WHY THE WRONG FOLKS KEEP GETTING ELECTED

This is the song that never ends

It just goes on and on my friend

Some people started singing it not knowing what it was,

And they'll continue singing it forever just because .

                                    Shari Lewis

Amazing. The more I’ve learned about these upcoming mid-term elections, the more this song just popped into my head and kept playing.  Coincidence? I think not.  Some things- like American politics- never change.  In my mind there is nothing more consistently Byzantine, convoluted, absurd and ludicrous than American politics.

The majority of Democratic candidates are running away from Barak Obama like he has the cooties, while the Republicans are poised to take control of the Senate.  The Republicans have had one agenda-as articulated by their leader, Mitch McConnell who is on record saying: “As long as Republicans refused to follow his (Obama’s) lead, Americans would see partisan food fights and conclude that Obama had failed to produce change.”  

Not only do we have McConnell on record putting politics above country, but we also have him- at a time when more and more college grads are living with their parents due to the unbearable burden of student loans- fending off any efforts to make those loans more affordable. Elizabeth Warren has been trying to change the law so that student loans could be refinanced when interest rates drop.  She is trying to lower student loan interest rates on working class kids by closing tax loopholes for the wealthy.  Mortgage loans can be refinanced, auto loans can be refinanced.  The only loans that cannot be refinanced are the ones that are needed for upward mobility: school loans. What could be more American than allowing the brightest to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” by attending the best schools into which their talents can get them admitted?  Common sense tells us that if the best and brightest can attend the best schools, then society as a whole-not to mention the student him/herself- will be better off.  That is what the American Dream is all about.  Who champions the American Dream more than the Right?  What does McConnell say about all this?  “Not everybody needs to go to Yale.”

Despite McConnell consistently voting against the interests of the vast majority of his constituency, he has survived in the senate for thirty years and is still a few points ahead in his race for reelection against Democrat challenger, Alison Lundergran Grimes.  Grimes, meanwhile, is so afraid of the backlash against the head of her party, The President of The United States, that she refuses to say if she voted for Obama or not.  And what, exactly, other than the fact that he’s black, is the source of this anger and resentment of Obama?

According to Charles Krauthammer (who constitutes one third of the right wing brain trust-along with William Kristol and George F. Will) a major source of discontent is Obama’s handling of the economy.  A Republican is saying that Obama was too slow in cleaning up the George Bush (REPUBLICAN) mess- the greatest economic mess in U.S. History since the great

Depression.  Of course, Krauthammer neglects to mention that every step Obama has taken to revive the economy from its Republican induced coma had been fought bitterly by those same Republicans.

As if laying this economic mess at the feet of the president weren’t enough, Krauthammer, ever the jokester, lays a genuine thigh slapper on us when he writes: “”Moreover, here is a president who proclaims the reduction of inequality to be the greatest cause of his administration.  Yet it has radically worsened in his six years.” Every single attempt by the Obama administration to reduce the inequality has been met with accusations of SOCIALISM! (AARRGH!!!)  

The amazing thing is that these Republican tactics work!  They are like the kid who draws on the walls then sticks the crayon in the other kid’s hand.  Where Democrats are often ruled by fear, the Republicans rule by fear.  The Bush administration used the terrorism alert to keep a gullible public so worried that they had to vote for him.  With nothing but smoke and mirrors, they win election after election, correctly counting on an electorate so easily distracted that they won’t let facts get in the way. 

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