There Is No Elephant In The Room

Michael Tomasky writes about a Coming Obama Landslide: Crunch the electoral college numbers and something becomes obvious that has actually been obvious for a long time. It is something that has been so obvious for so long that it actually accounts for the months and months and months of craziness of the crazytown Republican primary, and that's saying something: And what that obvious something is, is that it is virtually impossible to see a pathway to victory for the GOP and it is effortlessly easy to see many pathways to victory for President Obama.

There are no certainties in politics, and the economic circumstances that still beset us are as destabilizing as has been the historically unprecedented irresponsibility of monolithic GOP obstructionism keeping those economic circumstances as bad as possible. Indeed, that obstructionist strategy itself reflects, no doubt, the fact that Republicans themselves saw the obviousness of the obvious even before President Obama's inauguration. And, of course, the lazy gossips of our corporate press do enjoy a horse race so much that they will try to give us one even if it is obviously not on offer, focusing on national polls that ignore the electoral college, on partisan outlier polls that yield momentary panics among the sane, on coughing up phony gaffe hairballs nobody really cares about anyway, all to pretend, or possibly even in the hopes of ginning up, that horse race. But, again, what is obvious is that this election is no horse race. It isn't even a dressage event.

As I have been insisting for a year now, I am not worried overmuch about President Obama regaining the White House. I mean, it would be truly terrible if Romney were to win, to send more anti-choice judges into the courts, to abet the ongoing demolition of the New Deal, to bring back neocons itching for was with Iran, to completely ignore the climate crisis four more years, and so I guess I am a wee bit worried in an abstract sort of way at what he represents as a logical -- albeit illogical -- if not a particularly practical possibility. But what has worried me much more all along is that Democrats have to regain the House (or enough of it to make some kind of functional legislative environment possible there) and retain the Senate (and then enact some reform of the filibuster this time to make some kind of functional legislative environment possible there), else Obama's victory won't matter as much as it should -- although it will still matter more than enough to matter to everyone with any decency or sense.

The last and best reason not to talk about the elephant in the room, that is to say about the fact that there is no elephant in the room any time soon if that room is in the White House, is because Obama's victory can only be a true victory if it has the coat-tails to get him a Congress he can actually work with, and that means it is crucial for Democrats and sensible independents -- of whom I think there is at least one -- not to become complacent about his chances. Democrats are uniquely gifted with the ability to draw defeat from the jaws of victory, and the stakes are simply too high for us to let that happen.

It would be truly devastating if Obama were made by the racists and misogynists and warmongers and greedheads and know nothings of the Republican Party a one-term President. But it would be nearly as devastating if Obama's second term were constrained by the same Congressional dysfunction that has characterized the second half of his first term, since so many Americans fell for the lies of the right or decided to sit out the absolutely predictable and predicted disastrous mid-term election.