Obama is Okay

Ian Duncan
Class of 2014
College of Arts and Science

On November 3rd, Barack Obama addressed the American people on a different note with a different tune. Those of us who remember may have noticed that Barack Obama’s speech that Wednesday did not sound like his 2004 senate victory. It did not sound like the optimistic presidential-hopeful Obama on the 2008 campaign trail. It was not the Barack Obama who waved a heavy stick at the Supreme Court and Congress earlier this year, pressuring that his agenda be fulfilled. No, that Wednesday, after the midterm elections, Obama’s plea was not a “Yes we can” as much as “Please! I can!”
The night before, Republicans made some big gains. A whopping 60 seats in the House exactly, more than either party since the 1930’s. John Boehner is expected to become Speaker of the House of Representatives with a Democratic Party that holds less than 200 seats for the first time since 1946. The Democratic majority in the Senate has been hit hard as well. The Republicans simply out-fundraised, out-campaigned, and ultimately out-did the Democrats this round.
And yet President Obama should not be as worried as others suggest. In my home district, the Massachusetts 6th, Congressmen John Tierney’s wife created a scandal when she committed gambling fraud with her brother, but, nevertheless, Democratic incumbent Tierney beat the Republican challenger with 60% of the vote. Other than New Hampshire, the northeast remains under Democratic control. The large amount of victorious Congressional Republicans in upstate New York cannot come close to turning the state purple. In the west, Democrats retained control of the Senate seats in California and Washington, and even Reid’s Nevada seat, despite confident pollsters’ predictions that Reid was sure to lose. The Democratic powerhouses in Northeast and West remain stable.
However, the red revolution of the Great Lake states has Democrats shaking in their shoes. Swing states Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana have gone from Democratic control in the house to large Republican majorities. Ohio, specifically, has always been an accurate barometer for presidential elections, but despite large gains in the swing state, Republicans took the governorship by only 2 points—a small margin of victory that Democrats can easily close. This region has not grown more conservative overnight since 2008; perhaps regional voters have merely become less employed.
Ben Bernanke announced last week that the Federal Reserve would pump $600 billion through bond purchases. This may take a whole year to set in to the economy, but it’s certainly better than the alternative. It seems like only a small margin of victory for my fellow Republicans. Americans cast a vote against Obama’s economic proposals, but interpreting this as a ballot for more conservative governance would suggest a more fickle electorate than public opinion suggests. Legislative fiscal policy of the next two years may not exactly emulate the Reagan wave of the early eighties, but at this point, American voters are willing to reward the President for any sign of improvement. Reagan and Clinton rode landslides into their second terms. If President Obama can turn the economy around just a little, I’m confident he can too. This midterm election could easily prove irrelevant with the way things are going now.