GOP's Pyrric Victory

The GOP's Pyrrhic Victory: Why It Won't Work, Pt. 4 of 4

Terrance Heath — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:26:46 -0500

President Obama is right. The Democrats got a "shellacking" in the midterm election. But not from the people who voted. And in a sense, the pundits and prognosticators are maybe half right. The president and his part were sent a message in this election. But not from the people who voted. Want to know who administered this midterm "shellacking" and delivered the message of the midterm elections of 2010? Want to know what how to avoid another "shellacking" in 2012.?

Do the math.

First, let's review.

It's only natural, I guess, for politicians to worry more about voters than non-voters. But that would be a mistake where Democrats are concerned. Because it's not that voters turned on Democrats and voted Republican in this election. Most of the people who voted Republican were the people who would have voted Republican anyway. Democrats need to focus on who was not there. Who stood with Obama and Democrats in 2008, but stayed away in 2010?

By comparing these 2008 national exit polls and these from yesterday, both from CNN and asking essentially identical questions, we Alearn some useful things..

Here, as far as I can see, are the three big top-line differences:

1. The 2008 electorate was 74% white, plus 13% black and 9% Latino. The 2010 numbers were 78, 10 and 8. So it was a considerably whiter electorate.

2. In 2008, 18-to-29-year-olds made up 18% and those 65-plus made up 16%. Young people actually outvoted old people. This year, the young cohort was down to 11%, and the seniors were up to a whopping 23% of the electorate. That's a 24-point flip.

3. The liberal-moderate-conservative numbers in 2008 were 22%, 44% and 34%. Those numbers for yesterday were 20%, 39% and 41%. A big conservative jump, but in all likelihood because liberals didn't vote in big numbers.

Add to these figures the fact that overall turnout was down by about a third, or more, from nearly 130 million to about 82.5 million. That's at least 45 million no-shows, and the exits tell us the bulk of them were liberal, young, black, Latino. If 25 million of these no-shows had voted, Democratic losses would pretty obviously have been in the normal range, and they'd still control the House.

Democrats picked up more moderate votes than Republicans did in this election (and the Blue Dogs still got decimated). Which moderates they picked up an why is also important.

Here's an interesting takeaway from the exit polls: Democratic candidates for Congress won more votes from self-described moderates than they did from liberals. Meanwhile, Republicans swept to victory on a coalition dominated by conservatives -- two out of every three ballots cast for a GOP candidate on Tuesday was cast by a self-described conservative.

...Obviously one of the key questions here is why moderates were less likely to vote for Democrats in 2010 than they were in 2006. The exit polls can't fully answer that question, but given the sharp decline in moderate turnout, it seems likely that the biggest reason is that Democratic-leaning moderates simply didn't vote.

It's unlikely that moderates were simply renaming themselves as conservatives; if that had happened, you wouldn't have seen a sharp decline in the share of the electorate who voted for Obama in 2008. (Obama voters were 53% of the electorate in 2008 but just 45% in 2010. Liberals dropped from 22% in 2008 to 20% in 2010, accounting for some of the decline; almost all the rest were almost certainly moderates, not conservatives.)

It also seems unlikely that the moderates who stayed home did so because they felt Democrats had moved too far to the left. First, if that were the case, wouldn't you expect them to turn out and vote for Republicans to provide balance? Second, moderates by their very nature tend not to look at things in ideological terms. Undoubtedly this will be a matter of debate, but it seems most likely to me that moderates who stayed home did so because they feel alienated from the political system and do not believe that it is delivering for them. That's not an issue of being right or left -- it's an issue of not moving forward quickly enough.

The moderate votes picked up weren't enough to win the day. The missing elements were the broad, diverse coalition that swept Obama and the Democrats into office, and the base that help build and motivate that coalition.

The first message of this election, for Democrats, is simple: Stop making your base feel like cheerleaders at Charlie Brown's football game.

By your base, I don't just mean the people who vote for you. I mean the people who make sure as many people vote for you as they can persuade — from family and friends, to co-workers and neighbors, to random strangers. I mean people like "soccer mom" Jodi Jacobson.

I started by finding a precinct in Loudon county, Virginia that needed help. I spent countless weekends, weeknights, and sometimes weekdays, and countless dollars on gas never counted as "official" contributions, driving out to Virginia to canvass, place door hangars, and talk personally, face to face, with literally hundreds of voters. I made notes, I made follow up calls, I researched answers to call back the undecided; I gave out my personal cell number to anyone who wanted to call me for further info. I phone-banked at centers but more often from home, making countless phone calls on my own dime across the country, night after night, on the MyBarackObama website.

