Wednesday, November 3, 2010

A little thing call the mid-terms

History is a funny thing, especially when people forget it!!! You can check out the NYTimes coverage here. Below are results from midterm elections, all the way back to 1930, we see the party in power in the Executive lose a significant number of seats in the House (and in often cases the Senate). I only included large losses, demonstrating that while this is a big deal (Dems. losing the House), it is not something NEW, in fact it is to be expected. IN fact, since WWII we've had a divided government for at least two-thirds of that time, so the fact that we just came out of a Democrat controlled White House, Senate and House is the unusual bit of information.

2010 Barack Obama D-60 (still being determined due to close races)
2006 George W. Bush R-30
1994 Bill Clinton D-54
1982 Ronald Reagan R-26
1974 Gerald Ford R-48
1966 Lyndon B. Johnson D-48
1958 Dwight D Eisenhower R-48
1942 Franklin D. Roosevelt D-45
1938 Franklin D. Roosevelt D-72
1930 Herbert Hoover R-52

These midterms demonstrated the growing strength of the Tea Party Movement that was borne out of the major bank bail outs and the 2008 victory of Barack Obama.

So what does this all mean? Well, it means that the party of "no," the GOP (the Grand Old Party) aka the Republicans and the Democrats will have to start working together. I mean, this is assuming that we actually want to do anything to restore economic security to the country, decrease the amount of unemployment, increase education standards, pass legislation that would repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and a repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

More to come...

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