programs are a risky experiment that gambles taxpayers’ money and children’s lives,” Florida Education Association vice president Joanne McCall warned in a local newspaper op-ed. “Voucher schools are largely unregulated.”
So far as we know, there have been no reports in Florida of death-by-voucher. In fact, scholarship recipients in Florida have posted academic gains equal to their public-school counterparts despite coming from more disadvantaged backgrounds. Mr. Scott’s challenger, Democrat Charlie Crist , in a previous life as the state’s Republican governor vigorously promoted vouchers; he quietly walked back his support during the campaign.
Scott Walker also got whipsawed for expanding vouchers and reforming public-worker collective bargaining, which Wisconsin Education Association Council President Betsy Kippers claimed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was really “aimed at tearing down the strongest advocates for public education: teachers.” Meantime, the union chief groused that the governor was “slipping tens of millions of dollars to those bent on privatizing education, along with handouts to businesses and the wealthy.”
Last year, thousands of teachers stormed the barricades in Raleigh, N.C., to protest legislation that Thom Tillis had quarterbacked in the state House reforming tenure and creating a modest voucher program. Sen. Kay Hagan —whom he unseated on Tuesday—this fall also ran ads charging Mr. Tillis with phantom education cuts: “The fact is: Thom Tillis hurts North Carolina students.” Voters clearly didn’t agree.
Unions unsuccessfully sought to erect a firewall in Illinois, where Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn faced a formidable challenge from Bruce Rauner, a Republican businessman. Mr. Rauner has personally financed some of Chicago’s highest-performing charter schools and campaigned to reform teacher tenure, lift the cap on charters and introduce private-school scholarships for poor children.
“We’ve got a system rigged to protect the bureaucracy of the school system rather than set up to advance the agenda of kids and their parents,” Mr. Rauner declared last month. The Republican governor-elect can now claim a school-reform mandate, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has won an ally in Springfield in his brawl with the teachers union.
Unions also got clobbered in statehouse elections and, in some cases, on Democratic turf. A pro-charter group defenestrated three Democratic state senators in New York, giving Republicans control of the upper chamber. School reformers warned that re-electing the Democratic senators would give Bill de Blasio , New York City’s progressive mayor, and his union cronies hegemony over Albany.
The American Federation for Children, which supports private-school scholarships, elected all 13 of its legislative candidates in Alabama despite being outspent by the state teachers union 27-to-1. In Tennessee, the pro-school-choice outfit toppled Democratic state Rep. Gloria Johnson, a teachers-union favorite.
A rare silver lining for the unions was California State Superintendent Tom Torlakson ’s slender victory over school reformer Marshall Tuck, a fellow Democrat and former head of the nonprofit Los Angeles-based Green Dot charter schools. Mr. Tuck, who was backed by other Democratic school reformers, including San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson , was blasted by teachers-union ads as a creature of Wall Street who would turn “our schools over to for-profit corporations motivated by money” and “those who profit from high-stakes testing would take the joy out of learning.”
Perhaps no candidate for political office in California has posed a greater threat to the teachers unions than Mr. Tuck, an articulate, congenial and unassuming Democrat who ripped wide open the crack in the party over school reform.
The California State Democratic Party, progressive groups such as Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club, in addition to nearly every Democratic legislator and statewide officer—save one—backed Mr. Torlakson. A profile in courage, Gov. Jerry Brown refused to weigh in on the contest. Had the governor endorsed Mr. Tuck, there is little doubt that the reformer would have won and realigned the tectonic plates in Sacramento, hardening the backbone of Democrats who are afraid to buck the unions.
Yet Mr. Tuck can claim a moral victory, since he prevailed in most low- and middle-income communities in the state, including San Bernardino, Riverside and Fresno counties, and led in polls among minority groups. Mr. Torlakson won by racking up large margins in the Bay Area and other tony coastal areas—with voters unlikely to be sending their children to the schools in urgent need of help.
On the whole, teachers unions got crushed in the midterms, and their biggest victory—the defeat of Marshall Tuck—was decidedly hollow.
