Midterm Elections: How the Dems Lost the House

(CBS)  To put the political power shift in perspective, experts tell us House Democrats lost more than half of the land mass they once held as district after district went from blue to red. CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric reports on a remarkable turnaround in two short years.

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As Republicans celebrate their return to power, Democrats are coming to grips with what went wrong.

"I would not recommend future presidents that they take a shellacking like I did last night," President Obama said Wednesday at a news conference.

Hope and change put Democrats in the White House in 2008. The recession and a series of miscalculations cost them control of Congress.

Elections Have Consequences

"The president's economic team was led by Larry Summers," says CBS New chief business correspondent Anthony Mason. "While I think they knew things would get bad, I don't think they were aware they were going to be as bad as they turned out to be."

"In fact, they predicted that the highest unemployment would go - would be 8 percent," says CBS News chief White House correspondent Chip Reid.

On "Face the Nation" Jan. 19, 2009, CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer asked, "Do you think we'll see unemployment actually get to 10 percent?"

"I don't think so, Bob," Summers replied.

"What the president's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel believed was that the stimulus package would work and the economy would start to turn around in the beginning of 2010," says CBS News Political Analyst John Dickerson.

The $800 billion package consisted of public works projects, loans and tax breaks. But Republicans wanted the tax cuts to go even further.

Complete CBS News Election Results

On Jan. 23, 2009, "the House Republican leadership met with President Obama at the White House," say CBS News Capitol Hill producer Jill Jackson. "And the president told the Republicans elections have consequences, and I won."

Days later, as the president was leaving the Oval Office to try and seal the deal with Republicans, the GOP sent word - they would not vote with the Democrats on the stimulus plan or anything else.

"The president found out about that strategy of the Republicans when he was on the way to Capitol Hill to meet with the Republicans," Reid said. "That was the day to me that bipartisanship died."

Boiling Over

"The American public saw a financial disaster and they looked at Washington for help," Reid says. "And all they saw was the Washington throw money at the problem and the banks get rich again."

$700 billion was offered to banks and auto companies as the national debt increased by almost three trillion dollars. A growing number of Americans became convinced federal spending was out of control - and helping big institutions instead of the little guy.

"Early on the administration thought the Tea Party was basically the hard core, right wing coming alive," Reid explains. "When independent voters started showing that kind of anger, that's when they realed started to realize we have a problem here."

The pendulum was swinging away from Democrats. A remarkable 40 percent of voters now identify themselves as Tea Party supporters. And 8 out of 10 of them voted Republican.

Waterloo

"If we are able to stop Obama on this," said Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. "It will be his Waterloo."

"The early thinking in the administration was success breeds success," Dickerson says. "So after the stimulus package passed, the White House thought we better get quickly on to health care."

"Democrats spent a year debating and working on health care when Americans were saying what we care about is jobs," reports CBS News congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes.

Less than half of Americans understood how the 1,000 page proposal might impact their lives.

Dog Days

"What happened in August was that the White House lost control of the message," says CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook. "People started talking at the tops of their lungs and talking about death panels."

"Many members were shell-shocked - many members did not want to move forward," Jackson says. "Many of these Democrats represented districts that McCain won in 2008 - they knew they were vulnerable. They knew their heads were on the chopping block and Speaker Pelosi convinced them to vote for it anyway."

But the first blow would come in a Democratic stronghold - snatching away the Democrats' veto-proof majority and any notion of the president's electoral invincibility.

The election of Scott Brown, a Republican, in Ted Kennedy's old seat in Massachusetts, should have been a huge wake-up call to Democrats that the Tea Party movement and the energy behind it, could affix to any candidate, even in the bluest part of the country," Dickerson says.

The debate dragged on. Unemployment peaked just above 10 percent.

This past February, I asked the president, "In retrospect, do you wish you had waited on health care until the economy grew stronger?"

"No," he replied. "Because keep in mind, jobs were my number one priority last year."

