2010 Minus 1 - a Media Misinterpretation

Election 2009 is over. What is statistically a dead heat is being portrayed as everything from a rebuttal of Obama to the great hope of Republicans in 2010. It is neither. Trumpets sounding a Republican revival for 2010 neglect the fact that self-identification as Republican is at its lowest point in history, that Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia were not exactly the strongest of candidates running on the strongest of issues and, most importantly, Democrats picked off a district in New York that had not voted Democratic in a century. The Republican loser in New York's 23rd was also the candidate of Limbaugh and Palin. I don't hear the repudiation of the Republicans or their leadership being trumpeted in the press.

But the repudiation of the losers doesn't engender conflict, the thing that makes good fiction readable and that has replaced fact in our news media. It's the winner that has to fail in today's media in order to bring something once called bias now called balance into the equation. So the losses in Virginia (traditionally Republican) and New Jersey (where anything warm would have beaten the incumbent) are great triumphs and New York is a minor victory (which, as a national office, means more to me than 49 gubernatorial races). In this unbalanced equation, no Democratic victory is of the scale of any Republican and it's all the fault of Obama.

It is, I hope, a wake-up call to Democrats in power. You can lose. Beating on Bush and branding a Republican a Republican aren't enough. Democrats were elected to change things and so far the party hasn't created a lot of change. The recession has stayed around long enough that Democrats now own it, particularly after the stimulus and bailouts have produced richer banks and little that can be felt on my street. The message to Democrats is clear: Do something to get your base re-energized. Otherwise 2010 could be a bloodbath and the pundits can point to their analysis of 2009 and say, ain't I smart.