And When He Lost The Independents, He Lost The War!

The Crux Of The Problem

Obama’s democrats took control of the House and the Senate with substantial margins, but America is center right.
For twenty months Democrats had the power to do almost anything they wanted.
They controlled every lever of elective power in Washington but sadly for them they didn’t and don’t control the public’s allegiance.

So How Did The Democrats Lose The War?

The Democrats’ demise is actually simple to explain, they lost the support of the independents.

In 1994 the Republicans got the backing of 14% of independents.
In 2006 the Democrats got the backing of 18%.
But in the latest Gallup survey, Republicans lead among independents by 11%.

You Can’t Win If Only One In Five People Want You!

Since 1984 both the Republicans and the Democrats have had hovered around the mid-30s to 40s in terms of their proportion of the public, whilst Independents have been around the mid 20s.

The GOP’s share declined from 40% in 2002 to 33% in 2008, and independents hovered between 22 and 28%.
So whoever gets those independents wins and reflect the basic center-right contour of American opinion.

The Liberals Need The Center Even More

Since 1992, according to Gallup, ideological opinion has been roughly constant:

Self-described moderates have been right around 40%
Conservatives were always in the high 30s
Liberals were in the high teens to low 20s.

So it should be clear to almost everybody that to try to govern on the strength of only one in five people would be rank foolishness, but Obama and his Czars didn’t seem to grasp this obvious fact for whatever reason.

The Liberal Response

Not having grasped the seemingly obvious, Obama’s advisers and the left wing press are now exhorting him to get even more angry, insistent, and ambitiously liberal.
To be fair to Obama though, I sense that he knows that going further left would be suicide even if the Liberal lemmings would happily jump off of the cliff.

It’s The Public That’s Got It Wrong!

What is almost incomprehensible is that Liberals not only don’t seem to recognize that the country as a whole is seeking a different reality, but they see the majority as just plain wrong on immigration enforcement and the Ground Zero mosque, and they they continue to accuse the American public of bigotry even after it elected an African-American president.

Former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner wrote, “Liberals are expressing deepening alienation from our nation and turning on the American people with a vengeance”.

The Bottom Line

Liberals thought that they thought they had a mandate that was made in heaven in 2008 and they seemingly can’t bear the thought that they deluded themselves and the they’ve gone from triumphalism to a petulant and uncomprehending tantrum in less than two years.