If you want proof that money doesn’t buy elections, Mr. Steyer and his fellow green comrades are it. The San Francisco investor gave most of his money to his NextGen Climate Action Super Pac, which spent almost exclusively for Democrats. Environmental groups including NextGen spent $85 million to support President Obama ’s green agenda, especially his regulations targeting coal for extinction.
Nearly every one of Mr. Steyer’s favored candidates—in Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Wisconsin and Maine—lost. New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen won, but Scott Brown had her playing defense for supporting a cap-and-trade carbon tax. A recent Gallup poll found that climate change ranked last among 16 issues that voters cared about in the midterms.
It’s even possible that Mr. Steyer’s money helped Republicans. He and the greens have made opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline a litmus test of their support for Democrats. Mr. Obama has in turn dutifully delayed approving the pipeline, despite multiple government reports showing no net effect on the climate. But the delay has raised Keystone’s national profile and made it a wedge issue in Senate campaigns.
Republicans campaigned for the project that polls show has 70% approval, using Keystone to appeal to union workers and voters without college degrees. Colorado’s Cory Gardner hammered Democratic Sen. Mark Udall on his refusal to support Keystone. He’s now Senator-elect Gardner.
2) The Senate’s Talent Infusion
Voters have sent a group of principled but pragmatic conservative reformers to Washington
The obsession in the media this year has been so heavy on which states were in play that the contenders themselves got short shrift. Even when the media begrudgingly acknowledged the Republican Party had chosen good candidates, it wasn’t a particularly deep compliment. The press measures GOP hopefuls on how many months they can go without burbling about rape.
This doesn’t give credit to voters, who on Tuesday elected one of the more solid and reformist freshman Senate classes in decades. Conservatives have been overhauling the GOP for years—replacing an older, lazier, spend-happy generation with Republicans who have run on policy change and principle. The tea-party wave sent 87 new Republicans to the House in 2010, churning over more than a third of the GOP caucus.
The pace has been slower in the Senate, though it too has seen a steady growth in reformers: Marco Rubio , Ron Johnson , Pat Toomey, Jeff Flake, Kelly Ayotte , Mike Lee,Rand Paul , Ted Cruz . Up to now, their influence has been largely internal—putting the older guard on notice and helping shift the Senate Republican caucus mostly in smarter directions. Harry Reid ’s Senate lockdown hasn’t allowed for much more. But that’s about to change, as Republicans take the Senate reins, and as the reformers’ ranks swell with Tuesday’s victors.
Add Iowa’s incoming senator, Joni Ernst, who served in Iraq and Kuwait, and who made her opponent’s votes to defund the Iraq war a prominent part of her campaign. In Alaska, Dan Sullivan, who looks to win that Senate race, ran on his military service and his time working on foreign policy for Condi Rice in the White House. The voices of these younger veterans are going to resonate in any coming debate over the president’s cuts to the Pentagon budget. Expect, too, an interesting new dynamic vis-à-vis the Rand Paul wing of the GOP.
On domestic issues, nowhere are Republicans better offensively positioned than on energy. Colorado’s new senator, Cory Gardner, won in part by pummeling his opponent on fracking and Keystone, and by highlighting energy legislation he’d authored in the House. Mr. Sullivan, the former head of Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources, can and will talk all day about pipelines, drilling on more federal land, and energy regulations. Montana’s Steve Daines made a name for himself in the House with aggressive oversight of the EPA.
Washington is poised for a major battle over corporate or broader tax reform. Joining the fight will be Georgia’s new Senate voice, David Perdue, a successful businessman who made tax reform central to his campaign. Mr. Daines is a former businessman who loves the subject and helped rally opposition in the House to Internet taxation. North Carolina’s new senator, Thom Tillis, another businessman, has spent four years as speaker of the North Carolina House, where he shepherded a tax-code overhaul and budget reforms. These new senators are also likely to have prominent roles in upcoming budget and spending debates.
Nebraska’s Ben Sasse cruised to a Senate victory by 34 points, and he ran on a fully articulated plan for replacing ObamaCare. He wasn’t shy either about calling for entitlement reform, welfare reform, immigration reform and electoral reform—and to explain his detailed policy thoughts on each of those topics. Expect to see him everywhere.
