Louisiana Voice

By Judith Howard

My biggest disappointments in the recent mid-term elections were that Senator Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and Congressman Tom Perriello in Virginia lost their seats. Both are men with conviction, and are as clean as politicians can be.

Feingold co-sponsored legislation with McCain on campaign finance laws that our conservative Supreme Court dismantled in January. He voted against the financial reform bill because he said it wasn’t strong enough.

Perriello voted for health insurance reform, for Wall Street reform, and for a cap and trade bill even though he is from a district that went for John McCain in 2008, because he thinks those votes were the right thing to do. In his concession speech he said that Judgment Day was more important than Election Day. I hope both men will run again.

My biggest embarrassment was that David Vitter will once again be Louisiana’s senator. It gets tiresome to be the laughingstock of the country.

According to Republicans congressional leaders, voters in last week’s election sent a message that we want a repeal of healthcare, lower taxes, and smaller government. Of course that’s what they are going to say. That is not what they are going to do.

The Henry K. Kaiser Foundation’s did exit polling to see what the most important thing on voters’ minds was. Their polling found that 29% said jobs and the economy was most important, the deficit/government spending was most important for 9% of voters, and taxes ranked at the bottom with only 5% of voters.

There have been all kinds of interpretations of the election results. The best I’ve seen is this one by Matt Miller:

Voters punished a party they are furious with by giving more power to a party they can’t stand. That sounds about right to me. Capitol Hill Republicans have a 23% approval rating, according to a National Journal poll in October.

Why might voters be furious with Democrats? Because of the unemployment rate. Because we bailed out Wall Street, yet not one banker has done a perp walk for almost taking down the financial system. Because bankers have fraudulently foreclosed on peoples’ houses, yet not one of them has been held to account.

I suspect Democrats underestimate how much the lack of accountability underlies much of the discontent with Washington, especially with people who have lost not just their jobs, but also their homes as a result of being unemployed.
The unemployed and the foreclosed-upon have families and friends who, even though they may still have a job and a home, see how the system has worked for those who don’t, versus how it has worked for bankers.

Plus, corporate America spent anonymous millions to convince voters that Obama raised taxes, even though he didn’t; that health insurance reform is socialism, even though it expanded the market for private insurance companies; and that Nancy Pelosi is the devil incarnate, even though she got legislation passed to benefit the middle class.

In other words, those anonymous millions of dollars created an alternate reality that too many Americans bought into.

In order to show their displeasure with Democrats, people voted for the Party they hate. This makes no sense, but we shouldn’t be surprised by it. Angry behavior is seldom rational behavior.

The election results mean we will probably get watch gridlock for the next two years, because Republicans have no ideas beyond tax cuts, and no interest in governing. What they have is rhetoric—fine-sounding, but insincere words.

Take, for example, repealing health insurance reform. Ain’t gonna happen. Why? One reason is because insurance executives don’t want it to happen. As reported by Reuters, the CEO of Cigna said, “Repealing the new U.S. healthcare law would be a waste of time, but there is room to improve it.”

Insurance CEOs don’t like parts of the law, such as not being able to reject people for pre-existing conditions, but they love the individuate mandate, because it brings them millions of new customers.

Not unsurprisingly, the individual mandate is the only part of the law that voters disapprove of, (where’s all that personal responsibility when you need it?). According to a Henry K. Kaiser Foundation survey last week, other sections of the law received in the neighborhood of a 70% approval rating.

I predict congressional Republicans will engage in all kinds of posturing about trying to repeal health insurance reform in order to placate their Tea Party base. Come 2012, however, the law will still be in place, but Republican governors will try to gum up the works and sabotage the insurance exchanges in whatever ways they can.

The mid-term election has come to an end. Now the 2012 presidential election has begun. Why do I say that? Because rather than groan behind the scenes, some in the Republican establishment have started to publicly turn on Queen Sarah–they do not want her to win the nomination. This could get interesting.