Why We Should Not Read Too Much into the Election and What We Need to Do To Win a Few More

I think people are reading far too much into these election results.  The bottom line is that we did much better than I anticipated (OK, so I have low expectations).   The craziest Tea party nut jobs lost.  Republicans like to win more than anything else, and they are smart, so I think they are less likely to run extreme candidates in 2012, which is good for all of us.
The economy is horrible.  Unemployment is in double digits.  Yes, I believe this is the result of Bush mismanagement but also part of a business cycle that is disconnected from politics.  Nevertheless, people vote according to the most basic principles and economics drives the boat.   It probably wouldn't be too hard to develop a simple model predicting how many midterm seats will be lost by the incumbent party given a certain unemployment rate going into the elections.  I would bet that that model would predict that we should have done much, much worse than we did.   When you take into account the Faux News phenomenon, Hate Radio, and the Koch Brothers now being able to pump as much money as they like into elections (thanks to the Supremes), I am surprised that any Democrat won.
Nevertheless, I agree we have to get on message and stay on message and reduce our policies to their most concrete and graphic terms.
Saying you're pro-Life is easy; defending the idea of empowering a government bureaucrat to force your daughter to have her rapist's child (as Palin has repeatedly stated she wants to do) is quite another.
Saying you don't want a government takeover of healthcare is easy (especially when no one proposed such a thing) but defending the idea of letting even a single child die of a treatable condition because her parents worked for the wrong employer or were between jobs when she got sick is much harder.
Saying you oppose deficits and debt is easy; explaining why you then support tax cuts that created that debt in the first place (and have obviously done nothing to grow our economy) is harder.
We need to keep firing at them and now we don't have to be the only ones driving while they keep jeering from the back seat hoping we will fail to get the car out of the ditch they drove us into.  It's their turn (at least in the House) to put up or shut up.
And we have to use the L word more.  I don't care if Jon Stuart thinks it's not nice, we can't sit back and ignore it when the other side lies.  Sarah Palin's death panel fabrication should have been a career ender as a credible infotainer (or whatever she is) just as Dan Rather's far less egregious lapse ended his career.  We should hound these people when they lie and repeatedly and often remind people that they have not yet retracted, explained, or apologized for past dishonesty, so why should anyone believe them now?  Remember that the same people screaming about the risks of a nonexistent government takeover of healthcare with nonexistent death panels are the ones who screamed a few years ago about the nonexistent WMD threat in Iraq.  A broken clock is right twice a day, but these guys don't even have that kind of batting average.
And that's all I have to say about that.