We suspect that Obama's refusal to take a principled stand on matters of justice was the No. 1 reason Democrats lost a seat that Kennedy had held for almost half a century.
Obama's refusal to take a principled stand on matters of justice, his refusal to hold the Bush administration accountable for its myriad crimes, probably will cost Democrats again today.
We tend to think of CNBC's Chris Matthews as a pompous windbag. But we agree with Matthews' assessment that Obama has had two major failings. (See video below.):
* He campaigned as an "inclusive" candidate but has governed as an elitist;
* He failed to adequately explain to the American people how we got into our current fix--and what we need to do to get out of it. Lincoln did it in the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt did it in the 1930s. Obama, Matthews correctly states, has failed to "take people along" with him.
Obama and his fellow Democrats had mountains of evidence that the Bush administration was a monumental failure--and bold action was needed to get us out of a hole the GOP spent eight years digging. But Democrats, other than Bill Clinton, failed to make that case. And now they are in the pathetic position of hoping that polls under-represented likely voters who have given up land-line phones and use only cell phones. Here is how election analyst Nate Silver explains the "cell phone effect":
This one is pretty simple, really: a lot of American adults (now about one-quarter of them) have ditched landlines and rely exclusively on mobile phones, and a lot of pollsters don't call mobile phones. Cellphone-only voters tend to be younger, more urban, and less white -- all Democratic demographics -- and a study by Pew Research suggests that the failure to include them might bias the polls by about 4 points against Democrats, even after demographic weighting is applied.
This race should not have come down to that; it should not even be close. Conventional wisdom holds that the party in control of the White House always loses seats in the next midterm election. First, that conventional wisdom does not always hold true:
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