Elections have consequences. The consequences of the November 2010 elections -- and one might add the November 2009 elections in New Jersey and Virginia and the January 2010 special Senate election in Massachusetts -- became clear as lights shone over the snow at both ends of the Capitol on Thursday night.
"The single most important jobs program we can put in place is a growing economy." So said Barack Obama at his surly press conference last week defending the tax deal he made with Republicans.
We won't be able to say we weren't warned. Continued huge federal budget deficits will eventually mean huge increases in government borrowing costs, Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of Barack Obama's deficit reduction commission, predicted this month. "The markets will come. They will be swift, and they will be severe, and this country will never be the same."
Is there any chance we can come to grips with our short-term and long-term fiscal problems -- the huge current federal budget deficit and the huge looming increases in entitlement spending?
I don't claim to be an expert on monetary policy or international finance, but I've been astonished by the degree of disrespect expressed here and abroad to the latest economic policies of President Barack Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
George W. Bush is sitting on a hotel sofa in front of a south-facing window on a sunny November morning. His presidential memoir, "Decision Points," is No. 1 on amazon.com and is expected to be No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. "I've got a very comfortable life," he says.
For political junkies of a certain age, it was a given that the House of Representatives would always be controlled by Democrats. They won the chamber in 1954 and held on for 40 years -- more than twice as long as any party in American history had before.
Let's try to put some metrics on last Tuesday's historic election. Two years ago, the popular vote for House of Representatives was 54 percent Democratic and 43 percent Republican. That may sound close, but in historic perspective it's a landslide. Democrats didn't win the House popular vote in the South, as they did from the 1870s up through 1992. But they won a larger percentage in the 36 non-Southern states than -- well, as far as I can tell, than ever before.
Uncharted territory. Historic upheaval. The tallies are not all in as this is written. But it seems that the 2010 elections have produced results that are unprecedented in the lifetimes of most readers.
Heading into what appears to be a disastrous midterm election, the Obama Democrats profess to be puzzled. The president's record, they insist, is moderate, accommodating -- if anything, overcautious. So why do most American voters seem to be angrily rejecting it?
