Florida Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson, the 17th richest Member of Congress with a net worth of $26 million, whose wife and children are currently on public assistance, took to his blog Wednesday to opine on why his party was beaten so handily in the midterm elections. It wasn’t policy, it wasn’t the economy, it wasn’t jobs, it was hatred of President Barack Obama.
In a post on his blog entitled, “The issue was Obama-hatred,” and featuring a picture of the president as the devil, the Democrat attacked the American people for having the attitude of, in his words, “We hate President Obama, and you should too.”
Citing a joke he claims to have overheard at Disney World when a father said, “Blame Obama, Shawn. It’s all Obama’s fault,” as his evidence, the Congressman best known for absurdist appearances on MSNBC and rambling House floor speeches, says hatred of the president is why Democrats now have so few representatives in government.
His analysis, littered with links to a page where people can donate to his reelection, is that Republicans “ran an issueless, issue-phobic campaign. I don’t remember any of them promising to suppress voting, prohibit all abortions, indulge polluters, give huge tax breaks to billionaires and multinational corporations, gut Social Security and Medicare and shred the right to organize – even though that’s exactly what they’re going to do. Instead, the Republicans said ‘Obama stinks, and we’re against him.’ In fact, that was all they said.” (Emphasis is his, where he embedded his fundraising link. The link has been removed.)
He concluded his post with (again, the bold is his, the links have been removed):
There was an oft-circulated post-election chart pointing out that Obama had slashed the federal deficit, slashed unemployment, increased consumer confidence, etc., etc. But I would venture to say that none of that matters to those voters who had become convinced that Obama is Beelzebub. Or Mephistopheles. Maybe both.
Obviously, there are other lessons to be learned from the 2014 election. One could, for instance, compare the 18-point loss of Mark Pryor, who campaigned as the Most Conservative Democrat in the Senate™, to the 11-point victory of, uh, me. Surely there are plenty of lessons to be learned from that compare-and-contrast.
But the only lesson that matters to the GOP is this: What President Clinton called “the politics of personal destruction” works for them – big time. Which is why I can predict, unfortunately, that over the next two years, we’ll be seeing a lot of this:
Courage,
Rep Alan Grayson
A new Gallup poll show the Americans, by a margin of 53 to 36 percent, want Republicans to set the agenda for the country, not Obama. Gallup also found the popularity of the Democratic Party to be at an all-time low of just 36 percent.