Election redux: The aftermath

It wasn't a wave. It was a tsunami.

Republicans won the Senate, increased their majority in the House and now hold more than half of the nation's governorships. All this just a year since Sequester and Shutdown brought Congress' approval rating down to around 7 or 8 percent.

What in the world happened here, and how in the world can the world be saved?

Answer: Moving us forward will be done only by people who really want to govern -- not just grandstand on partisanship.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning when Mitch McConnell delivered his lets-meet-in-the-middle victory speeches, he said: "We have a duty to do that."

We hope he means it. But it's important to note that leaders can't wait to govern until Christmas morning when they are deliriously happy with all their new toys. Governing is something leaders must do all the time.

There's been plenty of the blame game to go around. In the past two years, Republicans have been genius at obstructionist politics and then shifting much of the foul smell to Democrats. Even Democrats bought into the "it's-all-Obama's-fault" chant. For the record: Alison Lundegan Grimes deserved to lose her race after she so ditched her president and the progressive message. The same is true for every other Democrat who ran away from President Barack Obama. It's one thing to disagree on some policies and something else entirely to act like a Republican fearing Obama cooties.

On Wednesday President Obama said voters sent a message Tuesday: "Voters expect us to work as hard as they do." And he said the two-thirds of Americans who didn't vote sent a message, too: The country's leaders must work together.

"I heard you," he said during a more than hour-long news conference. "We are more than just a collection of red and blue states. We are the United States."

President Obama clearly doesn't believe in lame-duckness.

Nor do we. And nor should anyone else.

The Nation on Wednesday morning aptly pointed out that Ronald Reagan, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Franklin Delano Roosevelt "were all written off, decried and dismissed by their critics" when mid-term elections left them on the sixth years of their presidencies facing their opposing party's majority in both houses of Congress. But they, not the opposition in Congress, defined the last chapters of their presidencies.

Sometimes that meant the president compromised when the Congress compromised. Sometimes it meant the president stood firm.

One thing's for sure. The wave will now give way to an expectation of governance. And woe be to the party -- or parties -- that fail that test.

•••

When Tennessee voters Tuesday approved Amendment 1, they stripped the state's established right to access safe and legal abortion. That vote no doubt was helped by confusing ballot language and ads that lead viewers to believe Tennessee lawmakers couldn't already regulate abortions.

Of course, they could. And do. The only thing they couldn't do before was ban it -- even in instances of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. And frankly, they still can't -- unless they want to spend your money senselessly to put the issue in costly lawsuits again that will head once more to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And when Tennessee voters Tuesday approved Amendment 3, they set the state on a path headed for double-digit sales taxes, rising property tax and still more cuts to education -- all for a state constitutional guarantee of no income tax in the Volunteer State. No, we don't have one now and there is no expected call for one.

The battle cry to pass this false promise was that it would send jobs running to Tennessee.

Well, we don't have a state income tax, so why don't we already have all those jobs? The reality is that what we have is one of the highest unemployment rates in the South at 7.3 percent, higher than six of our eight neighboring states. All of those neighbors, by the way, have state income taxes.

We can't attract jobs to Tennessee because Tennessee's workers are not job ready because Tennessee's education is sub-par.

But we're in denial of these facts in Tennessee.

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