I also brought the troops. I started with organizing my best friends, and at the end had a list of more than 50 regulars who put everything they could into joining me to canvass, make phone calls and work mano-a-mano to convince one voter at a time that we needed change, driving long distances to help turn Virginia blue and even some of us to ensure victory in Pennsylvania. Many of us brought our kids, missing games, parties, and relaxing weekend days at home to do what we felt was needed and to instill in our children the value of participation in a democracy. Later, some of us trained as poll watchers, drove people to polls and helped get absentee ballots in early.

Your base isn't all the people who voted for you. It's the people who made sure those people voted for you by carrying your message, making your case, knocking on doors, handing out literature, and literally driving people to the polls — all because they believed in your message.

Jacobson also sums up what that base wanted in return.

In exchange, I wanted the change I was promised. And I was willing to keep working for it well after the election.

...I certainly never thought it would happen without a fight.

But the bottom line is I expected him to fight. I expected him to understand that the change many of us sought was the use of political power for good, that we had delivered him massive election turnout and a Democratic House and Senate to lead effectively, proactively, strongly, and vocally on economic change, health reform, climate change, energy use, education, women's rights, gay rights, science and evidence. This was not wishful thinking--he was on the record for every one of these things in the campaign.

...Finally, I did expect him to actually realize that it was progressives who not only voted for him as individuals, but delivered the vote to him across the population, by working assiduously and tenaciously to solidify independent voters and cross-over Republicans whose votes carried him to victory. I further expected the Administration to call on us, command us, to fight in support of a clear agenda for change.

Instead, this Administration not only failed to do much of any of the above, it has also vilified people like me by calling progressives the problem. It has locked out progressives in meetings and in the press. And it has catered slavishly to the religious right.

And while Obama stayed silent, equivocated and pre-emptively compromised away the rights of my children, gay children, Latino children, and black children, status-quo politicians in leadership, like Chris Van Hollen, my own Congressman, gave away the store by supporting people like Bart Stupak and undermining those like Jennifer Brunner.

I would not in the end been so distraught at the many giveaways that eventually happened if the good fight had been fought en route to getting there.

But for their trouble, they were dismissed as "whining" and demeaned as part of the problem. Particularly the "professional left," which is the closest thing the Democrats have to what is essentially the "corporate-funded right." Perhaps if the "professional left" had corporate sponsors and three-corner hats the Democrats might have mistaken them for the Tea Party, and paid more attention for a while.

Instead, progressives sensed the apparent contempt for the base that lucked just behind those comments, and became even more demoralized.

This week, Ari Berman of the Nation released his book "Herding Donkeys" that documents the growth of the modern Democratic Party from the nadir of the 2004 election through the triumph of 2008. The majority of the book looks at the efforts by former DNC Chairman Howard Dean to build a national network that could immunize the party from becoming either marginalized or regionalized. But the epilogue charts out how the style of Obama's governance drained the type of voter enthusiasm that, Dean acknowledges, was critical in those efforts.

"The White House began to believe that they could mobilize their supporters without hearing what their supporters really wanted in terms of specific change," Dean is quoted as saying. "The principal problem with OFA is the same one the president's having. You can't dictate to your base what's going to happen. It's got to be a two-way deal, and it hasn't been."

Addressing a telling moment in the health care debate, when White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (a frequent Dean critic) called out progressive activists for running ads against conservative Democrats, Berman asked the former DNC Chair for his reaction.

"I'm not looking to pick another fight with Rahm Emanuel, but the contempt with which he held the progressive wing of the party was devastating and incredibly demoralizing," Dean said. "That's basically saying to your own people -- you got us here, now FU."

As Jacobson goes on to explain, the point was less about whether progressives voted on election day than whether progressives were motivated to do the same work many did in 2008, to carry the president's and the Democrats' message and get more people to the polls. Many, like Jacobson, voted but didn't do much else. They didn't knock on doors, phone bank, donate, etc., except perhaps for specific candidates — not for the the Democratic party and not in order to get more Democrats into Congress, but to get even a few more progressives into Congress.

