David Greenberg: What Went Wrong?
[David Greenberg is a historian at Rutgers University and contributor to Dissent, Slate, the New Republic, and other publications. In 2010-11 he is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.]
IF THE way to fight bad speech is with more speech, is the way to fight bad punditry with more punditry? Let me try. The Democrats’ drubbing on Tuesday has yielded the usual analyses, most of them, to paraphrase Mencken, simple, neat, and wrong: from the right comes the sneer that President Obama and the Democrats pushed an agenda that was too far to the left. The Left dangles the delusion that Obama tacked too far to the right. The center bloviates that this most gifted of communicators failed to sell his programs. These analyses misleadingly imply simple remedies: work with the Republicans, à la Clinton; boot the Blue Dogs and build a true progressive majority; rekindle a disillusioned electorate. All are easier said than done. One might as well tell Obama to get unemployment down to 6 percent. That would have done more for the Democrats this year than any of the above prescriptions.
I don’t purport to have a solution to the Democrats’ troubles, because there’s simply not much they can do. The problem lies mainly with the continuing fallout from the economic cataclysm of 2008. A robust jobs program, obstructed by the Republican minority of the 111th Congress, certainly won’t appear under the Republican majority of the 112th. The best we can hope for is some small steps, achieved through legislative trench warfare, that speed the sluggish recovery, and perhaps the Fed’s growing recognition that it too needs to do more....
Read entire article at Dissent
IF THE way to fight bad speech is with more speech, is the way to fight bad punditry with more punditry? Let me try. The Democrats’ drubbing on Tuesday has yielded the usual analyses, most of them, to paraphrase Mencken, simple, neat, and wrong: from the right comes the sneer that President Obama and the Democrats pushed an agenda that was too far to the left. The Left dangles the delusion that Obama tacked too far to the right. The center bloviates that this most gifted of communicators failed to sell his programs. These analyses misleadingly imply simple remedies: work with the Republicans, à la Clinton; boot the Blue Dogs and build a true progressive majority; rekindle a disillusioned electorate. All are easier said than done. One might as well tell Obama to get unemployment down to 6 percent. That would have done more for the Democrats this year than any of the above prescriptions.
I don’t purport to have a solution to the Democrats’ troubles, because there’s simply not much they can do. The problem lies mainly with the continuing fallout from the economic cataclysm of 2008. A robust jobs program, obstructed by the Republican minority of the 111th Congress, certainly won’t appear under the Republican majority of the 112th. The best we can hope for is some small steps, achieved through legislative trench warfare, that speed the sluggish recovery, and perhaps the Fed’s growing recognition that it too needs to do more....