Dems: Don’t freak out.

If you have read my posts on this blog with any regularity, I probably have begun to ring hopelessly optimistic. I like to think of myself as an optimistic realist, but really, who cares?

Anyway, we’ve just a tough election cycle coming up that won’t get any easier, especially with the departure of Senators Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan. Bill Ritter’s exit in Colorado has Democrats afraid that Ken Salazar’s caretaker, Sen. Michael Bennett may be facing a politically toxic environment on the western front.

Point is we have eleven months to win back the message.

The correct argument is not that the Republican Party is the “party of no.” That is merely stating the obvious, and the Democratic economic agenda is not nearly popular enough to defend so meekly. The correct argument is to say the same thing, but far more substantively: that staunch Republican opposition to President Obama’s agenda represents a cop out on the American people solely for political gain.

We have long been ignoring the obvious: we do live in a center-right country, and Americans are troubled by being so deep in the red, regardless of whether the $787 billion dollar Stimulus Package averted another depression. As much as they disgust some Democrats, the Tea Party argument is appealing to middle of the road, working class voters easily seduced by populism and angered by the Obama administration’s rapid expansion of government and inability to effectively combat Wall Street’s fiscal recklessness, punctuated by the AIG bonus debacle of last summer.

I’m certainly not going to argue that Obama “misread his mandate,” as many pundits have opined, but his levelheadedness in addressing the public on financial issues may not have proven to be a virtue. The health care debate dominated the legislative agenda for most of the year, paralyzing the president’s remaining economic agenda in the short term as he failed to connect the conceptual dots (although Chris Dodd remains hard at work on his last great hurrah, a tough financial reform bill).

The Tea Party has taken advantage of America’s populist rage, and bended it to suit conservative sympathies. But it’s not too late for the president to win bend it back. After all, this is how Franklin Delano Roosevelt ultimately won support for the new deal, taking control of an angry, empowered, populist center and with its support, declaring himself outright an ‘enemy of the banks,’ and in so doing, embarking upon the legislative road to recovery. Now, Barack Obama must do the exact same thing.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.