It is stunning to see such a reversal in the Democrat’s fortune in the course of one year.  As the electorate sees the hopes and dreams degenerate into deficits and taxes, the administration will be inclined to spin the outcome into something other than the rejection that it is.

It is clear that the Democrats misread the mandate. But what should they have done?

Clearly the financial system needed reform. Obama could have started by addressing problems in the banking and financial system that would have clearly enjoyed bipartisan support, and would have been seen as a consensus builder.

The administration could have addressed unemployment with tax credits rather than reckless deficit spending.  But when the first program out of the box is to force unions down the throat of business, trample bankruptcy law in the case of GM, pass a hugely flawed Cap and Trade bill, and then force and even more flawed Health Care bill riddled with blatant bribes, then he has created such political uncertainty that economic remedies are effectively neutered.

But the voters’ rejection is as much about style as policy. The unmitigated partisanship, arrogance and deafness to public concerns has pissed off the electorate.

The president prefers making grand speeches to the dirty process of passing legislation. He may have promised change but what we got were old leftists exploiting a crisis to pass unpopular legislation.  His call for openness was greeted with contempt by his own party leaders.

If I were a Democrat I would place a large portion of the blame for this destructive hubris at the feet of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.  The party picked two horribly divisive leaders. If the Democrats hope to save the ship they need to mutiny and get better captains.

This is how desperate  and how low the Massachusetts Democrats are willing to go. This is the Democrat Party mailer Scott Thomas is suing over.  I realize that political operatives from both parties have often believed in the effectiveness of such negative campaigns, but it has appeared to me that they rarely work.  Such action assume that the voters are stupid to believe such extreme statements. What such statements really say is that the candidate distributing such vile tripe has absolutely no compelling reason for you to vote for her.

I doubt if I am alone.

The race in Massachusetts is stunning.  If Democrat Coakley is unable to beat Republican Brown in the bluest of blue states, then any Democrat is vulnerable. Just the fact that this race is close  should be a startling wakeup call to the Democratic party.

It appears that Brown is doing and saying all the right things and Coakley is doing just the opposite. If defeated the party will blame the candidate , and refuse to see it as a referendum on the current administration. Brown is running against Coakley on her statements, her policies, and her record. Brown is being attacked by invoking references to Bush and “tea baggers.”

Last Wednesday the odd at the trading site Intrade had the odds of a Coakley win at 85 to Brown 15, this morning it 53/47; a remarkable shift.

The Democrats have grossly misread their mandate and their hubris has dwarfed even that of the Bush administration. This mismanagement of their party’s victory should be laid squarely at the feet of their leaders, especially Pelosi and Reid. Their first constructive step to clawing their way back from the abyss should be to quickly replace both of them.  It is their hubris, partisanship and arrogance that are putting the nails in Kennedy’s coffin.

It is worthy to note how the president’s popularity has dissipated so rapidly in his first year.  I believe it is for three reasons.

Obama’s success was more related to luck than his party wants to admit.  The timing of the financial collapse could not have been more fortuitous to his success.

Campaign promises are easy compared to the reality of implementation.  Progress requires change, change requires pain.  The real costs and sacrifices of his promises are hitting the constituencies.  The young may have supported Obama.  Now they must buy expensive insurance and face dire employment prospects. This may not have been the change they expected.

And finally Obama and his party totally misread the mandate.  Fred Barnes notes in Why Obama Isn’t Changing Washington (WSJ 11/26/09):

Mr. Obama misread the meaning of the 2008 election. It wasn’t a mandate for a liberal revolution. His victory was a personal one, not an ideological triumph of liberalism. Yet Mr. Obama, his aides and Democratic leaders in Congress have treated it as a mandate to radically change policy directions in this country. They are pushing forward one liberal initiative after another. As a result, Mr. Obama’s approval rating has dropped along with the popularity of his agenda.

Mr. Obama should have known better. The evidence that America remains a center-right country was right there in the national exit poll on Election Day. When asked about their political beliefs, 34% identified themselves as conservative, 22% as liberal, and a whopping 44% as moderate.

