Last night we took a thumpin'. We got our asses whupped.
Everyone agrees. It's in all of the papers. It's on all of the websites. Eric Cantor was gloating on MSNBC. You couldn't miss it this morning if you tried.
There's only one little tiny problem: it's not really exactly true.
Oh, we lost. That part is true. And we did indeed fare badly. Some of our best people went down. (Moment of silence please for Feingold, Grayson, et. al.) But as whuppin's go, as historical mid-course corrections go, this one was--well, it just wasn't. What it was was a return to something more closely approximating normal.
"Normal" in this country is having to fight for everything you get. We are not going to be gifted the keys to the car--to use President Obama's favorite recent metaphor. We have to earn them and then to prove continually that we deserve the privilege of driving. Recently, that has meant that the country likes to keep its leaders on a tight leash. Obama knew that, stating on more than one occasion early in his presidency that his agenda for change for far more important to him than whether he retained electability by enacting it.
On Friday, Rachel Maddow ran down Obama's first half-term legacy:
There is no arguing with facts: Obama and the 111th Congress accomplished a lot. Whether they did everything they might have or went far enough or too far is open for personal judgment, but they did far more than any other administration in history ever has in its first 21 months, even if there is a lot left to do. And then, last night, the voters rewarded them by skewering them, by driving the Democrats out of office, by replacing them left, right, and sideways with Republicans, with Tea Partiers, for crying out loud.
How can that not be a complete and utter butt kickin'? I hear you say. The answer is pretty simple, actually:
First of all, this is the first time since the 17th Amendment (remember, the one that the GOP and Tea Partiers want eliminated?) allowed for the direct election of senators that a party has taken over the House without taking over the Senate as well. That tells us that the general discontentedness (as undeniable as the accomplishments Rachel outlined above) is not really aimed squarely at Democrats. It is aimed at Those In Charge. It is aimed at Washington, Inc. As discontent should be.
Why, then, was the House takeover so incredibly huge?
The answer to that is simple as well: it wasn't.
It looks huge: 60 seats or perhaps a few more. Sure looks like a whole great bunch. But let's put that into perspective: 23 of those seats belonged to Blue Dogs, many of them to the most conservative of the Blue Dogs (Kos used words like "vile" last night in describing them was they went down, one by one). The Blue Dogs, as everyone knows, are basically a group of moderate Republicans running as Democrats because there is no place for moderates in the other party. They are GOP-ers in blue clothing, and most of them live in McCain districts. 23 of them lost last night, replaced by far more conservative Republicans in those GOP districts: thus the 60+ seat swing was actually a 37-seat swing, ugly, yes, but certainly not out of line for a midterm election in a time of economic bad straits.
I am not suggesting that we won last night, or anything as ridiculous as that. Nor am I suggesting that we should look at last night as good news. I am merely saying that we should put it all into perspective and see that it may not have been as utterly disastrous as it might initially appear and as, most certainly, the punditocracy will make it out to be.