Back to Work - Bill Clinton [9]
There were many reasons for the magnitude of the defeat. First, the size of the Democratic majority before 2011 was in large part a reaction to the years of one-party GOP rule, years in which the economy produced very few jobs, mortgage foreclosures exploded, and opposition to the war in Iraq intensified. In 2006, Democrats won back majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994. Then the financial meltdown in September 2008 in effect decided the presidential election and ensured that even more Democrats would go to Congress. Many of those elected in 2006 and 2008 represented districts that were not normally Democratic.
Second, the people had given both the White House and Congress to Democrats to fix things, and on Election Day 2010 things didn’t feel fixed. Jobs weren’t coming back, and the deficit continued to increase dramatically, due to the combination of declining revenues because of lower incomes and higher unemployment and increased federal spending, because of the stimulus package and the large number of unemployed people and part-time workers who were receiving aid. For example, one in seven Americans was getting food stamps. So even though President Obama and Congress did several significant, positive things in 2009 and 2010, the beneficiaries of the changes didn’t yet feel them, and often didn’t even know about them, while the opponents of those changes were inflamed and energized.
Third, Americans hate all the partisan bickering in Washington and usually prefer to see one party in control of Congress when the other is in the White House. They think that will force our elected officials to work together across party lines and keep the government from going too far to the left or the right. So in 2010, whether it was necessary or not, the whirlwind of government activity—saving the financial system, the stimulus, restructuring the auto industry, the financial reforms, the health-care law—left many voters thinking we had too much government. That’s what happened in 1994, too, when independent voters also rewarded the partisan “just say no” tactics they otherwise deplore.
Fourth, the Republicans ran a more effective, more aggressive campaign, characterizing the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and President Obama as extreme leftists who wanted to spend America into ruin, regulate the economy into extended recession, and tax individuals into poverty and businesses into bankruptcy: Someone had to stop them before it was too late. The GOP candidates repeated the message incessantly, as did their supporters in the media and interest groups.
The Republicans were also both candid and clever in presenting their own policy agenda in printed materials distributed to their more ideological base voters. They proposed (1) to cancel the still-unspent portion of the “failed” stimulus, in spite of nonpartisan studies finding that the stimulus had created more jobs than predicted and kept unemployment lower than it would have been; (2) to repeal the financial-reform bill with its provisions to require banks to maintain more capital to cover potential loan losses and to avoid future bailouts by establishing a liquidation procedure that would hold stockholders and management more accountable for them (so repeal would make both failures and the bailouts the Tea Party claims to deplore more likely in the future); (3) to repeal incentives to rebuild our manufacturing base through green technologies and instead rely on more drilling for oil and gas, mining coal, and spending on heavily subsidized nuclear power;1 (4) to repeal the student-loan reform law, ending direct government lending,