"The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there."-Barack Obama, Election Night, 2008, letting Americans know that the problems facing us that night were mountainous compared to what they looked like just two months prior.
Yet, if the 2010 pre-election polls are to believed, Americans, weary of the deepest recession since the 1930s, blinded by the fear that our economy is heading in the wrong direction despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and unable to comprehend that thirty years of Republican irresponsibility cannot be turned around on a dime, seem poised to return to power the very people who brought us the Great Recession.
The Republicans
If the American people think the Republicans of 2010 are at all interested in repairing the current economic mess, they are in for a world of hurt. The last two years are a classic case study in Republican incompetence and adolescent obstruction, and when weighed with the irresponsibility of their eight year pillage of the United States Treasury during the Bush years, it is beyond obvious that the tea-bagging fascists who make up the current GOP should not be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
Fact: The congressional Republicans have refused, at every turn, to step up to the plate and work with the Obama administration to repair an economy on the verge of collapse. Instead, while the President and his team worked around the clock to prevent a depression, the Republican minorities in the House and Senate threw up road block after road block, playing political games rather than securing the economic security of the American people. Key positions in the Treasury Department remain unfilled two years into the Obama presidency because Senate Republicans have filibustered their nominations. Why? There is one reason and one reason only: As House minority leader John Boehner has said, the key priority of the Republican Party is to make sure Barack Obama is a one-term president.
Think about that for a minute. The Republican Party, responsible for an almost complete economic collapse, have absolutely no concern for your lot in life. They refuse to pitch in and help repair the damage their policies created. Instead, their only concern is a return to power for power's sake. No game plan. No policy proposals. Nothing.
Mark my words, a 2011 Republican majority will not work to right our economy. The proof is in the pudding: Their counter budget proposal, the official document they put up for a vote in the House of Representatives, had no numbers in it. When asked for specifics about where they'd cut spending and raise revenue, their leaders have no answers. Instead, in a desperate effort to replay the drama of the 1990s, a new crop of Fascist Republicans will spend American taxpayer money trying to overturn the policies that brought our economy back from the brink and, as Rep. Darrell Issa of California has promised, investigating the Obama administration. Not exactly a job creating platform, is it?
The American people, with their 15-minute attention spans, seem to have forgot that the first decade of the 21st century is a testament to the irresponsibility and incompetence of the current Republican Party. Their return to power, even if in just one house of congress, could very well return our great nation to the perilous abyss we were all staring into at the end of the Bush presidency.
Any fair assessment should lead to the conclusion that the modern day Republicans are not serious about governing. Voters need to remember that as they head to their polling places today.
The Democrats
By all measures, the 111th congress was one of the most productive in decades: Equal pay for women, a comprehensive health care overhaul, tighter tobacco regulations, new financial regulations to help prevent another economic collapse, an economic stimulus that kept us from going over the proverbial cliff, and an education policy that for the first time since the 50s puts American kids on track to compete with the rest of the world.
The disappointment by some on the left is legitimate. Many believe more could have been done these last two years, they feel the policies passed by congress didn't go the distance. But the current Democratic majorities made the political reality such that compromise was the only path to take. Conservative Democrats weren't going to vote for solidly liberal programs.
However, what did get done is nothing less than stellar. Without the policies passed by the current congress, Americans would be deep into a second Great Depression, with unemployment nearing 15% and no end in sight. Banks would have closed and Americans would have found their savings gone. It's that simple. It's that straight forward.
But with unemployment stuck at 9.7% and economic growth anemic, the American public isn't interested in what might have been. They want answers and they want them now. Unfortunately, the Bush financial collapse was so severe and systemic that an immediate fix was never in the cards. As former president Bill Clinton said last week:
I’d like to see any of you get behind a locomotive going straight downhill at 200 miles an hour and stop it in 10 seconds.President Obama and his Democratic Party did everything they could with the congressional majorities they had. As a result, the economy is no longer staring into the abyss; unemployment, while not ideal by any stretch, is no longer growing at alarming rates; regulations are in place to help keep another collapse from taking place.
It's going to take a while, we still have a long way to go, but only if we keep the current team in place. To put the Republicans back in power would be detrimental to the recovery, throwing the ship of state into reverse so fast that an all out economic catastrophe might well take place.