Progressive are beginning to understand something I've said before: Just getting Democrats elected is not sufficient. We have helped get Democrats elected, for the sake of getting more Democrats elected, and the result has not been what we hoped for.

In the days leading up to the election, President Obama said to supporters at a Chicago rally, "I need you to keep on believing."

"Chicago, I need you to keep on fighting. Illinois, I need you to keep on believing. I need you to knock on some doors. I need you to talk to your neighbors. I need you to get out and vote in this election," Obama told a cheering crowd of thousands.

If the president and the Democrats hold out any hopes for 2012, they need to do something they haven't done since January 2009: Give the progressive base and the diverse coalition helped them win in 2008 a reason to believe and a reason to stand with them — instead of something to sit down, shut up, and settle for.

But first, they need to understand all of the above. Voters didn't reward Republicans because they support Republican policies, but for not being Democrats. The electorate didn't flip to the GOP in 2010. The Democrats' demoralized base sat on its hands, and the diverse coalition of 2008 stayed away in droves.

The GOP is not popular, nor is its agenda. They are offering the same old ideas that didn't before, won't work now, and aren't what Americans want. If they are successful with even part of their agenda, it will be a "catastrophic success" for American middle- and working-class families. Treating the Republican and party and its agenda will be about as effective as treating George W. Bush like a popular president was towards the end of his term.

It wont' work. The choice now is to compromise or fight. Compromising didn't work for the past two years. It's time to fight.

Democrats need to a plan. And once they have it, they need to fight for it. The one Michael Moore offered them just a month out from the election is a good place to start.

If Democrats want to be rewarded for being Democrats, then they need to be Democrats and make sure people know the difference:

Remind Americans how we got here. Remind them who unnecessarily invaded two countries, fought two "off the budget" wars to the tune of over $3 trillion; destroyed the budget surplus of they got in 2000; and cut taxes on the rich lower than even Reagan did, and managed to do so without creating any new jobs. Do this loudly, and often. Pull no punches.
Be bold. Democrats weren't trounced in this election for being too bold, but for being not bold enough — not for going too far, but for not going far enough.
Answer the GOP's corporate-sponsored "populism" with real progressive populism. Fight back with populism that rallies economically distressed voters — the very ones who stayed away from the polls in 2010 — who are still desperate for leadership that meets their concerns with solutions.
Focus on jobs, jobs, jobs. The election was a referendum on the economy, and the failure of the private sector and the government's modest efforts to create jobs and reduce the jobs deficit. Tear a page from FDR. Present the country with a bold, progressive plan for direct job creation. Spell out exactly how it will create jobs, put more Americans back to work, and project the jobs of those who are (still) employed. Make the GOP do the same, spelling out how more tax cuts for the wealthy will create jobs (this time around), how many, and how soon.
Define solutions that are founded in progressive principles, show how they will deliver the change Americans want, and then fight for them. It doesn't matter that there's no chance of "winning." Even if, in the current political reality, it's unlikely that the Democrats are going to get much passed, they must be seen as standing for and fighting for something, at long last.

The campaign for 2012 starts now, and it begins by winning back your base and the coalition that believed in you in 2008, and is waiting for reason to believe in you again.

There's a chance they will believe again. But not because of what you managed to bargained for, what you prevented from happening, or even because of what you won. They will believe again if they see you standing for them, if they see you fighting for them, and fighting for what what you believe right. They will have a reason to believe and a reason to stand with you even if you lose, because at least you will have fought. Whether won or lost, every battle has the potential to move the front line close to the point of victory. Especially if more people are moved fight alongside you next time.

Democrats have a chance not only to win in 2012, but to stand firmly on the right side of history. To earn it they must define what they believe is right, and how it differs from their opposition's belief. Then they must fight earnestly, openly and unapologetically for what's right, not merely what's winnable. It is the only way -- from abolition, to civil rights, women's right, equality, etc. — that what's right has ever won.

The GOP's Pyrrhic Victory: Why It Won't Work, Pt. 3

Terrance Heath — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:30:02 -0400

It Won't Work

Not to pick on Kathleen Parker, but the "narrative" she suggested the Democrats take from midterm elections — "You can't sell people what they don't want" — is more likely to end up being the narrative the Republicans take from 2012 — if the president and the Democrats do what they need to do. Karl Rove was half-right when he said voters didn't toss out the Democrats because are "enraptured with the GOP." People are angry sure, but the numbers tell a different story.

