[PAA-Discuss] Republicans win sweeping victory in US congressional election

[Ron and Kris Graham]

 <http://www.wsws.org> World Socialist Web Site




Republicans <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/elec-n03.shtml>  win
sweeping victory in US congressional election


By Patrick Martin 
3 November 2010


With many results still being counted or too close to call, the US
congressional elections have produced a sweeping victory for the Republican
Party, which regained control of the House of Representatives, gaining as
many as 60 seats, and cut into the Democratic margin in the Senate.

Incumbent Senate Democrats Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and Blanche Lincoln
of Arkansas were defeated, and Republicans took open Senate seats in
Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Indiana. The Republican candidate was leading
early Wednesday in the contest for Barack Obama's former Senate seat in
Illinois.

In the House of Representatives, Republicans took at least four seats from
Democrats in New York, two in New Hampshire, one in New Jersey, five in
Pennsylvania, five in Ohio, two in Michigan, two in Indiana, three in
Illinois, and two in Wisconsin, for a net gain of 26 seats in the industrial
Northeast and Midwest. The Republicans also captured at least 15
Democratic-held seats in the South, including three each in Florida,
Virginia and Tennessee, and two in Georgia and Mississippi.

Some longstanding congressional Democrats lost their seats, including House
Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt in South Carolina, Appropriations
subcommittee chairman Rick Boucher in the coal-mining region of Virginia,
and Ike Skelton of Missouri, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

Republican candidates won the lion's share of the 39 state governorships,
taking control of Democratic-held statehouses in Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Michigan, Iowa, Tennessee and New Mexico, while retaining Republican-held
statehouses in Florida, Texas and Georgia. The Democrats retained New York
and Massachusetts and were leading in Illinois and California.

The electoral debacle is a devastating indictment of the Obama
administration and the Democratic Party. Two years after an overwhelming
victory in the presidential election, four years after the Republicans lost
control of both the House and the Senate, the right-wing policies of the
Democrats have created the conditions for a massive comeback by the
Republicans.

The corporate-controlled media and the representatives of the two big
business parties are already proclaiming that the outcome of the election
demonstrates that the American people have shifted to the right, embracing
the "free market" nostrums of the Republican Party and the right-wing Tea
Party movement.

This contention is both stupid and ludicrous. According to these political
"experts," in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great
Depression, with unemployment near double-digit levels, millions facing
foreclosure, and the poverty rate skyrocketing, the American people have
decided that they favor eliminating unemployment compensation, cutting
Social Security, closing public schools and slashing taxes for the rich.

Exit polls demonstrate that, far from a surge of popular support for the
Republicans, the outcome was determined by a collapse in the vote among
those who voted most heavily for Obama and the Democrats in 2006 and 2008.
While young voters, those 18 to 29, comprised 18 percent of the vote in
2008, they made up only 10 percent of those who turned out at the polls on
Tuesday. Those over 65 comprised 15 percent of the vote in 2008, but 24
percent of the vote in 2010.

The elderly shifted sharply against the Democratic Party in large measure
because of the reactionary character of the Obama health care "reform." Far
from being a progressive measure to extend health care to the uninsured, the
Obama plan was primarily a cost-cutting measure that many of the elderly
regarded, quite correctly, as a threat to Medicare benefits. While 48
percent of the elderly voted Republican in 2008, this figure jumped to 58
percent in 2010, one of the largest swings among any demographic group.

The collapse of support for the Democrats was the product of two years of
betrayal of the illusions promoted in the 2008 campaign. The Democratic
victories in 2006 and 2008 were fueled by popular hostility to the Bush
administration's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama appealed to these
sentiments in order to get elected, but once in office he continued the same
militarist policies, even keeping on Pentagon chief Robert Gates and General
David Petraeus, and pouring another 70,000 troops into Afghanistan.

>From the beginning, Obama disavowed any effort to hold Bush officials
responsible for the blatant illegality of the wars, for torture and other
war crimes, or for the attacks on democratic rights undertaken as part of
the "war on terror." Obama intensified domestic spying, kept the Guantanamo
Bay detention camp open, backed renewal of the Patriot Act, and declared
that the commander-in-chief had the right to order assassination of American
citizens.

On economic policy, Obama brought in figures identified with Wall Street
like Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers to be his chief aides. He
combined solicitude for the banks with scarcely concealed indifference to
the plight of the working class. Obama moved heaven and earth to continue
the bailout of Wall Street begun under Bush, while rejecting any
job-creation measures by the federal government and describing unemployment
as merely a "lagging economic indicator."

In the month leading up to the midterm election, the White House seemed to
go out of its way to alienate the youth and workers who turned out in 2008
to vote for Obama, who ran as the candidate for "change" and "hope." The
administration opposed a moratorium on foreclosures despite revelations
about banks fabricating documentation, lifted the ban on drilling in the
Gulf of Mexico imposed after the BP disaster, and promoted more tax breaks
for business in the name of "job-creation."

Tuesday's electoral rout will be bemoaned by Obama's liberal apologists,
from the editorial board of the New York Times to the Nation, who will join
in blaming the American people for having "moved to the right." In reality,
the election has exposed the Democratic Party for what it is: an alliance of
a part of the financial aristocracy with a privileged and complacent section
of the upper middle class, a social category that includes the trade union
bureaucracy.

Establishment liberalism is concerned about lifestyle issues and identity
politics, but is utterly distant from the needs of the working people who
are the vast majority of the population. It has moved so far to the right
that the economic program of Obama and that of the incoming House Speaker
John Boehner and the Republicans differs only on minor details.

Coming out of the election, Obama will renew the drive towards
bipartisanship with which he began his administration, going out of his way
from the moment of his election to rehabilitate a completely discredited
Republican Party. All the "compromises" that he proposes will amount to
acceptance of Republican demands for deeper reductions in social spending as
well as further tax cuts and other concessions to corporate interests.

Republican leader Boehner declared that his new majority in the House of
Representatives constitutes the "voice of the American people." The truth is
that the Republican victory sets the stage for a direct confrontation
between the working class and the most reactionary sections of the American
ruling elite.

In this conflict, the working class will find a way forward only through a
resolute and implacable break with bankrupt liberalism and the Democratic
Party and the building of a new and independent mass political movement
based on a socialist program.

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 


 

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