The 'WTF' Election

Mark Schmitt is only half right at his dismissive essay, "The "F-You Election" (at Memeorandum). It's true that voters gave the Democrat-Socialists the epic middle-fingered salute last night, but not for the reasons Schmitt elaborates:

Tuesday's election, and months of Tea Party and other well-funded rebellions, brought back to power the F-You Boys, the F-You Men, and -- if exit polls confirm a narrowing of the gender gap -- F-You Women as well, exemplified by Sarah Palin's "mama grizzlies." Economic frustration is on the rise, and the results tracked it -- in the Midwest, in the border South, and particularly in the Rocky Mountain West, states like Arizona and Nevada that once believed they were "recession proof" are now enduring unemployment rates well over 10 percent. But there were also F-You Billionaires, like the Koch Brothers, whose principal economic frustration is that their inherited fortunes might be modestly taxed; and the F-You Wall Streeters, who two years ago supported Barack Obama, and whose industry was saved by government bailout, but who now seem to have convinced themselves that they were the passive victims of a hostile takeover.

Based on the survey research of Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, the "F-You" bloc is basically a vulgarized iteration of the working-class populist vote that has historically supported efforts such as the Reagan-Democrat electoral coalition and later Ross Perot's "United We Stand" movement that took 20 percent of the vote in 1992. Schmitt excoriates these constituencies because they are the exact opposite of the urban-arugula elites who look down their noses at down-market electoral demographics as modern-day Know-Nothings. Frankly, folks like Schmitt --- and his readers at the socialist American Prospect, and across the progessive fever swamps --- are simply devastated that their big goverment, we-know-what's-good-for-you agenda has been brutally repudiated. Yeah, voters said "F-You," but that after saying "WTF" for the past 18-months, as the Obama administration ran up the largest peacetime budget deficits in American history, while the unemployment rate skyrocketed to 10 percent, and while the Democrat Party passed an enormous and enormously-unpopular healthcare bill that sought to put the U.S. on the path to nationalized medicine.

Schmitt is right that the coalition of voters that ousted the Obama-Socialists is a largely unattached demographic that won't easily translate into long-term partisan gains for the GOP. But we already know that. Schmitt would be better off looking inward to examine why far left-wing progressive government got the boot on Tuesday. It's more likely that --- in coming elections --- the Democrat state-socialist ideology will continue to get the big "F-You" at the polls. And the frustrated working-class electorate will continue to demand good government and economic perfromance, exactly what hasn't been delivered amid the Obama interregnum.