People are angry not at what the Democrats did after 2008, but what they didn't do. They didn't "buy" what the GOP was selling. Like a shopper who ordered one thing and got another, American voters ordered transformative change in 2008 but got the same old transactional politics instead. The midterms of 2010 is their letter or complaint.

Here at Campaign for America's Future, we just released a voter survey that shows voter fears about the economy and anger at government failure to help middle- working-class families even as Wall Street got bailed out.

Democracy Corps/Campaign for America's Future Election 2010 Poll

View more presentations from ourfuture.

Findings include:

Compared to a candidate who attacked Democrats for the economic stimulus and health care reform, 57 percent of voters said they were much or somewhat more likely to support a candidate with a "made-in-America" campaign message that points out that Republicans have "pledged to support free trade deals and protect tax breaks for companies that send American jobs to India and China."
Eighty-nine percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement that "America is falling behind" in the global economy and that "we need a clear strategy to make things in America, make our economy competitive, and revive America's middle class."
Sixty-nine percent said that "politicians should keep their hands off Social Security and Medicare" as they attempt to address the national deficit.
A majority opposed the Republican plan to cut $100 billion from domestic spending programs while extending the Bush tax cuts to those earning more than $250,000, while 51 percent said they agreed that those top-end tax cuts should expire and with proposals offered by Democrats to reduce the deficit over time.
Significant majorities in the poll supported new investments in infrastructure through a national infrastructure bank, a five-year strategy for reviving manufacturing in America

Why stop at one poll?

The GOP is not popular with Americans, nor is its agenda. Poll after poll leading up to the election bear this out. Their approval/favorability ratings were low going into the election, lower than the Democrats in many cases.

This is in the context of low approval ratings for Congress overall. But, as I said in the previous post, The Democrats' problem is failing to deliver on the agenda Americans voted for in 2008. The Republicans problem is an agenda that remains toxic to most Americans.

Americans offer tepid support for much of the Republican Party's domestic agenda, including repealing the new healthcare law and extending tax cuts for the wealthy, according to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center.

The results suggest Republicans could struggle to pass legislation advancing many of the smaller-government themes that have dominated their campaigns in the midterm elections, even if the party wins control of one or both houses of Congress in November.

In particular, the party appears to risk a backlash from senior citizens, a critical voting bloc that harbors deep skepticism about tinkering with entitlement programs.

The survey is the most comprehensive polling look so far at the major elements of the agenda that key Republicans have been discussing in the weeks leading up to the election.

Not all the news was good for Democrats...

...Still, the poll offered little to suggest that the surge in voter support for Republican candidates, whom analysts project to win major gains this fall, carries over to support for policies championed this fall by Republican leaders in Washington and on the campaign trail.

Kos posted a handy breakdown when the poll came out.

29% of Americans support extending all of the Bush tax cuts.
32% support repealing the newly passed health care law.
33% support replacing Medicare with vouchers.
58% support creating Social Security private accounts.
46% support amending the Constitution to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants (49 are opposed).
Fewer than half of Republican respondents favored extending all the Bush tax cuts or replacing Medicare benefits with vouchers.
Poll respondents continue to disapprove of President Obama's signature healthcare legislation, 45% to 38%.
Three-quarters said they could not name the leader of the Republican Party, or that the party does not have a leader.

What do Americans want? Here's a hint, it's not what the Republicans campaigned on.

A September AP poll said that Americans who wish health care reform went further outnumber opponents of health care reform by 2-to-1.
An October poll by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard university found that six in ten Americans say they want their representatives to fight for more government spending in their districts, to spur job growth. That's compared to 39% who said they want cuts even if it means fewer local jobs. (That's a flip from 1994, by the way, when 53% wanted their Reps. to fight for cuts, while 42% were on the other side.)
In the same poll, 50% supported more government spending to boost the economy, while 46% prioritized deficit reduction.
Not only did voters defeat major anti-tax measures in several states, but an AP poll less than 50 days before the election showed that 54% of Americans favored raising taxes on the highest earners, compare to 44% opposed.
A Stanford University poll showed that 86% of Americans want government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit.
And 76% favored government regulating greenhouse gasses in particular.
Another poll, conducted by Knowledge Networks and designed by Yale researches showed that 77% believe that global warming should be a priority for the president and Congress.
And 94% believe that developing sources of clean energy should be a priority for the president and Congress.
Meanwhile, 77% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

And that's an overview, because a detailed analysis is more than I have space to do here.

