Ivan Seeking said:
This election was about jobs and nothing else - not spending, agendas, or policies. People are frightened, they are unusually vulnerable to Republican propaganda, and they lashed out. Were unemployment at 5%, all of the other alleged issues would have been moot.
I'd say it was a combination of the economy and a rejection of the Obama agenda. The people were supposed to be frightened/irrational/angry when the Republicans took control in 1994 too, but the unemployment rate was significantly lower then.
The party in power tends to take a hit during elections when the economy isn't doing well, but the Democrats really got their butts handed to them this time around. That isn't solely due to the economy. Also, note that the Democrats didn't run on things like healthcare.
If your argument was true, then one could easily say it was fear that got Obama elected in the first place. In late 2008, the economy seemed on the verge of collapse, people were fearful, and voted in Obama (by that type of reasoning).
Exactly, and who put Obama in office?
Why did Reid win? He got out the Latino vote. Who swung heavily for the right - blue-collar workers.
Sharron Angle also helped in this sense I think with her anti-illegal immigrant ads, which I think caused the Latinos to swing more heavily for Reid.
Russ made the comment some time ago that Obama will be reelected because, by then, the jobs market will be recovering. True, but only true BECAUSE of the actions of Obama and the Dems. But you'll never sell that one to a person who is looking for a job.
What actions of Obama and the Dems are you referring to that will theoretically cause the economy to turn around by 2012? I would say it will turn around (hopefully)
in spite of their actions.
Since taking office, the Democrats embarked on a massive so-called stimulus program from which we have pretty much seen nothing. One of the main selling points for the stimulus was that America has a very aging infrastructure, so now would be a good time to embark on doing a lot of infrastructure projects. But where are they?
While many can criticize for example Japan's attempts at stimulus for not stimulating their economy, nonetheless, Japan did get a lot of infrastructure out of it, some might even say too much, in the form of roads and bridges to nowhere.
If the economy was still bad but we were seeing some real investments made in improving America's infrastructure in all sorts of ways, one could at least reason, "Well it doesn't seem to be stimulating very much, but at least we are getting lots of nice new infrastructure out of it."
But we haven't seen that. The Democrats say that the stimulus saved us from a repeat of the Great Depression, but I find this questionable because of Obama's own statement, when he said that he didn't realize at the time that there is no such thing as a shovel-ready project. If that is the case, then how did the stimulus save the economy? The money wasn't able to flood it quickly as was needed.
Then Obama spent over a year pushing for healthcare reform, which created a lot of uncertainty in the economy. One problem isn't that corporations lack cash, it's that they are sitting on it and not investing. No one knew if things like carbon cap-and-trade, or union card check were going to pass either, creating more uncertainty. Also the Bush tax cuts being set to increase.
Now that the House has gone to the Republicans, much of the uncertainty is over, and hopefully we will see corporations start investing putting their money into the economy, and hopefully the unemployment rate will start declining.
I would say the Democrats did a lot of things to hamper an economic recovery simply by the agenda Obama wanted passed (healthcare, cap-and-trade, union card check, financial system reform, Bush tax cuts expire), and the one thing they did to specifically help the economy recover, the stimulus, was executed in a very poor manner.
