The stunning results of the midterm election have delivered a clear message from the voters: They were fed up with the president and his fellow Democrats’ liberal agenda in recent years.
When President Barack Obama won the 2008 election, many expected his victory would bring a generational change and refreshing renewal of the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, this did not occur. Instead the president has been consuming his party since his first victory, costing it control of the House in 2010 and then the Senate in 2014.
Tracing the results of all elections after the Second World War, the debacle of the Democratic Party early this month signals a trend that the United States has been and will continue to be a country where the majority of its citizens reject radical liberal ideas and agendas.
The U.S. as a nation was not deeply divided, polarized and radically politicalized about everything until the era of former President Bill Clinton. The extraordinary scale of bailout to the conglomerates during the great recession stirred and bred two extreme, opposite movements: the tea party and Occupy Wall Street. The former has fostered an overwhelming political power that might even shake up the current incumbent Republicans. The victory of tea party challenger David Brat against House Majority Leader Eric Cantor might repeat again in other future elections.
These extremist movements are dangerous to the country when it comes to governance. Candidates bearing with extreme ideology, either conservative or liberal, usually accuse incumbents of compromising too much to the opponents or being too moderate. Such a way of attacking worries incumbents, who either lose the election or take a similar polarized view as those challenges, may eventually lead to more polarized-minded candidates elected to offices. This deadly downward spiral does little to recover an already malfunctioning government.
Although after the election Obama and the Republican leaders expressed a strong will to dedicate to any possible bipartisan cooperation in two years, the divides between the two are still too large to bridge. The root of all the divides is that Obama and his fellow Democrats have moved too far and too quickly on their agendas in the past few years. From orchestrating the Affordable Care Act to immigration reform, the Obama Administration has been eroding the fundamental structure of this country—federalism, granting states many rights to decide their own legislature. Any attempts to conform a complicated law to all states will hardly succeed, especially in enforcement. The chaos of federal health care exchange and subsidies to states is an example in case.
Compared to the last popular Democratic president, Bill Clinton, perhaps Obama’s instincts are more liberal than those of Clinton. Though many of Obama’s actions at the beginning of his first term, such as extending former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts and resisting nationalizing the big banks, would label him as a “moderate,” he did so because the economic solutions were limited at that time. Clinton raised income taxes on the rich, the fuel industry and various corporations without a single vote from the Republicans, which is considered a liberal policy from a standard political point of view. But Clinton’s place in the Democratic Party was very different from Obama’s. He chaired the Democratic leadership council prior to running president, pulling the Democratic Party to the center. There is nothing in Obama’s presidential history comparable to Clinton’s.
The radical aspect of Obama is not only expressed through his ideas, but also and, most dangerously, through his actions. Clinton had launched several ambitious liberal reforms during his presidency. His healthcare plan was somehow more radical than Obama’s, but it was killed in Congress. Clinton tried to allow gay people freedom of expression in the military but ended up with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Obama did away with DADT anyway. President Obama often gets around Congress to use his executive power to create and enforce his own laws. That desire of authority has gone too far beyond the public’s tolerance of use of power.
There’s nothing wrong with being a liberal-minded Democrat. But as a president, it is better to be a moderate Democrat in a country dominated by a slight right-leaning majority.