Not of the above adds up to what the GOP was "selling" in this election. But it's what more Americans "bought" in 2008 than voted in the midterm elections and any number of special elections since.

Parker follows the example of other conservatives who, after every election election since November 2008 have rushed to declare that "the people have spoken." When voters in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey elected Republicans, they somehow "spoke" louder than those Americans who spoke in 2008. When 45 million fewer vote in 2010 than voted in 2008, "the people have spoken."

The people spoke in 2008, and have been speaking since then. It's just that neither party has listened.

The people spoke in 2008, upwards of 130 million of them, compared to 82.5 million in 2010. The numbers above, all from polls taken in the last half of this year, reflect what they voted for then and have wanted since.

From Democrats they got health care reform with no public option; and no fight to defend it; financial reform that left "Too Big To Fail" standing; a stimulus that was too small for the jobs crisis the country faces; a foreclosure prevention program that, in order to avoid helping the "wrong people," helped almost no one; and no climate/energy legislation, given up without much of a fight.

From the GOP they got an agenda written by and for corporate interests.

The GOP is in an unenviable position. It is constitutionally incapable of delivering what Americans truly want. Meanwhile, the party must content with an extreme right that wants what Republicans cannot deliver without angering a great many Americans.

It won't work.

The Democrats have a chance to come back if they want it. But they need a plan to finish what the started, and deliver what Americans said they wanted in 2008 and are still waiting for.

Then they have to convince us that they mean it.

The GOP's Pyrrhic Victory: Why It Won't Work, Pt. 2

Terrance Heath — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:05:38 -0400

It Hasn't Worked

Karl Rove actually gets it. Sort of. He at least understands that voters didn't toss out the Democrats because they are "enraptured with the GOP," when he tells Republicans that it's "time to deliver." It just too bad for the GOP — and, now, the rest of the country — that they won't anything Americans haven't already sent back to the kitchen.

If what we heard and saw from them leading up to the election is any indication, the GOP doesn't have any new ideas. Their platform recycles the same old conservative policy that failed before, and got us into a mess we'll be trying to get out of for a while.

Late into the Bush administration, it became something of a joke that the president's answer to everything was "Tax cut!" It was like he had a bad case of "Tax Cut Tourette's Syndrome." If so, today's GOP has it just as bad. Tax cuts are their answer to everything, too. And we know how well that worked last time.

It turns out, tax cuts have little positive impact on the economy. According to the CBO, tax cuts offer the smallest "bang for the buck", making them the least effective way to spur the economy and reduce unemployment.Tax cuts for the wealthy don't stimulate the economy because the rich don't spend tax cuts, so the money never makes it back into the economy.

Thus the Bush tax cuts never delivered the prosperity Republicans promised, mostly benefited the rich, and make the rest of us poorer.

But Republicans are hell bent on making those tax cuts (and their consequences) permanent. Mitch McConnell introduce legislation to do just that in the Senate, and the idea is central to the GOP's "Plan for America" — which, by the way, doesn't even mention some of America's biggest challenges right now.

Republicans have made a lot of noise about the deficit, and scared more than a few Democrats-Who-Should-Know-Better™ into doing the same. Never mind the current deficit is the product of a decade of conservative failure. Never mind that extending tax cuts for the wealthy would add more to the deficit than the stimulus and health care reform combined. Never mind that the "Pledge to America" offered no credible plan to reduce the deficit, while Democrats shrank the deficit in the last fiscal year. Never mind that revenue rose and spending fell in the past fiscal year.

Never mind that health care reform reduce the deficit by $143 billion, if left alone. The GOP wants to repeal health care reform and "replace" it with more of the status quo, plus a plan that's basically a recipe for a "race to the bottom" in health care coverage.

Never mind all that, because the GOP turned anxiety about the economy into anxiety about the deficit and won. Too bad they won't do much to lower it. Republicans can't say how they'll pay for extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which would add $3.9 trillion to the deficit. Despite calling for trillions in tax cuts, their "Pledge" offers just $100 billion in non-specific spending cuts. If you get specific, they save the most painful cuts for everything from public education to housing, health care, and cancer research.

