No real surprises

The election results are in, and Democrats nationwide are looking and sounding understandably depressed. Over the next few days we're going to get to hear a lot of second-guessing as to why so many supposedly promising candidates lost.

Here's a hint: no one wants to vote for a candidate who acts ashamed of his or her own party. I saw a whole lot of candidates busy trying to distance themselves from President Obama. If I were an undecided voter, I'd have a hard time finding a good reason to vote for anyone who tried to claim that even though he or she was running  as a Democrat, that person didn't really support the President's policies or want anything to do with him. The ultimate, of course, was Alison Grimes in Kentucky embarrassing herself by tap dancing around a question about whether or not she, an avowed Democrat, had voted for the person at the top of the Democratic ticket in 2012. WTF? Did anyone seriously believe that she had NOT voted for Obama? The surprise isn't that McConnell won; it's that anyone at all in Kentucky voted for Grimes. In any case, in too many states and districts, the Democratic candidates gave voters a choice between Republican-Lite and Real Republican. Not surprisingly, given a choice, voters opted for the Real Republican instead of the pseudo version.

It probably doesn't help that the Democratic Party is still being managed from the top by corporate shills. But that's a subject for a different post.