This new Republican bunch isn’t like the 2010-style firebrands; they are, for the most part, principled yet pragmatic. Think of them as the latest iteration of a grass-roots movement that has grown wiser about Washington realities. The voters deliberately chose these personalities over more radical conservative voices in GOP primaries. Most of the senators-elect come to Washington with real mandates, having been elected in their home states with notable majorities.
A more dynamic Senate caucus meantime has the potential to lay the groundwork for, and give backing to, a reformist 2016 presidential candidate. Voters like to complain that Washington is too full of headline-seekers, empty suits and soulless political types. True. And voters on Tuesday did something about it; they elected some men and women of substance.
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3) Teachers Unions Flunked Their Midterms
A torrent of negative union ads couldn’t hold back education reformers, who won almost across the board.
By ALLYSIA FINLEY
Teachers unions took a drubbing on Tuesday after spending more than $100 million to try to elect their allies and steamroll education reformers. Like good Democratic team members, now the unions are blaming President Obama for their sweeping losses while taking credit for their few slim, hard-fought wins.
“The Republicans successfully made it a referendum on the president,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said on Wednesday, by way of explaining the union’s thumping. “In the few places where you had issues like education and you had a good candidate who could get through the torrent of negative ads, we were able to win.”
Kudos to Ms. Weingarten for her optimism and ironic humor in the wake of defeat. Reformers like Republican Govs. Rick Snyder in Michigan, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Nathan Deal in Georgia and Sam Brownback in Kansas did cut through a torrent of negative union ads and prevailed.
Teachers unions this election provided an object lesson in how to lie with statistics by lambasting school reformers across the country for “cutting” education spending. According to one ad, Mr. Brownback signed the “largest single cut to education in Kansas history.” Florida Gov. Rick Scott stood accused of taking a $1.3 billion sledgehammer to schools, and Mr. Snyder of slashing $1 billion from education.
Yet in Kansas, total per pupil spending has increased to $12,960 from $12,283 since Mr. Brownback was elected in 2010, despite a $412 per pupil decline in federal aid. Mr. Snyder has increased education spending by $660 per student over his four-year tenure, while Mr. Scott has increased annual state funding for schools by 20%—nearly $2 billion—over the past four years.
The teachers unions also whacked Mr. Scott for expanding private-school scholarships for low-income kids, eliminating tenure, and linking pay to performance for new teachers. “Florida’s private-school voucher programs are a risky experiment that gambles taxpayers’ money and children’s lives,” Florida Education Association vice president Joanne McCall warned in a local newspaper op-ed. “Voucher schools are largely unregulated.”
So far as we know, there have been no reports in Florida of death-by-voucher. In fact, scholarship recipients in Florida have posted academic gains equal to their public-school counterparts despite coming from more disadvantaged backgrounds. Mr. Scott’s challenger, Democrat Charlie Crist , in a previous life as the state’s Republican governor vigorously promoted vouchers; he quietly walked back his support during the campaign.
Scott Walker also got whipsawed for expanding vouchers and reforming public-worker collective bargaining, which Wisconsin Education Association Council President Betsy Kippers claimed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was really “aimed at tearing down the strongest advocates for public education: teachers.” Meantime, the union chief groused that the governor was “slipping tens of millions of dollars to those bent on privatizing education, along with handouts to businesses and the wealthy.”
Last year, thousands of teachers stormed the barricades in Raleigh, N.C., to protest legislation that Thom Tillis had quarterbacked in the state House reforming tenure and creating a modest voucher program. Sen. Kay Hagan —whom he unseated on Tuesday—this fall also ran ads charging Mr. Tillis with phantom education cuts: “The fact is: Thom Tillis hurts North Carolina students.” Voters clearly didn’t agree.
Unions unsuccessfully sought to erect a firewall in Illinois, where Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn faced a formidable challenge from Bruce Rauner, a Republican businessman. Mr. Rauner has personally financed some of Chicago’s highest-performing charter schools and campaigned to reform teacher tenure, lift the cap on charters and introduce private-school scholarships for poor children.
