I spent most of my reading time today going over the increasingly long list of excuses as to why the Democrats got themselves had of their own backsides by the voters, being offered by the Democratic leadership and their minions in the press.
Clearly the issue is at least partially Barack Hussein Obama. I posted the comments of Donna Brazile last night…..
efore I rest for the night, let me explain the election results. When you run away from the President of your party, you lose. Period.
— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) November 4, 2015
…. because it strikes me as passing strange that anyone in the Democrat Party hierarchy would admit that the voters are running headlong away from Obama governance. She’s able to admit that they are turning away from Obama, but can’t quite bring herself to identify why they are doing so.
Without question, Obama has made about as many bad choices as the victims of a slasher movie would… If you consider the right moves to be leaning toward a stronger America, at least. Indeed as I have said several times in the past, Mr Obama and the Democrats in Congress have made the wrong choice for America every time right on down the line without exception. And, as I have again said in the past we should disabuse ourselves of the idea that these failures were not intentional. After all, you don’t get that kind of consistency without two things going for you… talent, and intent.
If we assume, as I do, that even the rank-and-file Democrats recognize the disaster that is the Obama presidency, that what we have here is a split within the Democrat Party that is larger than anything that the tussle between the establishment GOP and the rank and file has ever been.
So imagine the look on my face as the end of my driving day comes and I find a copy of a Washington Post article in my mail. Look if you will at the numerical gyrations that the author has to go through so that he is not required to admit that the Democrats lost and lost big:
But it may not be quite this bad. The suggestion of a loss of 69 House seats and 13 Senate seats in particular is based on this Politifact analysis, which appears to tally up those losses by comparing the number of House and Senate seats Dems held when Barack Obama took office on Inauguration Day 2009 with the number they hold today.
But the always-excellent Ron Brownstein has suggested a somewhat different metric. Brownstein posits that the fairer way to measure this is to look at the number of seats that Democrats held after the election that took place before Obama won the presidency — that is, after the 2006 elections — and compare that total with the number they hold today (and, ultimately, to the number they hold after the election of his successor). Those results look somewhat different:
Uh-oh. Get your boots on….
Using that yardstick, we would measure Obama by comparing the Democratic standing after 2006 (the last election before his first presidential campaign) with the party’s position after 2016 (the race to succeed him). For Bill Clinton, say, the equivalent comparison would be 1990 to 2000.
So far, Democrats under Obama are down five Senate seats (from 51 in 2006 to a likely 46 today, counting independents who caucus with them) and around 45 House seats, depending on final recounts.
And Brownstein adds that by this metric, three other recent presidents fared worse than Obama, one of them being George W. Bush
Oh you just knew they were going to bring in Bush’s name on this didn’t you?
As one reader put it, ..
The article is nothing short of the hockey stick of Apologia for Democratic destitution in the wake of the Obama.
And I tell you now that going forward this is going to be the argument. They really didn’t lose it all, they actually did pretty well.
I think I ought to point out before proceeding further that there were more people up for election in the above referenced November during the Bush presidency. But let’s not facts get in the way of a good excuse. And of course let’s completely ignore the facts posted by Rory Cooper…
Under President Obama, Democrats have lost 900+ state legislature seats, 12 governors, 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats. That’s some legacy.
After all, we would not ourselves to be swayed by inconvenient facts.
