Every glance I've sneaked of the news in the weeks leading up to next Tuesday's midterm elections has brought to mind one question:
"What took everybody so long?"
It seems, finally, voters around the country will be putting their stamp of disapproval on 14 nearly-uninterrupted years of Republican Congressional stronghold when punching their chads early next week. Democrats are looking good to re-take the House, and there's still a chance at the Senate.
This is joyous news, the kind of thing that should inspire people to hand-holding and macramé-weaving and buying each other Cokes.
Why, then, does this leave a bad taste in my mouth?
Anyone who's lived in this country for the last six years is patently aware of the Grand Old Party's penchant for blanket bungling, pointing fingers every which way but toward themselves, dealing in shadowy half-truths and rampant fear-mongering. As a party, it functions only while destroying: When it's not suppressing the potentially life-saving benefits of stem-cell research, it's lashing out against the utterly harmless right for gays to marry. Party faithful, on nearly every issue, in virtually every case, are wrong, and I look forward to seeing them go. As -- unless you're very rich, I suppose--should you.
Yet, whenever I catch a glimpse of an uncharacteristically glum-looking Sean Hannity waving the white flag, a sight that would normally fill me with bliss, I'm left feeling a bit empty. People seem ready to pick the lint from the figurative belly-button of Washington. But what exactly were those people thinking two years ago when they gave Huckleberry Hound and the rest of the Hanna Barbera squad to go-ahead for round two?
It's not that things aren't worse in 2006 than they were in 2004. They are. But it's also not as if the problems we're now facing are much different than they were then; they're simply the logical extension of a couple more years of policy mismanagement and a total unwillingness to consider a different course of action. We're still waist-deep in a war nothing good has or will come out of.
We're still supposedly fighting for family values, despite our insistence on denying families the right to earn living wages. We're still farming jobs to other countries while telling those willing to work for substandard pay to hop the brand new fence back to Mexico.
The list goes on; every pre-2004 problem George W. Bush and his ilk swore up and down they'd fight harder for than John 'Mr. Personality' Kerry has persisted in the two years since his re-election.
And it's not as though Republicans have been avoiding the bipartisan issues to deliver on their crazy notions; abortions are still legal, gay marriage just scored a significant victory in New Jersey, and I suspect the war on Christmas shall rage on once there's more of a nip in the air. For the Republicans, it's truly been King Midas in reverse. But it was that way before 2004, too, and folks still gave G-Dubs the thumbs up they're now turning over for his House counterparts.
People are right to be fed up with the very Congress-people who've sat idly by for the last six years as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre has raged on in Washington, and it's even better than some of the Republicans running in hotly-contested areas have done whatever they could to (opportunistically, perhaps) distance themselves from their head honcho's buffoonery.
But I fail to see what exactly has happened in the last two years that could've flipped so many switches in the minds of voters. Democrats have been largely disorganized and ineffectual since Kerry's defeat, and they're hardly running with a stacked deck this election (take Bob Casey, please), so, apart from being right on the issues, they don't have too much to offer.
I guess those so-called swing-voters of 2004 must've reached the upper registers of their apparently titanic threshold of pain, and figured six years of Republican control of both the White House and Congress was plenty.
Voters' decision to axe the Republican leadership next week won't be too little, but I'm a bit worried. After the free pass Congressional Republicans have given the Bush administration since his re-election, it may be too late.
I'm doing my best to be optimistic; I just hope it doesn't take people so long to demand a change the next time things get this bad.