In the year it took for Democrats to get health care reform passed, the U.S. economy lost more than 2 million jobs. Now, nearly half of voters want health care reform repealed.

New Reality

At a town meeting in September, Obama heard from a woman named Velma Hart.

"I'm exhausted of defending you -- defending your administration," she said. "And Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly: is this my new reality?"

Hart's frustration was shared by millions of voters. According to a CBS News exit poll, 84 percent say their financial situation is worse or no better. Sixty-two percent believe the country is on the wrong track.

"There's no point in government unless it improves the lives of its citizens," Schieffer says. "And I think in many cases the Democrats had not been able to show how they had done that."

More Campaign 2010 Coverage:
Election 2010: Winners and Losers
The New House Leaders
The New Senators on the Block
What's Next for Obama and Congress?
Boehner Calls for "Smaller, Less Costly" Gov't

[611Juniper]

I suggest that before people assume this was a mandate for any political party, you look at election results. In a number of races (e.g., the Alaska, and Florida Senate races and the Rhode Island governor's race), there were 3 viable candidates. The person who won did so with far less than a majority of the votes (e.g., 35 - 38 percent of the vote).

I, for one, hope that in future elections, we'll have a lot more of these general election races with 3 to 4 viable candidates. I, for one, have pretty much had it with the two party system (at least as far as these two parties go).

So Green Party, Libertarian Party, and all the others .... Get Geared UP! We need you!

[611Juniper]

As an independent observer of national politics, I would suggest the President isn't the problem, as much as is the Congressional leadership.

(1) First and foremost, the Democrats gave the election to the Republicans by having constant closed rules on all substantive legislation, and even most inconsequential legislation. That meant that the Republicans never had to offer an alternative or expose their ideas to the light of all. Years ago, you could bring bills to the floor that no one had ever seen and steamroll the minority, but not anymore. Not in the era of C-SPAN, Youtube, Twitter, et al.

For months, all millions of C-SPAN viewers saw was hour after hour of righteous indignation by the Republicans over closed debates and no chance to review proposals. The Democrats blew a huge opportunity to put the Republicans on record for all of their proposals. Deadly mistake!

That, and that alone, I put at the feet on Nancy Pelosi. She's the Speaker and she lost the election for the Democrats.

(2) The economic stimulus package had lots of great stuff in it, but lots of pork barrel projects that had no place in emergency legislation. Again, a failure of legislative leadership, both on the part of the Speaker but also the senior committee leaders (e.g., Waxman et al.) who put their pet causes ahead of having a clean, simple, sharply focused relief package.

(3) Only a bunch of idiots moves complex "cap and trade" legislature during an economic downturn. I'm a strong environmentalist, and even I don't get the concept and thought that legislative initiative was overreaching. Had this been the only mistake that the Democratic leadership made, the Democrats might have survived it. But in combination with the other things, this was another huge nail in the coffin.

To a lesser degree, I think the following contributed to the loss of so many seats:

(1) Ethics, ethics, ethics! The Democrats didn't clean house and they didn't drill the Republicans about their ethically challenged members.

(2) The President's economic team is way too tied to Wall Street.

(3) A media that considers facts irrelevant to news stories. A media that ignores the hard questions in favor of letting opponents create good theater by screaming slogans at each other.

[Cato_56]

It didn't help that several medial outlets, including CBS, did a poor job of countering the onslaught of misinformation. When a poll on the economy by Bloomberg finds voters so woefully misinformed it's dismaying.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-29/poll-shows-americans-don-t-know-economy-expanded-with-tax-cuts.html

You and others let your fear of being labeled "liberal" get in the way of your news judgment.

As for the contention that government has never forced the public to buy something, I have two words for you: auto insurance. Mandated by state law just about everywhere.

[sjc_1]

He and Congress took too long on healthcare. It allowed the baggers to bring guns to rallies and make a mess out of everything. Now the GOP wants us all to go back to exclusions, drops and extortion by the insurance companies. When are people going to see who's side the GOP is on? Big business and huge profits at the expense of everyone, that is who.

