The US mid-term elections

Last month, realizing that his party faces a rout in the upcoming midterm elections, President Obama told the audience at a fundraising dinner:  “Don’t compare us to the Almighty, compare us to the alternative.” Amplifying on this message a few days ago when he appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Obama said he still believed that “Yes, we can” was a viable slogan, but then conceded that he would now qualify the promise with the proviso that “[change] takes time and we must work for it.”

Obama may be right, but too many Congressional Democrats have ignored his advice and assumed the voting public will automatically see their Republican rivals as truculent upstarts,  the vanguard of a Party of No that reflexively blocks every serious initiative then blames the current administration for not making enough progress. So instead of confronting the angry populism Tea Party movement on its own terms, a large number of Democratic incumbents have opted for a quiet retreat from the hope and change rhetoric which galvanized the base in 2008. Several have disavowed their support for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme (which began during the last days of President Bush), and discovered a fierce scepticism towards the financial stimulus package and the supposed socialism of Obamacare. Cowed by incessant attack ads – this will be the most expensive mid-term election in history, with a collective price-tag of nearly US$4 billion – many have shown a singular lack of political courage in the closing days of their campaigns, and distanced themselves from the president as his approval ratings dip below 50%.

This lack of nerve will likely prove to be a costly mistake. It is also symptomatic of the ways in which the political establishment on both sides of US politics has badly misread public sentiment. While the President, his advisers and the most strident elements of the opposition have wrangled over the rights and wrongs of bailouts and healthcare reform – legislation that often needs to be enacted for several years before its benefits are clear – the public has dealt with immediate problems like mounting unemployment and an escalating mortgage crisis. The man in the street has faced these uncertainties for the best part of two years. Meanwhile Wall Street has been celebrating healthy profits and returning to its former extravagance. (In 2009, more than 1500 Goldman Sachs employees took home bonuses greater than $1M.) Understandably the public is angry.  So while General Motors may have been rescued and the stability of the financial system ensured, the average taxpayer has yet to see tangible returns from most of its government’s exertions.

The Tea Party movement – which has now earned the sympathy of nearly one in five Americans –  has fanned this resentment with political rhetoric that would, in less dire circumstances, sound plainly foolish. In Nevada Harry Reid, leader of the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, is currently in a tight race with Sharron Angle, a candidate whose many extreme proposals include a plan to get rid of the Department of Education and social security. And in Delaware Christine O’Donnell, whose candidacy has been plagued with allegations that she dabbled in witchcraft, began a recent campaign commercial with the line “I didn’t go to Yale” – probably to assure voters that she would not look after Wall Street first, unlike eggheads like Larry Summers the former president of Harvard University who oversaw the recent bailouts as Director of the White House National Economic Council.

One of the only unifying factors in the loose, often chaotic coalition referred to as the Tea Party movement is the idea that the federal government must be reduced. (A recent survey by the New York Times found that “social issues, such as same-sex marriage and abortion rights, did not register as concerns.”) But while this central idea should fit neatly with traditional GOP talking points, the protest has proved to be almost as sceptical of the Republican establishment as it is of the Democrats. These doubts have given a few Democrats the hope that their mid-term losses will not be as painful as some have forecast, but it is a slender basis for complacency.

It is easy to dismiss populist candidates for their lack of polish and political knowledge, but Sarah Palin has shown that this is not an irremediable problem. Most of the Tea Party gets its information from television and the internet (only 8% bother with newspapers) and these media play to populist strengths. When the brightest and the best can be blamed for the financial meltdown and other crises, ignorance becomes a virtue.

In fact it seems as though right-wing populism in other countries has also learned valuable lessons about the proper use of the new media – many of them, ironically, from Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Last week, for example, the city of Toronto elected a mayor that most of the establishment, and a large majority of the media had dismissed as a sort of village idiot throughout his campaign. Branded as a hothead, loudmouth and know-nothing, Rob Ford nevertheless won a sizable majority in an election that had a higher voter turnout than any previous poll.

He did so by making thousands of phone-calls to disillusioned voters, holding town-hall gatherings and by re-iterating a Tea-Party style message ad nauseam – that he would cut wasteful spending, stop the gravy train and reduce the size of the city’s council.

If his success is any indication of what lies ahead when millions of American voters take to the polls next week, the Democrats should brace themselves for unpleasant surprises.