OK, lets pull together to.....Make a Difference

CONTROVERSIAL PREDICTION

Here is a controversial prediction. It can be verified or disproved by midnight, Tuesday, November 2.

THE PREDICTION: 50% of those who were members of Congress when President Obamawas inaugurated will not be members of the new Congress when it convenes in 2011.

SECOND PREDICTION---and this is more important to democracy than the first prediction: I predict that the talking heads, the editorial writers and pundits will spend all their efforts trying to divine the political reasons for the voter rejection of so many incumbents.

BUT, one reason for the inability to devine the cause of the “incumbents rejections” is it effects both major parties proportionately. And while the pundits will be spending their analytical talents trying to devine what each losing candidate did wrong, the real answer will be that the angry American voters took their anger out on whoever (incumbents) was associated with the current unplesantness regardless of party or political conviction.

The real lesson to be learned particularly by career politicians is if things aren’t going well, the politicians in power will be kicked out of office even if the problems weren’t their fault.

That will be a very important lesson for career politicians and, if learned, a very important step for the growth of the basic democratic idea. The lesson, hopefully to be demonstrated, is that a politican’s job security and the longevity of his party’s dominance depends on whether a majority of the voter’s believe “that the country is heading in the right direction”. (The most recent polls show that somewhere between 60—80% of the poll respondents said they thought the country was heading in the “wrong direction”.)

Finally, the election hopefully will prove that voters are more sophisticated than politicians typically believe them to be. It really doesn’t matter to the voters that the Democrats made housing so easy to buy that people vastly overextended their credit or that the repeal of the Glass=Stegall Act in 1999 gave the banks the new authority to speculate with people’s savings in new ways. The facts are, that both parties may have been trying to do right, but Congress did not react fast enough when it first became obvious that greed and excess were way too rampant.

TO REPEAT: The fact that the Congress didn’t quickly correct their mistakes is what has created the voter discontent predicted to be shown in the November 2 election.

NOW, if this lesson can be learned, the chances of repeating the mistakes will be somewhat reduced and the case for democracy will be advanced to a new level because elected officials everywhere will conclude that their job security depends almost solely on whether the voters think the country or the state or the county is heading in the right direction with a minimum of graft, corruption and greed. What’s more, the voters don’t care who caused the problem.

I can hope only that this lesson will be learned in an indelible way.