I have been astonished at the interest here in the midterm US elections. Normally there is subdued coverage of any US election not a Presidential one. However, this year the BBC suspended its Radio 4/World Service broadcasts from last midnight to cover the election results, and the news that the Republicans have now captured control of the House of Representatives is top news in the bulletins.
Thinking about the results, I believe that they are troubling to me personally, but also predictable. They may even help the President win a second term. Here are my thoughts.
From the vantage point of the United Kingdom, US politics this year seems to have been dominated by nutcases. The Tea Party seems to be running high in the water, and their rhetoric of getting the government off our backs and reducing the amount of government in total is very attractive to people who feel overtaxed, under-represented, and aggrieved at government's activities intruding on all our lives. However, in this rhetoric has been planted the seeds of their own destruction. Once they get in, the Tea Partiers will find that being in government makes them important, influential, and powerful. Rather than reducing the size of the government, they will want to increase it, so as to increase their own status. This happens every time someone who wants to "reduce the size of government" is elected to government. So in two years all these new Representatives and Senators will have been coopted by the system they were elected to slash and burn.
The President must bear some of the blame for the rout, of course. He has neglected many of the groups who elected him, and he spent too much time and political capital early on getting the health care reforms enacted. Now he will have little chance of repealing DADT or DOMA, thus permanently alienating the lesbian and gay and transgender people who worked to get him elected. However, he can now run in 2012 on a platform of accusing the Congress of doing nothing. Passing the blame over to Congress will be his salvation. In addition, if Sarah Palin were to be nominated for the Presidency in 2012, it is unlikely that even middle-of-the-road Republicans will be enthused about voting for her. Like so many Tea Party associates, she is ignorant, intolerant, and a rabble-rouser. Were she to be elected, there would be a serious problem with the Government of the United States starting at the top, possibly even greater than the rot which set in during the Nixon Administration. At least Nixon was passably intelligent.
Every time there is an election in the United States I feel relieved that I am here in the United Kingdom, where the National Health Service is sacrosanct and revered by the vast majority of citizens. I would never want to move back to the US and can foresee no circumstances in which I would do it.
Finally, every time there is a landslide one way or another, pundits (I'm not a pundit) say that the (Republicans/Democrats) are washed up, and a permanent (Republican/Democratic) majority is now assured. Bushwah. It has not happened any time after the Nixon landslide of 1972, and it won't happen now. People do not habitually vote for one party or another any more, generally. They vote their pocketbooks and their ideology, and the party that seems to promise that the former will be heavier and the latter will be lighter gets their vote. When that doesn't happen, they vote for the other lot next time. The Democrats are not a spent force, and the Republicans are not cruising back to power. The Tea Party will implode and fracture before the next election (believe me, it'll happen). Some of those elected yesterday will turn out to be as corrupt as the last lot. The electorate will move toward the center-left, as it almost always does, and Obama will be re-elected.
As a yellow-dog Democrat (perhaps the last one standing…) I am of course annoyed that my party has lost control of the House. But the next elections are only two years away.
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