[TurnAmericaAround]

Your ignorant comments about Obama being a dictator and a Muslim tell me everything I need to know about members of the Republican Party. That's what happens to you when you expose yourself continuously to the Faux News Propaganda Machine. Their charlatans like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly know they have a built in lemming population that enables them to get filthy rich by peddling their snake oil. You're nothing more than their stooges.

[sjc_1]

Most of the GOP are a bunch of lunatic red necks.

[TurnAmericaAround]

Actornaught...you're right. The repubs want to eliminate the minimum wage so "small business owners" make more profits so they can put more Americans back to work at below poverty wages. But in the interest of stimulating jobs, providing insurance to said employees will only hinder job growth so they don't want that mandated either, but they don't want a government healthcare option either because that would be socialism....or worse: COMMUNISM!!! So I guess our poor citizens who are doing the menial work our small businesses require and is needed by our country, they're just out of luck. Apparently this is the American way!

[rodnacious]

Whether or not you want to believe that the voters have spoken, I think that you should realize one thing; the trend of voters giving the opposition Party control of Congress is consistent with previous mid-term elections. The November 2010 mid-elections were no different.

I believe that the Democrats underestimated the strategy of just saying ?No? as used by the Republicans. Just saying no was so ingenious that it worked! In Congressional bill after Congressional bill introduced by the Democrats, Republicans appeared to want to contribute. Compromises were made that watered each bill down on both sides of Congress. As each bill came to the floor either a filibuster would take place or the watered-down bill would pass with absolutely no support from the Republican side of each chamber of Congress ? risky, but it worked? in conjunction with the ?normal trend to oust the Party in control of the White House ? we have ?The Voters Have Spoken?.

The mid-term election trend is well known and has duplicated itself for the pass century with uncanny precision. Each president has seen this reversal in his first term of office. Pundits and the media are spinning what happens as a trend into what the voters are saying at the polls. No one to date has been able to explain why the trend has occurred with such predictable regularity to date ? but we hear that ?The Voters Have Spoken?.

What do the voters speak to? they don?t want ObamaCare; they are not happy about the turn-around in job losses (700,000 jobs per month from July of 2008 through February of 2009); Obama spent too much of the taxpayers money to curb the recession; Obama failed to address the financial corruption on Wall Street ? or was it just a duplication of the mid-term election trend returning on schedule?

I think that it was the latter; my biggest worry is that Obama does not stoop down and communicate more with the people of this country, people who have no idea of what he has taken them through in such short time. I also think that, just as Reagan, Clinton, and Bush 43 did, Obama will rebound in the 2012 elections ? election trends at work. Carter and George H. didn?t for obvious reasons ? they simply weren?t presidential enough to gather the momentum for a second term in office. Obama has to fall into the ?Carter/George H performance? category to lose the 2012 elections ? given his performances so far, I don?t see that happening.

I blog at www.cozumelian.blogspot.com

[TurnAmericaAround]

Shark Boy...typing in all caps like that without any sort of punctuation or coherent sentence structure takes away any credibility you might otherwise have. Think before you write, read to make sure it makes sense, and then ensure you have outlined a logical argument. Now, the only thing I can undertand in your run-on sentence is the first 3 words: Impeach Obama Now. OK...what crimes has he committed which are impeachable offenses? You do know that's the only reason you can impeach somebody, don't you? Tell me the laws he has broken that he needs to be impeached for.

[sharkboy234]

IMPEACH OBAMA NOW RIGHT NOW IN JANURAY OBAMA GO HOME WHITE HOUSE NO PRESIDENT NONE WSJ/NBC POLL IMPEACH OBAMA KU-KLUX-KLAN BURNING CROSS WILL START HERE SINCE WE HAVE TEA PARTY GOP TOOK OVER HOUSE.

[actornaught]

How do the 'pubs expect to keep their $2/hour workforce functioning, if those workers keep dropping dead from lack of medical care? It's where we're going if the 'pubs get their way.