As Mr. Obama has unveiled his policies, the country has tilted more to the right. A Gallup Poll on Oct. 21 found the country to be 40% conservative, 36% moderate, and 20% liberal.

Nearly every Obama policy has thrilled either the president’s base in the Democratic Party or a liberal interest group but practically no one else. Nearly every policy is unpopular with a majority or large plurality of Americans. The $787 billion economic stimulus was enacted in February with strong public support. But it has long since lost favor.

Sometimes optimism and contrarianism can complement each other.   Here is a thought.

The health care bill is so unpopular and causing such outrage that other damaging proposals like the Union Card Check bill and Cap and Trade may have no opportunity at all.

By staking all their value on the health care bill which is years away from being effective, and filled with provisions that may not pass Constitutional muster, they risk having it overturned by the new Congress if the Democrats lose substantial representation.

The Democrats may have pushed too far which will erode their power.  A year ago the Republicans were badly whipped, and the Democrats talked about a 50 year reign. Now polls have the Democrats down substantially. The promise of a new era of bipartisanship has ended with the most radical bill yet passed in the Senate with not a single Republican vote.  The promise of transparency has become just another hollow and unfulfilled promise.

The independents that elected Obama have no party loyalty and will turn much quicker than the committed party members.

All of this may be factored into market expectations. The net effect of overreaching arrogance may a far shorter reign than the administration expected.

If the Democrats had been more inclusive and centered they could have gotten more Republican support and we would have possibly ended up doing more damage to the economy than their extreme tactics have caused.

Obama’s campaign was blessed by the financial collapse only a few months before the election. When it struck, few of the voters could absorb or analyze the cause, and with a compliant press it was natural to blame the party in power, although few seemed to realize that for two years that party had been the Democrats.

This is not to take credit away from the Obama campaign’s ability to use modern technology far better than the opposition, their ability to exploit every opening handed to them, their ability to read the voters and to craft and communicate a message that stuck, and their ability to defuse a history of radical ties. And one should not slight the aura of competence Obama projected to a population who clearly felt it was lacking in the previous administration.

But given the recoil from an incredibly unpopular war, an uninspiring campaign from McCain, and most of all the disastrous credit collapse on the eve of the election, I am still struck by how close the election was. The spread was 7.2% of the popular vote;- 52.9 to 45.7%; more substantial than recent elections, but still modest considering the conditions. A change of only 3.5% of the voters would have changed the outcome.

It is not uncommon for a new president to see his poll numbers drop after inauguration and Obama is no exception. But given the radical reordering of our economy and society, I would expect a tremendous pushback and a hardening of the opposition. I think many independents and moderates who supported Obama, frustrated with the Bush Administration for any number of reasons, are having great remorse.

The Democrats seem galvanized at the moment because the Republicans seemed so fragmented and neutered. They seem to recycle old faces. Personally I think their savior has yet to arise. They need a leader with populist appeal AND enough intellectual heft to get beyond dogma, and understand the complexities of global policies and American politics. A successful leader must dominate the unaffiliated center.
We used to observe that candidates ran to the left or the right and governed to the center. This described Bill Clinton. But Obama got the independents to believe he was a centrist, yet has governed far to the left. Some blue dog democrats are already feeling the heat from their voters. The Democrats are pushing their toughest programs recklessly through now, hoping the economy will be in recovery and the changes will be forgotten during the 2010 Congressional elections.

Just as the Republicans got drunk with power when they took Congress under Clinton, the Democrats are abusing their majority power now and underestimating how fragile their majority is. Obama is a formidable leader and has the magic that people will support him even when they disagree with many of his policies. I do not believe that the Democrats in Congress have that advantage.

Camille Paglia steps aside from the sycophants and holds her own party accountable for its elitist attitudes.  Read her whole article in Salon here.

Excerpts:

I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical, because Democrats control the White House and both Houses of Congress. It isn’t conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it’s the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan — it’s the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the “mob” — a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.