Debbie Wasserman Schultz is all over television, peddling the darndest notion. She insists voters really do agree with Democrats on the issues, they just don't come out for midterms. And that's why Team Blue lost.
I hope she didn't tell that to Mary Landrieu. After 18 years in the United States Senate, Democrat Landrieugot crushed like a chili pepper in last Saturday's Louisiana runoff election -- for no other reason than she couldn't wash her hands of President Obama's policies fast enough.
For once, I don't think DWS is just propagandizing. I think she's been saying "voters agree with Democrats" so many times, in so many ways since August, she believes it herself.
I think the Democratic National Committee chairwomanhas thoroughly deluded herself.
Here's part of the speech she's making -- not just to "my fellow Democrats" on YouTube, but in interviews given in all sorts of places, in Florida and across the country, to explain 2014 election failure:
"Our party has a problem. We know we're right on the issues," she says. "The American people believe in the causes we're fighting for. But the electoral success we have when our presidential nominee is able to make a case to the country as a whole doesn't translate in other elections. That's why we lost in 2010, that's why we lost this year."
"Right on the issues" ... what issues?
All the polls I've seen show, the "causes" the American people are fighting for are galaxies away from the causes Democrats made their top priorities in Election 2014.
A national Fox News poll taken just before the election -- and conducted by Anderson Robbins Research, a Democratic firm, and Shaw & Company Research, a Republican firm -- found Americans overwhelmingly disapproved of Obama's position on the issues they considered most important:
- Immigration: 34 percent approved, 60 percent disapproved.
- The economy: 41 percent approved, 56 percent disapproved.
- Terrorism: 41 percent approved, 54 percent disapproved.
- Ebola: 41 percent approved, 50 percent disapproved.
- Health care: 40 percent approved, 57 percent disapproved.
- Foreign policy: 36 percent approved, 57 percent disapproved.
- Combating ISIS: 35 percent approved, 56 percent disapproved.
Unfortunately, I think DWS originally got her talking points from Vice President Joe Biden, who was predicting in the summer the Democrats would keep the Senate because Americans agree with Obama "on every single issue."
Never mind that the Washington Post (97 percent chance Republicans win back the Senate), CNN (95 percent), New York Times (70 percent), and Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight (75.5 percent) were all predicting the same GOP Senate win-back. The vice president knew better.
And I guess nobody ever clued Debbie in on Biden's fatal flaw: He's like the fortune teller who believes with all his might he has the gift of clairvoyance, but couldn't predict a hurricane if he was standing in the middle of Miami Beach staring right into it.
I'm not making that up about our vice president. His "gets it wrong" reputation is all over the Internet. And in his memoir, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates writes that Biden -- whom Obama appointed veep only to fill his foreign policy void -- has been wrong about nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.
Worse than building a delusion around Biden's crystal ball, Debbie is blaming the voters: Those lazy sods just don't want to turn out if they're not voting for a president.
The Democrats lost not just because of the administration's mistakes, but because they tried to foist their agenda on the American people instead of listening to what the people were telling them.
The people really do have a problem with Obamacare -- many of them, certainly. They really do care more about their jobs, more about the economy and deterioration of the American dream, more about the national debt, about protecting our borders and energy independence ... than they do about climate change, or a trumped-up Republican war on women, or the GOP protecting "only the richest 1 percent" when the Democrats had billionaires of their own buying election issues.
Voters told DWS and the Democrats all this in poll after poll; they chose not to listen.
I'm not the first to say it, but it's worth repeating: Debbie Wasserman Schultz is right, the Democratic Party definitely has a problem -- their message.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith.