It has taken a few weeks for me to absorb the events surrounding the midterm elections. The left has been far too quick to point out the losses of conservative candidates for senate, especially with Christine O'Donnell, yet ignored the strong showing of conservatives and especially Tea Party candidates for the House and in local elections. The right, as usual, has looked upon the election as some divine sign from the electorate that they are willing to scrap everything that has happened in the past few years legislatively.

The dangerous trend that has occurred in the national election of 2008 and the midterms of 2010 is that the American electorate is very close to imploding on itself. Make no mistake, I'm not trying to color this with a broad stroke of fear, but the electorate is both hungry for change and tired of broken promises. They are close to being at the level where voting for anyone, despite qualifications, is a rational alternative. The Republicans saw solid candidates who probably would have had a chance at winning senate seats, lose to, and let's not be charitable about this, crazy people. It can best be illustrated by the crazy Democrat running for Senate in South Carolina, Alvin Greene.

The electorate was so disengaged by the primary that he was elected without any campaigning. When he was interviewed he didn't come off as an affable Forrest Gump, he wasn't a stumbling philosopher like Chancy the gardener, he wasn't even like Christine O'Donnell, a gadfly opportunist. No, Alvin Greene was a candidate who could barely string sentences together, who had a deer in the headlights look on television and who delivered talking points like the first grade student being fed lines by the teacher at the school Thanksgiving play.

Now, where the fear in my heart rises is when I looked at the polls in South Carolina and saw Alvin Greene was polling at 20% of the vote. I was astonished at the amount of votes he was getting but all things considered I figured if he got under 20% of the vote that would be about right. The same was true with the Christine O'Donnell race where she had so much baggage but she had the fascination of the national media behind her, the polling of 30% she was getting before the election seemed justified.

At election time, despite the continual negative feedback O'Donnell got she managed to get close to 40% of the vote. Now I understand where people wanted to jump up and down and declare it a huge defeat, the actual numbers separating the two candidates wasn't that great. A shift of a hundred or so votes in each county and O'Donnell would have had victory. The shock was in South Carolina where Greene got 30% of the vote. Again, he had a campaign with little get out the vote drive and a number of disastrous interviews, yet the slow witted unemployed man got a huge amount of votes.

What concerns me is a lot of the 'fringe' candidates got into their positions because when it mattered most, the primaries, there was so little interest by the voting public you had a perfect storm of voters who didn't go to the polls and uninformed voters who went by negative ads and campaign slogans to make their choice. I understand that things are tough and it's rough to find . . . no actually I can't say I see how rough it is to vote. You have absentee ballots, mail in stuff, there is the ability to research candidates online. We have tools at our disposal to make informed choices but by the results of the last two elections we aren't doing that.

By any conservative estimate we have had at least 6 years of a crappy economy and it would be impossible to think it could be cleaned up in two years. We think of our world as a sitcom, with everything resolved nicely in a quick amount of time. It doesn't work that way.

Now we live with a situation where the voting population has been lied and manipulated so many times they are willing to throw caution to the wind. I think many people elected black President Obama because they figured black President Obama would deliver on the hope and change he talked about. As much as I hate to bring this up, I think there were a good many people that thought of him as the magic Negro, the black guy from the films who would give sage advice, magically fix the problems going on, then would walk away into the sunset whistling a happy tune. I think others though he was an undercover brother, meaning he was going to be just passable enough to get white people to vote for him, then when elected he would say the magic word and transform into some blackploitation super brother and take it to The Man.

What we got was a politician, but not just a politician but a politician that some people feel will destroy the country because he is 'different.'

Whether we think it or not the midterm election was a wake up call. If I were a betting man, I think Obama has a shot of winning the 2012 election, but that will be because if things go as they should the Republicans won't be on the best footing and they won't have their ace in the hole running. All that will do is cause the pressure to build with the conservatives and the tea party people. When 2016 comes around, we will be at the breaking point.

 

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The Government We Deserve - November 21, 2010
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