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<h2><b><font size=5 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:
18.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'><a
href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/elec-n03.shtml">Republicans
win sweeping victory in US congressional election</a><o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h2>
<h5><b><font size=2 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>By Patrick Martin <br>
3 November 2010<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h5>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>Incumbent Senate Democrats Russell
Feingold of <st1:State w:st="on">Wisconsin</st1:State> and Blanche Lincoln
of <st1:State w:st="on">Arkansas</st1:State> were defeated, and Republicans
took open Senate seats in <st1:State w:st="on">Pennsylvania</st1:State>, <st1:State
w:st="on">North Dakota</st1:State> and <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Indiana</st1:place></st1:State>. The Republican candidate was
leading early Wednesday in the contest for Barack Obama's former Senate
seat in <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Illinois</st1:place></st1:State>.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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 <st1:State w:st="on">Florida</st1:State>, <st1:State
w:st="on">Virginia</st1:State> and <st1:State w:st="on">Tennessee</st1:State>,
and two in <st1:country-region w:st="on">Georgia</st1:country-region> and <st1:State
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Mississippi</st1:place></st1:State>.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>Republican candidates won the lion's
share of the 39 state governorships, taking control of Democratic-held
statehouses in <st1:State w:st="on">Pennsylvania</st1:State>, <st1:State
w:st="on">Ohio</st1:State>, <st1:State w:st="on">Michigan</st1:State>, <st1:State
w:st="on">Iowa</st1:State>, <st1:State w:st="on">Tennessee</st1:State> and <st1:State
w:st="on">New Mexico</st1:State>, while retaining Republican-held
statehouses in <st1:State w:st="on">Florida</st1:State>, <st1:State w:st="on">Texas</st1:State>
and <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Georgia</st1:place></st1:country-region>.
The Democrats retained <st1:State w:st="on">New York</st1:State> and <st1:State
w:st="on">Massachusetts</st1:State> and were leading in <st1:State w:st="on">Illinois</st1:State>
and <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">California</st1:place></st1:State>.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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 <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Iraq</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>. 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 <st1:country-region
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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 <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName
w:st="on">Guantanamo</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Bay</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>
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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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."<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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."<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>Tuesday's electoral rout will be
bemoaned by Obama's liberal apologists, from the editorial board of the <em><i><font
face=Verdana><span style='font-family:Verdana'>New York Times</span></font></i></em>
to the <em><i><font face=Verdana><span style='font-family:Verdana'>Nation</span></font></i></em>,
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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=1 color="#333333" face=Verdana><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;color:#333333'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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