There's something that seems remarkably treacly about Matt Bai's instant punditry on the heels of the Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives: "If there is a lesson in all this for both parties, perhaps it’s that merely piling up votes on Election Day doesn’t confer on you a mandate for any ambitious agenda." Okay, Mr. Bai: what are elections for, then, if not to elect representatives who set policy?
I live in a country with an imperfect electoral system but one that does tend to allow people from different parties to win election, unlike, say, Burma. One of the prices of living in such a system is that while you will occasionally be on the side of electoral winners, you're also going to be on the side of the losers for a good part of your life. And when you're on the losing side, you're going to be unhappy with a good part of the decision-making that follows an election… otherwise, you probably would have supported the winning side.
While Bai buys into the byword of the day, that somehow the Democrats' defeat was a matter of positioning, or maybe communication, or maybe the illusory overreaching on health-care policy that could only be claimed by someone ignoring how close the Affordable Care Act is to what Republicans would have accepted in the early 1990s… the underlying reality is of an economy that is lingering in very-low-growth territory, with insufficient job growth to absorb the growth in the labor force (let alone absorb the unemployed) and with states and local governments suffering under the third year of very limited revenues. As Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias have been pounding into their readers' brains over the past few months, a roaring economy and the Affordable Care Act would have resulted in minimal Democratic losses. This economy with no health-care reform? I can't see how the Democrats would have held the House.
Maybe it would have been possible to pass a much larger stimulus bill in early 2009, or maybe Obama could have shoved through his nominees for the Federal Reserve Board. Apart from those changes, however, and the assumption that those changes would have dramatically changed the economy in the past 18 months, the aftermath of the housing crash and financial crisis would have made the Democrats' political position dicey in any case.
So I am on the losing side of most of the races I cared about yesterday. I will be unhappy with many of the decisions taken by the new majority in the U.S. House. If I had his ear, I would not urge the president to get the political equivalent of a new hairdo (maybe that's what's meant by "new wave politics"!)–and though I suspect he'll take some new-hairdo steps in the next 6 months, I don't think it's a smart partisan strategy on the whole. If you get elected, you do what you can to enact policies and appoint people you like, and then you may or may not have success in the next election. And if you lose, or the people you support lose, you lick your wounds and figure out where to go next… substantively.
Me? I've got three conferences this month, a set of papers my students turned in this week, stuff to edit, stuff to write, stuff to do… in short, lots of things to distract me from potential misery. There's plenty of time to be disappointed in public officials before the next election: no need to rush!