The day of reckoning for Obama is finally here.
Apparently. Or maybe not.
According to some experts Republicans will win historic victories in the 2014 midterm elections, picking up more seats in the House and the Senate of any party since Dwight Eisenhower was president.
Others are saying not so fast: The Democrats have shown an ability to turn out the vote under Obama in a way that has permanently altered the political landscape. While acknowledging that a GOP victory is likely, they argue that it will be closer than some think, with fewer pickups by Republicans than the massive blow out others are predicting.
I’m content to wait until Tuesday to find out who is right.
In the meantime conservatives need to ask themselves: If the GOP can’t win now, then when can they win?
What does it say about the opposition party if it can’t muster historic wins against a historically bad president?
Because thus far the election is closer than I’d like considering how bad this administration has been. They can’t even beat ISIS, or Ebola, or Assad, or unemployment. They can’t even launch a website without problems. All Obama has proven able to do, chief executively speaking, is to beat himself.
Imagine if Obama was more competent. Imagine if he knew how to manage people, make judgments. Imagine if he was a competent executive.
The GOP would be sunk. Hoping the next Democrat will be this incompetent is not a strategy.
I mention this because even as the GOP wins—which I expect—there will be the temptation to see the election as something inevitable. Were inevitability a factor in elections Obama would have lost his re-election bid, a reelection bid where everything but the final result was against him.
The economy was bad and not improving; consumer confidence was still shot; the pocketbook issues that supposedly count were against Obama.
But candidates matter, and so does the ability to project power into elections.
And give the man his due: Obama has altered the vote. Whether it’s permanent or temporary only time will tell.
Win or lose the GOP needs to face the facts. They are several years too late to this party.
While the GOP was phoning in their Get-Out-the-Vote operations, the Democrats sent people to the door. While Tea Party candidates worried about the Tenth Amendment, Democrats micro-targeted their constituency.
There are a lot of little things that need to be done to be victorious, a lot of data to be collected. Right now the Democrats are doing a lot of those little things right.
They don’t the big things right, of course.
But conservatives do.
In victory hopefully conservatives will get message that it takes a coalition to win. Hopefully the establishment will understand that it takes a lot of little people to get the little things right.
The establishment needs the grassroots and the grassroots needs the establishment.
And in order to work with each other both sides will have to give something up.
But what they get back in return can make up for a lot.
Obama’s place in history will not be defined by the next election, but we can start to define it.
Because history is generally written by the winners, not the losers.
And if we can’t win now, when can we?
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