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By Root 779 0

giving a 90 percent government guarantee to banks to make loans, rendering them more expensive, thus increasing the costs to taxpayers and eliminating the most important part of the law—the part that allows students to repay their debt as a small percentage of their income for up to twenty years, so they won’t ever have to drop out again for fear they’ll never be able to repay their debt;2 (5) to repeal the health-care reform law, including the requirement that insurance companies spend 85 percent of the premiums people pay on health-care costs (80 percent for smaller plans), not on profits or marketing; to reverse the so-called cuts in Medicare, which were actually lower increases in reimbursement rates to providers, especially in the Medicare Advantage program, where the profit margins of the participating private providers were large; and, having given the money back to the providers, to reopen the so-called doughnut hole in the senior citizens’ drug program and reduce the solvency of Medicare by a few years;3 and (6) to both cut taxes again, largely for upper-income citizens, and still reduce the large annual deficit by making very large but unspecified cuts in nondefense, non-Medicare spending.

The fifth reason for the size of the Republican victory is that for the first time since their big losses in 1994, when the Republicans ran on the Contract with America, the Democrats did not counter the national Republican message with one of their own. There was no national advertising campaign to explain and defend what they had done and to compare their agenda for the next two years with the GOP proposals. The large amount of money Democrats raised, $1.6 billion, was almost all spent on local races, just as it was in 1994, with similar results.

In the 1998, 2002, and 2006 midterm elections, the Democrats did well with a national message buttressed by a few clear specifics, winning House seats in 1998 despite being badly outspent, the first time since 1822 the president’s party had won House seats in the sixth year of a presidency; not losing many seats in 2002, with President Bush and national security riding high in the polls in the aftermath of 9/11; and in 2006, with the economy in bad shape and the Iraq War increasingly unpopular, winning the majority in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994.

In 2010, with the economy in trouble, people upset with government spending that didn’t seem to be making it better, and many Democrats holding seats in Republican-leaning districts facing energized, organized opposition, the Democrats ran individual races without a big message. Apparently, they couldn’t agree on one, because they themselves were divided on some issues, especially health care and how best to combat climate change. These problems could have been finessed with commitments to reform—not repeal—the health-care law and to change how we produce and consume energy in a way that grows the economy and creates jobs.

Vice President Biden—whose speeches provided much of the same information and made many of the same arguments mine did—and I tried to get the Democratic National Committee to send out a centralized set of talking points to its large e-mail list so Democratic foot soldiers would at least have some good ammunition for their phone and door-to-door campaigns. We couldn’t persuade the decision makers to do so. I’m always glad to be in Joe Biden’s company, but it was frustrating to work crowds, right up to the night before the election, and hear people shouting at us after our speeches, “Why didn’t I know that?” At least we know Democrats can keep a secret. The failure to counter the GOP national campaign with an equally good one cost the Democrats.

Beyond the economic turmoil, the popular inclination toward divided government, and the relative effectiveness of the campaigns, there is a final factor that had a large impact on the election and the partisan wrangling on the budget that followed it: the idea that the government, especially the federal government, is the cause of every problem America