As the mid terms approach the Democratic Party has pulled out all stops in hounding supporters for money. Daily I open my email to find it overloaded with heart rending appeals for miniscule amounts of money - like $5 (of course they would like to get much more.) According to the Washington Post $2.4B will be spent on television advertising by both parties. The Demos by appealing to the masses of registered Democrats for money in small amounts are trying to match the massive gusher of cash from the Kochs and Karl Rove affiliated PACs. The hapless Democrats face a loss of their Senate majority. It seems the good burghers of the US have turned against Mr. 'Audacity of Hope.’ It’s probably more a general malaise than actual performance but you would never know it from the feedback loops of polls telling people how low his rating are, and therefore they go lower.
But the midterm candidates instead of educating the public in what Obama has accomplished they run from him like he has Ebola. That is very ugly and exposes the underlying fecklessness of the whole party. Despite a heavy headwind Obama has accomplished at lot. And I say that as a heavy critic of Obama. Urgently needed health care reform was pushed through, albeit very health care insurance industry friendly. And counter-cyclical fiscal policy, although less robust than all called for, reversed the downward plunge of the Great Recession (look at any chart.) Also he has not yet approved the horribly ill-advised XL pipeline, and for the most part has resisted Republican scorched earth policy regarding FDR‘s safety net. Yet democratic candidates everywhere are trying to distance themselves from him. Apparently the idea is to produce a Republican-lite appeal while imitating the horrendous negative ads the Repubs and their “dark money” sponsored allies crank out.
No wonder so many people turn away from the whole sorry spectacle and don't even vote.
Political advertising is designed to ring bells of the gullible
and uniformed, everyone else is either annoyed or repulsed. The Repubs are masters of the low road and have won many an election with a particularly effective political ad. Their expertise at deception is admirable. Even as they are the party of the ownership class they have now become also the party of white lower middle class. With their extensive corporate media apparatus they are able to profusely pump out disinformation, lies and racist 'dog whistling'. But when Demos try to play the same game with scurrilous below-the-belt political ads they risk becoming interchangeable with their loathsome adversaries.
In our faux democracy each election becomes a contest of which party can accumulate the biggest arsenal of money. Each with their respective bases more or less accounted for all this money is thrown at advertising at the elusive ‘uncommitted voter.’ In a real democracy informed citizens would consider candidates based on what they materially offered. It should not be a contest of warring bullshit. This degrades all of us. In a real democracy the media would be an honest broker and not be afraid of the truth even if it meant exposing actual lies of powerful interests. But our media is not on the side refining and improving our so-called democracy, it is on the side of making money. .
Since the economy never really recovered in terms of jobs partly due to Republican recalcitrance (they didn’t really wanted it fixed on Obama‘s watch) and partly due to emerging serious structural problems with global capitalism in general, the Repubs have been able to disingenuously blame it all Obama and the Democrats - and it has stuck. People want scapegoats, culprits. The stimulus (and it did work) was half as much as was urged by economists at the time. Furthermore it was undermined by useless tax-cuts as a bone thrown to the Repubs. Yet many Americans see it as a failure. They are losing ground and they know it. Too much wealth is flowing to the top most tiers. The middle class is shrinking. But the Democrats are in (the Presidency at least) while this happening and they are being blamed. Actually Americans lean more to the political left than they realize. A recent study shows a majority of Americans favor redistribution of the wealth by taxing it back from the top tiers especially the top 1%. They also favor an increase in the minimum wage which would which
push the entire wage structure upwards. Yet
the fundamental dogma of the Repubs is the diametric opposite – further tax cuts for the rich and the corporations they own and no stinking increase in the minimum wage (“it will kill jobs“.) This even as the rich and the corporations already sit on vast reservoirs of non productive wealth which funds massive global speculation in all sorts of (still very much legal) derivatives (futures, credit default swaps, etc.)
Maybe the pessimistic (for Demos) poll numbers will scare enough formerly non-participants and independents with an inclination toward practicality and good sense, to vote. But I doubt it. People are uncommitted because they are ignorant, confused and under informed (and bamboozled.) It probably doesn’t matter anyway because even if the Demos somehow miraculously retain a majority in the Senate, the Repubs still have the good old filibuster.
