Time Out

The papers are full of the morning-after analysis of the midterm election. Go to the Washington Post and get the Three Musketeers: E.J. Dionne, George F. Will, and David Broder, who all have their chin-stroking considered opinion as to why the Republicans lost, including Will's rather odd conclusion that conservatism won. (Okay, I thought the Democrats were considered to be the liberal party, but, to quote a phrase that seems to be all the rage, what do I know).

So I might as well toss in my two cents. After talking to a fair number of people and reading a lot of blogs -- and not all of them liberal -- I've come to the conclusion that just about everybody was tired of being treated like children by people who themselves were acting like children. For the last twelve years we've had a government marked by petulance, impatience, short-sightedness, bullying, dangerous acting out, and intolerable cruelty just for the sake of making the victim suffer which, when rebuked, resulted in whining and victimhood. Any parent or teacher who's had to deal with unruly charges knows the drill, and it is exhausting and accomplishes nothing; can you name any laws or acts passed by the 109th Congress other than the Save-Terri-Schiavo bill? Oh, right -- they passed an energy bill, a nice giveaway to the struggling petroleum companies and whose one noticeable effect on our daily lives is that Daylight Saving Time will now begin in March and end in November. Good going, guys.

So the voters decided they'd had enough. The scope of the Democrats' wins is of course being analyzed every which way to make it fit the particular agenda of the analyst; the righties are saying that only "conservative" Democrats won (ignoring the fact that one pro-life, anti-gay marriage Senate candidate lost in Tennessee while one won in Pennsylvania), but it's pretty clear that if you look at the results on a national level, Democrats of every flavor won election or re-election not just on the basis of the fact that they weren't Republicans -- winning by default, as it were -- but because the voters saw that the Republicans had not lived up to their promises that they'd made in 1994 and 2000. Instead, they never got over the gloating and the campaigning that brought them into power in the first place. From the arrival of Newt Gingrich and his attempt to connect the word "criminal" with the Clintons through to the cover-up of Mark Foley's stud-hunt and the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, everything was done with a political calculation. Nothing could be done without the manipulation of the electorate, including starting a war, leaking classified information, rigging science, conning the religious, and proposing changes to Social Security. (Some see it as all being done with an eye to turning the government over to corporate interests, but that goes without saying; after all, we're talking about Republicans here.) It was all done with the rather cynical attitude that the average voter wouldn't see the connection between governing and campaigning. And just to be sure, they enlisted the help of talk radio Wormtongues who were happy to shill for them in exchange for a seat at the Kool Kidz table, and, in some cases, a few bucks under the table.

But the evidence piled up tragically, from the coffins coming home from Iraq to the piles of debris left over from Hurricane Katrina, that all we were getting from our elected leaders was a lot of talk and very little action, and nothing that they did wrong was their fault. Blame Clinton, the news media, Canada, whatever; it was all a rehash of the old playground excuse of "It all started when he hit me back." And since starting a revolution and actually overthrowing the government with a military coup is messy and makes you late for dinner, the voters went to the next best thing: they gave the Republicans a time-out. Sit in the corner, don't move, don't say anything; just think about what you've done and how you must make amends.

The problem, of course, is that we can't afford much more time out. There are too many things that need to be done right now -- health care, immigration, education, the environment -- and trying to gear them for political expediency and advantage will only make things worse. For once -- just once -- can we take a time-out from campaigning and start thinking about governing?

That doesn't mean we can't stop looking at the human factors with a critical eye, and it certainly doesn't mean we can't have a harmless diversion every now and then (the president said what??), but in the end, the voters -- that's us -- sent the message that we want the work to get done.

Break's over. Get back to work.