All this, the say, will create jobs. More specifically, tax cuts for the wealthy that they won't spend and that will explode the deficit, will create jobs. It didn't work before. The Bush era, when the GOP had a virtual lock on government (and got far less resistance than they should have from Democrats after 2006), was an era of zero job growth. In fact, Bush left office with the worst record on job creation since the government started keeping records.

Left, right and center — every one agrees that America needs jobs. (Or at least everyone says they agree.) Aside from their desire to kill off a stimulus that created more jobs in less than two years than Bush and the Republicans did in eight, the most specific plan Republicans have offered is John Boehner's two-step job creation plan: lock in the Bush tax cuts and go back to the 2008 budget.

Never mind that it won't work.

So on the one hand, a measure that will make a small dent in the deficit. On the other hand, a measure that will lead to a huge increase in the deficit. There's no theory of the economy in which this really makes sense: If the market is worried about the government's finances, this makes them worse, not better. If we need lower tax rates, then simply holding the tax rates at the level that produced 2010's disappointing economic performance isn't enough.

It's also worth noting that these policies are both stale: The Bush tax cuts are, well, the Bush tax cuts. They're tax policy from 10 years ago, designed to deal with a very different set of circumstances. And the 2008 budget is, similarly, just an arbitrary number from some point in the past. Our economic situation has changed dramatically in the past few years. Don't Republicans have any fresh thinking on what to do about it?

Fresh thinking? That's not what the GOP is selling. And despite Kathleen Parker's smarmy post-election advice to Democrats that "You can't sell people what they don't want," people actually don't want what the GOP is selling. And they didn't punish Democrats for not selling it to them. Republicans are selling what they sold us before. It hasn't worked. Ever. People want what they were sold, and what they enthusiastically voted for in 2008. They punished the Democrats for falling short on delivery, not by voting for Republicans, but by staying home and not voting at all.

Americans want job creation now, not "cut-taxes-and-hope-for-the-best." They want an economy that works for all, and not just the top 1%. They want to know they will have access to health care if they need it. They want social security in their old age. R

They won't get any it from Republicans in Congress, and they won't reward them for not failing to deliver. But Democrats may have an opening if they can convince voters that they got the message, and will fight finish what they started, and deliver what they promised and what Americans voted for in 2008 — and if they can get their base back to the polls.

The GOP's Pyrrhic Victory: Why It Won't Work, Pt. 1

Terrance Heath — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 12:17:12 -0400

First, let's just face it. For the next couple of years, at least, this is the end of any progress on jobs or the economy. Democrats will probably have to spend most of their time defending what they've gotten done. Whatever legitimate gripes progressives had with the outgoing Democratic Congress, they got a lot done. More, in fact, than most others. Ezra Klein called it a "Do-Something Congress."

That this has been the most "do-something" Congress we've seen in 40 years hasn't made much of an impression on the public. Multiple polls have found that only a minority of voters know that the 111th Congress got more done than most congresses. That's true even among Democrats. Nor has their productivity made the 111th Congress popular. But if they failed as politicians, they succeeded as legislators. And legislating is, at least in theory, what they came to Washington toz do.

Interestingly enough, the Washington Post dubbed the 110th Congress a "Do-Something Congress", when the Democrats took over in 2007, in hopes it would get more done than the outgoing Congress.

WHEN DEMOCRATS take over the House next year, the regular workweek will stretch to a backbreaking five days -- up from the now-customary Tuesday-through-Thursday arrangement. Members of the House and Senate -- no doubt reeling from the two weeks they've worked since the election -- will have a mere four weeks off after they leave town Friday. Hard to believe, but the new leadership actually expects them to come to work on Jan. 4 rather than enjoy the usual elongated holiday break as they wait around for the president to deliver his State of the Union address in late January. In the Senate, the weeklong March break is being eliminated and the two-week April vacation cut in half.

...It would be quite a change. The 109th Congress will have been in session for a grand total of 103 days this year, which, as Lyndsey Layton pointed out in yesterday's Post, is seven days fewer than the "Do-Nothing Congress" of 1948. An ordinary full-time worker with a generous four weeks of vacation would have clocked 240 days of work during that same period.

With the GOP taking over the House, the likelihood is that we're faced with another "Do-Nothing" Congress, at least in term of creating jobs, fixing the economy, etc. As Bill pointed out before election day, the country is about to be saddled with a Congress that not only doesn't work, but one determined not to let the President work either.

