The Pendulum of American Politics

The American voter has the span of a chicken electoral memory. How soon the voter forgets that the largest US spending and deficit resulted from the other party’s 8 years of mismanagement and illegal foreign wars with over three trillion dollar bill for the Iraq war alone. Yet the voter seems to remember only the trillion dollars spent to stimulate a dying economy, to put an end to job losses and save the US from the largest recession in recent history.

The voter was lost in a “cup of water while ignoring the whole ocean.” The Republican Party who defined the issues in 2004 around fear succeeded in reelecting a president who turned the largest government surplus into the largest deficit.  And now, the same pundits were able to hold the party in power responsible for America’s economic ills.

The party responsible for the biggest economic crises since the depression placed the “monkey” on the Democratic shoulders who failed badly in defining America’s economic and political agenda. The vast majority of the voters believes that America is moving in the wrong direction and from the latest election, the Democrats are responsible for the present wrong course.

Why are the Democrats shying away from pointing to the origin of current economic ills? It was under the previous administration where the 700 billion dollars tax break for the top 2 per cent turned a surplus into a deficit. Why the Democrats are failing to tell the American that the cost of the Neo Zion illegal war against Iraq resulted in wasting more than three Trillion dollars? Not to mention the loss of human life.

The Republicans won because they framed the discussion around national spending and the haphazard healthcare plan. The Democrats failed to convince the American voter that spending is only a small portion of the deficit created by the previous party.

Now welcome back to grid lock. Instead of succeeding on their merits, the Republicans have shown in the past that the only way they do well is by having the party fail in governance, even if that means a national failure. Hence the policy they pursued in the last two years.