Tuesday, November 11, 2014

The post-mortems keep on coming. The Democratic wipe-out in
last week’s elections was so total that many people have been offering
explanations.

Trauma induces narratives.

It’s not just that the Democratic Party lost the Senate.
They lost the House so decisively that a statistical analyst at the New York Times suggested that they would not be able to win it back in the foreseeable
future. The Democratic losses in state-wide elections, both governorships and
state legislatures were so extensive that, as many have noticed, the Democratic
Party has, as they call it in sports, no bench.

Aside from old guard figures like Hillary Clinton and Joe
Biden, the party does not have a group of second-tier candidates it can groom as
the next generation of leaders. If Hillary does not run in 2016 the Democratic
Party has no one waiting in the wings. Link here.

The situation is dire. It’s the legacy of the Barack Obama
presidency. Certainly, it was all foreseen, here and in many other places, but
since the Democratic Party hitched its fortunes to the junior senator from
Illinois, it should, if there is justice in the world, reap the whirlwind.

Today, Harvard professor Niall Ferguson offers his own
post-mortem, one that, not surprisingly, emphasizes his own prophetic powers.

Since Ferguson had long argued that Barack Obama would not
know how to govern, to say nothing of how to conduct foreign policy, he finds
himself in the unenviable position of having to dispense with his natural
humility in order to point out the obvious.

In Ferguson’s words:

Sometimes
politics isn’t all local. There is little doubt that it was President
Obama and his
administration’s failures that condemned the Democrats to a crushing
defeat in both the congressional and gubernatorial contests last week. In
particular, the president’s fumbling foreign policy played a key part, in
defiance of former House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s rule that “all politics is
local.”

In a
New York Times/CBS poll conducted
in September, 58 percent of voters expressed disapproval of Obama’s foreign
policy. The previous month, a majority said they thought the president was “not tough enough” abroad. And an
October Pew poll showed the Republicans doubling their lead over the Democrats
on foreign policy compared with 2010.

He continues:

The
reason the public has lost its illusions about Obama is that he has proved to
be as bumbling an executive as he was beguiling as a campaigner.

The
president gave Congress a more or less free hand to design his flagship
legislation — the stimulus, health care reform, financial regulation. The
results were three giant messes. Worse, he has consistently failed to think
through the implications of three major challenges to American power: the
continuing spread of Islamic extremism, the military threat posed by an
aggressive Russia, and the rise of Asia’s new economic superpower, China.

“We
don’t have a strategy yet,” the president told reporters Sept. 4. He was
referring to the specific challenge posed by ISIS. But those words pretty much
sum up his foreign policy since 2009.

The
perfect illustration is the president’s 180-degree turn on Iraq. Elected as the
man who could get the United States out of George W. Bush’s war, he withdrew US
forces far too hurriedly and — as predicted — has now been forced to send them
back in to try to quell the resulting maelstrom.

Today,
of all days, this strategic ineptitude really rankles. Try telling the families
of the brave servicemen and women who died serving their country over the past
11 years that America’s new foreign policy doctrine is “Don’t do stupid sh**.’’

Since Ferguson has occasionally gotten involved in vigorous
debates with the last remaining Obama apologist, Paul Krugman, he must have
taken a certain delight in pointing out Krugman’s manifest failure as a
soothsayer:

Last
month, writing in Rolling Stone, Krugman insisted that Obama is “one of the
most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history”.
Fact-check this: “Most analyses [of the midterms] suggest that control of the
Senate is in doubt, with Democrats doing considerably better than they were
supposed to. This isn’t what you’d expect to see if a failing president were
dragging his party down.”

Er, no.
Tuesday’s thrashing of the Dems was exactly “what you’d expect to see if a
failing president were dragging his party down.’’