The sweep of Tuesday’s predicted Republican wave will surely cheer conservatives. It left Republicans in charge of more state houses and legislatures, solidified a virtually monolithic red-state South, and gave the GOP the largest number of new House seats (at least 60) in Congress in 62 years — surpassing the Republican Revolution gain of 54 seats in 1994.
Yet the elections left Democrats in narrow control of the Senate, and Republicans partly accountable for progress out of a recession that has defied fixes from every angle.
Exit polls showed voters themselves turned the dial on Washington not because they trusted Republicans more than Democrats, but because they are frustrated with the slow recovery from the wreckage of the Bush era’s Great Recession, and simply took out their anger on the party in power.
Beneath the veneer of anger, and reflected in the tea party mantra of “taking back their country,” lay also the undeniable taint of vengeful racism aimed at the nation’s first black president — a force artfully exploited by an unprecedented tsunami of independent attack ads funded by anonymous corporate donors reveling in the political gutter opened by the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United ruling last summer.
Voters were clearly divided on the first order of business in exit polls reported by The New York Times. Thirty-nine percent said winding down the budget deficit should be the top priority. A nearly equal number said the priority should be the conflicting goal of job creation.
The latter, of course, depends chiefly on somehow stimulating consumer spending in order to rev up manufacturing and business demand for new hires. That, ironically, is the dominant gridlock conflict that has stymied Washington since the stimulus-vs.-deficit-reduction debate began early last year over how best to pull the nation out of the hole of the Great Recession that crashed around George W. Bush’s deficit-bulging presidency and global financial markets in the fall of 2008.
Voters also split on over the question of keeping the Bush-era tax cuts for the nation’s wealthiest 2 percent, which would add $700 billion to the national debt over the next decade. And barely 18 percent said tax cuts should be foremost. Polls still show, moreover, that most voters favor health care reform as a rule, whether through the present new law or improvements to it. Fewer say they want reform repealed.
In short, the elections severely punished House Democrats for lack of progress on improving the economy and job growth, but they gave Republicans no specific mandate. Even top Republicans, including the presumptive new Speaker of the House in January, Rep. John Boehner, and former Speaker Newt Gingrich, said voters delivered no mandate for Republicans, but rather a humbling message for bipartisan progress.
Regardless, economic progress will continue to be tough. Though the electoral dynamic has been changed, and prospects for bipartisan consensus are nominally improved, the macro economic trends that restrain growth seem beyond the control of Washington. Its power to re-energize the job machine is limited. New jobs are growing again under Obama, but not fast enough to absorb the millions of citizens left behind by the recession who still battle home foreclosures and wait in despair for new or better jobs.
If Republicans are to be equally constructive with Democrats and President Obama, they will have to surrender some of the harsh rhetoric and “party of no” tactics that crippled Obama’s proposals for dealing with financial reform, the foreclosure crisis, business tax credits to boost hiring, and a ban on existing credits that reward business for shipping jobs overseas.
The latter is reflective of the larger trends that have wiped out U.S. manufacturing jobs and helped hollow out the middle class in recent years. It is those trends that are, predictably, coming home to roost, kindling voters’ angst over America’s future, and propelling China’s meteoric rise as the world’s workshop.
Indeed, China has now eclipsed Japan as the world’s second largest economy, and as the largest holder of American debt in Treasury notes. It was just a few years ago that economic seers foretold China’s rise to might as the world’s biggest economy and next reigning superpower — an event now probably less than a decade away.
America’s real problem is not whether Democrats or Republicans are in power. It is the absence of political will in Washington and in state capitals to fix the energy and education deficits that are sapping our financial and R&D capital and inhibiting smart job growth. Fully two-thirds of our monthly $50 billion trade deficits are for imported oil. Our secondary education has dropped to 18th among the top 36 industrialized nations, according to the annual assessment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
If Washington and state governments fail to come to grips with these economic megatrends, and fail to chart a path to a sustainable economy, the economy will continue to lag — and voter angst, justifiably, will produce yet another backlash wave in the 2012 elections.