Neither side gets it.....yet.
The election of Scott Brown to the US Senate from Massachusetts has been the big election story of the past week.
Republicans are ecstatic and they think that this was a triumph for Republicans.
Democrats are, of course, very disheartened, but blame the loss on a poor campaign, not their policies.
They are both wrong. It was a victory for the great political center of our country.
What is occuring is that the political center of the country is , to paraphrase Finch's yell from Network, mad as Hell, and they aren't going to take it any more.
In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned as a "post-partisan" who was going to bring change in the way Washington works. He promised more transparency and a bi-partisan approach.
This was what the center wanted to see, John McCain represented the old ways, so they moved into the Democratic column and voted largely for Obama.
Of course, the economy was headed into the tank and the Bush administration had started a huge Federal bailout of the very people who caused the problem, and that had everyone unhappy as well.
Hope and change seemed to be a good thing, so Obama won the election handily.
Almost by the time of his inauguration, it had become clear that hope and change meant more of the same. A huge and mostly wasteful stimulus bill was rushed through Congress, and it became apparent that the United States was facing huge deficits as far as one could project. Cap and Trade was pushed through without any debate and without anyone knowing exactly what was in the bill. And the huge bailouts continued.
All that could be discerned was that the Cap and Trade bill was going to be extremely costly to ordinary Americans, but that the owners of the trading markets, such as Al Gore, were going to get very rich.
So the Tea Party movement started....and grew and grew.
During the Summer of 2009 the ObamaCare bills started to be crafted....in the dark. Rather than transparency, we saw secrecy. People became more outraged, and appeared at Town Hall meetings to protest.
Democrats in the House and Senate were very disparaging of the folks that were protesting.
Tone deaf.
The gubernatorial election in Virginia followed wherein a huge turnaround from the vote in 2008 occurred and a Republican was elected. The Democrats remained tone deaf and continued to try to ram ObamaCare through Congress.
So we get to the election to fill Ted Kennedy's seat. A liberal Democrat runs in the traditionally liberal Democratic state, and is deemed a shoe in. She even took a vacation in the midst of the campaign!
Her opponent, running on the Republican ticket was not a conservative. It was, after all, Massachusetts. But he did tap into the anger of the regular folks.
And he won.
In the aftermath, both political parties remain tone deaf.
The Democrats think they ran a poor campaign and they did not sell their program very well.
The Republicans think the election means a turn toward conservative Republican principles.
Both are wrong.
Each party has its right or left wings, but both of them have to attract the center to govern. Both of them need to understand what the center does and does not want, and neither seem to have a clue that what they have both been offering is not what is wanted. Or needed.
Bush fooled them, and Obama fooled them.
My suspicion is that incumbents of either party are going to have a hard time. They should.
It is time that both parties get a clue, or there will be a party that comes along that will.
