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The Party's Over

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Back in '04, in the gloomy aftermath of the re-election of George W. Bush, I remember the first line of a post-mortem penned by my then-L.A. Weekly colleague Harold Meyerson. "There have been worse nights, I suppose," he wrote. "Kristallnacht, perhaps."

I got the grim humor. Ten years later I get it all over again in the wake of midterm election results that feels every bit as disastrous to progressives -- and to just plain Democrats, or how about the entire 99 percent? -- as those results did to us then. Though at least that contest was close, the reelection far from assured. Questions (though not enough questions) were raised about voting procedures in the key state of Ohio, resentment and disappointment was palpable across the land. Bush v. Gore was still fresh in the public's mind. There was drama, unsettledness. By contrast, the bloodbath of Democrats that happened Tuesday felt like a fait accompli. Anticlimactic. Many people, including Democrats themselves, had been predicting the outcome almost unemotionally for months. On the left there was no sense of fight, just a feeling of weariness about having to try and fend off the increasingly rabid Republicans -- will they ever stop? -- like parents being worn down by a child throwing a continuous temper tantrum to get what it wants. The glass of the fragile Democratic windows that had been the only thing standing between us and total political ruin were being shattered all night long. All we could really do on the West Coast was watch.

Republicans got what they wanted, and nobody else got anything. And that's how this Monopoly game has been going for the last 15 years, winner take all and everybody else be damned. This second-term, midterm pushback from the non-White House party is not new, I know. Bush and Clinton went through it. But the scope and depth of the antipathy towards Obama that started the moment he got in office in '09 was new. It sprang to life as a full-fledged political movement unto itself, with a name -- tea party -- and a strategy that included stoking racial suspicion at every opportunity (the birther thing, the Ebola thing) and raising obscene amounts of money from big corporations whose will became permanently fused to the GOP's. We saw a whole new style of government develop in which Republicans (who became more or less synonymous with tea partyers -- that's now a condition of the game) almost gleefully refused to govern at all. Obstructionism and gridlock, once a hallmark of bureaucratic failure and incompetence, became a badge of honor. Any Republican perceived to be cooperating with Obama to any degree was committing a sin punishable by party excommunication, or at least irrelevance.

Obama certainly has brought change, though hardly the kind he envisioned. What happened to 2008? What happened to the hope? I'm not so naïve to think big or even moderate change could happen in four years, six years or even eight. But the total evaporation of the joy of electing a black president, the sense of triumph so many Americans rightly felt was change, is disheartening. More than that, it's infuriating. Those once-hopeful Americans have been let down by a Democratic party that's been running scared of the tea party types for years instead of standing up for itself, and for Obama. I don't mean stand up for everything he does, but at least support him as head of the party. That's minimal. Instead, Democrats have been too concerned with retaining the empathy of that magical group of "swing voters" -- code language for white, working-to-middle-class people who aren't Obama haters, but they aren't thrilled with him either.

Of course, Republicans have learned that a little racial antipathy goes a long way. All you've got to do is introduce a little personal doubt about Obama to swing voters, et al, and presto! He loses. There was simply never any margin of error with this president, a reality with which African-Americans are painfully familiar. It's why it was so easy to knock off Obama's party. And his party knew that, which explains why the senators and congresspeople running against Republicans in any place other than California were terrified of even admitting they knew the guy. It was a political calculation that reeked of inauthenticity, and the public didn't buy it. Honestly, they shouldn't have.

But neither should we be buying what the Republicans are selling, either. We need new goods. I know it's Monopoly these days and not a free market, but there's got to be another game in town. There's got to be another house that hopeful and progressive people of all persuasions can live in that's made of something stronger than glass.

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