“We’ve got a system rigged to protect the bureaucracy of the school system rather than set up to advance the agenda of kids and their parents,” Mr. Rauner declared last month. The Republican governor-elect can now claim a school-reform mandate, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has won an ally in Springfield in his brawl with the teachers union.
Unions also got clobbered in statehouse elections and, in some cases, on Democratic turf. A pro-charter group defenestrated three Democratic state senators in New York, giving Republicans control of the upper chamber. School reformers warned that re-electing the Democratic senators would give Bill de Blasio , New York City’s progressive mayor, and his union cronies hegemony over Albany.
The American Federation for Children, which supports private-school scholarships, elected all 13 of its legislative candidates in Alabama despite being outspent by the state teachers union 27-to-1. In Tennessee, the pro-school-choice outfit toppled Democratic state Rep. Gloria Johnson, a teachers-union favorite.
A rare silver lining for the unions was California State Superintendent Tom Torlakson ’s slender victory over school reformer Marshall Tuck, a fellow Democrat and former head of the nonprofit Los Angeles-based Green Dot charter schools. Mr. Tuck, who was backed by other Democratic school reformers, including San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson , was blasted by teachers-union ads as a creature of Wall Street who would turn “our schools over to for-profit corporations motivated by money” and “those who profit from high-stakes testing would take the joy out of learning.”
Perhaps no candidate for political office in California has posed a greater threat to the teachers unions than Mr. Tuck, an articulate, congenial and unassuming Democrat who ripped wide open the crack in the party over school reform.
The California State Democratic Party, progressive groups such as Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club, in addition to nearly every Democratic legislator and statewide officer—save one—backed Mr. Torlakson. A profile in courage, Gov. Jerry Brown refused to weigh in on the contest. Had the governor endorsed Mr. Tuck, there is little doubt that the reformer would have won and realigned the tectonic plates in Sacramento, hardening the backbone of Democrats who are afraid to buck the unions.
Yet Mr. Tuck can claim a moral victory, since he prevailed in most low- and middle-income communities in the state, including San Bernardino, Riverside and Fresno counties, and led in polls among minority groups. Mr. Torlakson won by racking up large margins in the Bay Area and other tony coastal areas—with voters unlikely to be sending their children to the schools in urgent need of help.
On the whole, teachers unions got crushed in the midterms, and their biggest victory—the defeat of Marshall Tuck—was decidedly hollow.
3a) Little Green Machine
Democrats make a bad investment in the climate-change lobby.
Tom Steyer became a billionaire by investing in fossil fuels, among other things, and maybe he should return to his roots. He may need the money after blowing at least $74 million trying to persuade voters to oppose Republicans who disagree with him on climate change.
If you want proof that money doesn’t buy elections, Mr. Steyer and his fellow green comrades are it. The San Francisco investor gave most of his money to his NextGen Climate Action Super Pac, which spent almost exclusively for Democrats. Environmental groups including NextGen spent $85 million to support President Obama ’s green agenda, especially his regulations targeting coal for extinction.
They didn’t even get a lousy T-shirt, and they aren’t taking it well. “Despite the climate movement’s significant investments and an unprecedented get out the vote program, strong voices for climate action were defeated and candidates paid for by corporate interests and bolstered by sinister voter suppression tactics won the day,” declared Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune.
He won what was expected to be a close election by 15 points. Coal-supporting Shelley Moore Capito became the first GOP Senator in 55 years from West Virginia, where voters also ended the 38-year career of Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall, who couldn’t separate himself from Mr. Obama’s energy policies.
Nearly every one of Mr. Steyer’s favored candidates—in Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Wisconsin and Maine—lost. New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen won, but Scott Brown had her playing defense for supporting a cap-and-trade carbon tax. A recent Gallup poll found that climate change ranked last among 16 issues that voters cared about in the midterms.
It’s even possible that Mr. Steyer’s money helped Republicans. He and the greens have made opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline a litmus test of their support for Democrats. Mr. Obama has in turn dutifully delayed approving the pipeline, despite multiple government reports showing no net effect on the climate. But the delay has raised Keystone’s national profile and made it a wedge issue in Senate campaigns.