That's not just because of gridlock, though there will be gridlock. It's because conservative philosophy basically holds that a "Do-Nothing Congress" is exactly as it should be. And that's exactly the GOP's victory may be a Pyrrhic victory. Hemmed in by by a base that wants one thing, major (though anonymous) donors that want another, and an American voters angry that not enough been done to ease their economic pain — and who want more done — Republicans won't be able to make it work without abandoning their base, their donors, the basic tenets of conservatism, or Americans demanding solutions the GOP just doesn't have.

It won't work. That's what we face for the next two years. The best chance Democrats have for 2012 is to give voters a clear choice that does work, by offering solutions founded in progressive values, making the case for them, and fighting for them.

It Didn't Work.'

The election results made clear what progressive have been saying for years: Democrats' nearly pathological pursuit of bipartisanship was doomed to fail because the other party was never interested in bipartisanship, and in the end voters didn't reward them for it either.

From health care reform, to financial reform and the climate-bill-that-never-was, allowing Blue Dog Democrats to dominate policy negotiations came at a huge cost. First, it served to strengthen the obstructionist strategy the GOP announced even as Obama was sworn in. The White House and Democrats in Congress have spent two years scaling back progressive policies they ran on — and won — and often bartered away the very change that their supporters voted for and that the country needed, in a pursuit of bipartisanship.

It didn't' work, because the other party was never interested in bipartisanship in the first place.

Indeed, even before Obama's inauguration, the conservatives started down the path of obstruction, when the conservative movement's spokesperson Rush Limbaugh said he hoped the president failed — even given what that would mean for the country. From there, the GOP set out to make Limbaugh's dream come true by obstructing every effort to enact the kind of change Americans voted for when they put Obama in the White House with approximately 53% of the popular vote (compared to Bush's 47.9% in 2000 and 50.7% in 2004) and gave Democrats gains of 21 seats in the House and 8 in the Senate. (Republicans lost 5 seats in the House and gained none in the Senate in 2008, by the way.)

The list of bills that were obstructed by the 123 closure motions filed in the Senate is a litany of change that the country needed, Americans demanded, and congressional Republicans obstructed.

FDA Food Safety Modernization Act
Paycheck Fairness Act
Promoting Natural Gas and Electric Vehicles Act of 2010
Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act
Small Business Jobs and Credit Act of 2010
Restoring American Financial Stability
American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act of 2010
Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2009
Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights Act
District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2009
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009

The GOP's only regret? That they didn't obstruct more. Their plans for the next congress? No compromise. More obstruction. Who can blame them? It worked. For them.

It turns out that all that bending-over-backwards for the sake of "bipartisanship" didn't profit the Blue Dog Democrats or the party as a whole. The Blue Dogs — who worked hard to whittle down health care reform, put the brakes on climate change legislation, etc. — lost half their caucus in this election.

Not only did conservative voters not reward them for acting like Republicans, the Democratic base — the coalition that helped sweep Obama and the Democrats into office — was abandoned and alienated to the point of not even showing up at the polls.

By comparing these 2008 national exit polls and these from yesterday, both from CNN and asking essentially identical questions, we learn some useful things.

...Here, as far as I can see, are the three big top-line differences:

1. The 2008 electorate was 74% white, plus 13% black and 9% Latino. The 2010 numbers were 78, 10 and 8. So it was a considerably whiter electorate.

2. In 2008, 18-to-29-year-olds made up 18% and those 65-plus made up 16%. Young people actually outvoted old people. This year, the young cohort was down to 11%, and the seniors were up to a whopping 23% of the electorate. That's a 24-point flip.

3. The liberal-moderate-conservative numbers in 2008 were 22%, 44% and 34%. Those numbers for yesterday were 20%, 39% and 41%. A big conservative jump, but in all likelihood because liberals didn't vote in big numbers.

Add to these figures the fact that overall turnout was down by about a third, or more, from nearly 130 million to about 82.5 million. That's at least 45 million no-shows, and the exits tell us the bulk of them were liberal, young, black, Latino. If 25 million of these no-shows had voted, Democratic losses would pretty obviously have been in the normal range, and they'd still control the House.

Voters didn't "reward" Republicans for their obstruction in this election. Democrats effectively benched their base after 2008, and the based stayed firmly planted on that bench despite 11th hour calls to finally get in the game.

The result? The other side won by forfeit, with an worn out playbook of old ideas that haven't worked in the past, and shouldn't have won they day for them.