Republicans campaigned for the project that polls show has 70% approval, using Keystone to appeal to union workers and voters without college degrees. Colorado’s Cory Gardner hammered Democratic Sen. Mark Udall on his refusal to support Keystone. He’s now Senator-elect Gardner.
Republicans are promising to push pro-fossil-fuel energy policy in Congress, including support for Keystone XL, fast-track approval for liquid natural-gas export terminals, opening more federal land and offshore areas to drilling, and reining in anti-coal regulations. Democrats who want to help create jobs, and perhaps save their own, may want to rethink their fealty to Tom Steyer’s checkbook.
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A few points. 1. Notice how lying to the American people is completely justified by Obama administration standards so long as the ends justify the means. Gruber would "rather have this law than not," and therefore purposely lying about what the law actually is in order to get it passed is completely acceptable. regardless of the negative effects it has on the lives of Americans.
2. Lack of transparency might be a huge political advantage in the short term, but long term there are consequences from voters, which is exactly what we saw last week during the Democrat blood bath at every level of government across the country.
3. Insulting Americans as stupid and deceiving them is a really good way to lose your power on Capitol Hill, which is again exactly what we saw last week in the 2014 midterms. Twenty-eight Senators who voted for Obamacare are now out of the Senate for one reason or another.
4. Obamacare in its entirely was "sold" on lies. From the promise to keep your doctor to claims insurance rates would go down, not up -- to hiding that the legislation was in fact a tax until of course it was necessary to argue it was a tax to save the legislation at the Supreme Court. Government bureaucrats promising an expansion of care knowing care under Obamacare would be limited, etc. Hell, even the official name for Obamacare, "The Affordable Care Act," is a lie. Obamacare isn't affordable.
5. The process through which Obamacare was shoved through and down the throats of the American people happened as a result of Harry Reid changing Senate rules and without the support of voters. The legislation didn't receive a single Republican vote in the House or the Senate. Also, remember this?
Or this?
Obamacare is a sham and the American people have been lied to and deceived every step of the way. Further, Obamacare has never been popular with the American people. Not when it passed and not now. It should also be noted that since before Obamacare was passed conservatives have been rightly screaming about its true contents and impact on American families and the economy. They've been right all along and were called racists for sounding the alarm.
Overall, a lack of transparency has been key to the Obama administration's existence on a whole range of topics, which is why it is one of the least transparent administrations in history despite President Obama's promises.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6) How Mitch McConnell Outsmarted Obama
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Meet Jonathan Gruber, a professor at MIT and an architect of Obamacare. During a panel event last year about how the legislation passed, turning over a sixth of the U.S. economy to the government, Gruber admitted that the Obama administration went through "tortuous" measures to keep the facts about the legislation from the American people, including covering up the redistribution of wealth from the healthy to the sick in the legislation that Obamacare is in fact a tax.
The video of his comments just recently surfaced ahead of the second open enrollment period for Obamacare at Healthcare.gov.
"You can't do it political, you just literally cannot do it. Transparent financing and also transparent spending. I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies. Okay? So it’s written to do that," Gruber said. "In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in, you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical to get for the thing to pass. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not."
Obamacare is a sham and the American people have been lied to and deceived every step of the way. Further, Obamacare has never been popular with the American people. Not when it passed and not now. It should also be noted that since before Obamacare was passed conservatives have been rightly screaming about its true contents and impact on American families and the economy. They've been right all along and were called racists for sounding the alarm.
Overall, a lack of transparency has been key to the Obama administration's existence on a whole range of topics, which is why it is one of the least transparent administrations in history despite President Obama's promises.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6) How Mitch McConnell Outsmarted Obama
By Seth Mandel
Republicans–and some desperate Democrats who saw the writing on the wall–didn’t need anyone to tell them to make last night’s midterms about President Obama. His unpopularity was not in doubt, and his responsibility for manifold governmental failures over the last several years was undeniable. And yet, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell still deserves a large share of the credit for what may seem like an obvious anti-Obama election. How McConnell outsmarted the president and saved the Senate (at least temporarily) is one of the midterms’ more fascinating subplots.
As Jonathan Tobin mentioned late last night, McConnell belongs at the top of the list of winners, while Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid is second only to Obama in the losers column. Yet the efforts of both men to bring about that result are still widely–and in some cases, probably purposely–misunderstood. A perfect distillation of how to get the McConnell strategy exactly wrong comes via Vox, unsurprisingly. There, Matt Yglesias sums up the Democratic spin on how the Senate has been run by both Reid and McConnell. The spin is unambiguously false, but it does show the extent to which Reid’s mendacious propaganda actually convinced many liberals who don’t grasp the granular details of the Senate. Here’s Yglesias:
A Republican comeback of this scale was by no means guaranteed. In the winter of 2008-2009, the leaders of the Obama transition effort had a theory as to how things would go and mainstream Washington agreed with them.The theory went like this. With large majorities in the House and Senate, it was obvious that lots of Democratic bills would pass. But the White House would be generous and make concessions to Republicans who were willing to leap on the bandwagon. Consequently, incumbent Republicans from states Obama won (Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, Nevada) would be eager to cut deals in which they backed Obama bills in exchange for key concessions. With that process under way, many Republicans who weren’t even that vulnerable would be eager to cut deals as well, in search of a piece of the action. As a result, bills would pass the Senate with large 70- to 75-vote majorities, and Obama would be seen as the game-changing president who healed American politics and got things done.
McConnell’s counter plan was to prevent those deals. As McConnell told Josh Green, the key to eroding Obama’s popularity was denying him the sheen of bipartisanship, and that meant keep Republicans united in opposition[.]
Yglesias then quotes McConnell as saying “We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” and adds himself:
To prevent Obama from becoming the hero who fixed Washington, McConnell decided to break it. And it worked. Six years into the affair, we now take it for granted that nothing will pass on a bipartisan basis, no appointment will go through smoothly, and everything the administration tries to get done will take the form of a controversial use of executive power.
It’s quite possible Yglesias actually believes this. Many on the left have been thoroughly confused by how the Senate works, and they are almost always eager to believe the most negative portrayal of Republicans out there. But rather than Obama being generously and genuinely bipartisan, what happened was that he took his election to be a mandate for his own plans–“I won,” as he famously said.
And so the Obama strategy, with Reid’s help in the Senate, was to get what Yglesias calls the “sheen” of bipartisanship: get a very liberal bill that consists mostly of handouts to liberal interest groups and greatly increases presidential power on an issue, and pretend it’s the work of both parties by offering token, vote-buying concessions to convince a few Republicans to put their names on the overall bill. McConnell wasn’t buying it, because he understood that Obama had no intention of actually crafting bills that would prominently feature conservative ideas–the two sides were too far apart anyway.
McConnell also understood that Obama’s ideas were terrible, and would be unpopular. In some cases, we knew the bills were unpopular before they even went up for vote. Obama wanted an insurance policy (no ObamaCare pun intended): to have his name on the “achievement” if it turned out to be popular but to have Republicans own its passage in case it wasn’t. It was cynical and dishonest, and it didn’t succeed because Obama fooled his fans in the media but not McConnell.
Additionally, as anyone who follows the Senate closely knows, Reid’s strategy was to put unprecedented limits on the minority (Republicans) in the legislating process. Republicans were shut out of the traditional bipartisan role and also shut out of the amendment process. Reid didn’t want Republican input at all and didn’t want debate either. The plain fact is that it was Reid who “decided to break” the Senate, since Republicans weren’t willing to simply add their names to Obama’s legislative wish lists. And in order to protect constitutionally suspect legislation in the courts, Reid tossed out the filibuster as well.
Last night was a resounding victory for McConnell not because he sabotaged the Senate but because it confirmed what he already knew: Obama’s ideas are naïve and destructive, and therefore unpopular. McConnell’s refusal to allow his GOP minority caucus to be a rubber stamp for the disastrous liberal agenda was what stopped the midterms from being a pox on both houses and instead a referendum on those responsible for the wreckage: the Democrats.
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