Disappointment

I know I've been writing a lot about the midterm elections lately, but as they just occurred this Tuesday I thought it would be appropriate to bring them up one last time. For the last couple weeks, it was hard to turn on the TV without seeing either a campaign ad or a pundit predicting or analyzing election results, so it's obvious that Americans have been bombarded, like it or not, with news about this major event, so I think I can be excused for adding my two cents one last time.

Obviously the elections can't be neatly summed up in a word, considering the multitudes of people that participated, all with different outlooks and opinions. That being said: disappointment. In my opinion, this word most accurately describes the climate of this election. While legions of incensed Tea Partiers got a lot of media attention, these people did not represent the majority of American voters. Aside from the far-right Obama-haters and the die-hard Obama fans, the majority of the country's voters were simply disappointed with the direction that the country is headed. To back up this theorizing with some data, the Global Language Monitor conducted a study and found that the terms "frustration" and "disappointment" were far more frequent than "anger" or "rage". Of course, whenever people are unhappy with the way Washington is working, they look to blame the party that is in power, and therefore should be in a position to do something about it. In this case that party was the Democrats.

There's nothing wrong with being disappointed and informed, as many voters were. However, acting on uninformed disappointment can be problematic. In other words, it is difficult to pick out members of our government to "blame" our current mess on. Washington is so complicated that often the"bad guys" are hard to find. The "good guys", however, are substantially easier to pick out. One apparently negative outcome from Tuesday's elections was Russ Feingold's loss in the race for the Wisconsin Senate seat. He has authored a lot of important legislation on campaign finance, a huge problem in politics today. He also has a reputation as a good compromiser, which is something that voters supposedly were interested in. Still, Feingold, who was greatly respected for voting his conscience and not strictly adhering to party lines, was ousted along with many other incumbents in favor of Ron Johnson, an adamant global warming denier.

Though I do lean left politically, I don't see anything wrong with the disappointment directed at the Democrats, though I do think both parties should shoulder some of the blame. When one party has a clear majority in Congress and has control of the executive branch, they are expected to pass major legislation that will affect Americans' lives for the better. With the possible exception of health care reform (which is largely unpopular), this hasn't happened. Therefore, it's okay for voters to be disappointed and to want to get some new faces in Washington. That being said, I think they could have been a little smarter about it, and tried to differentiate between good incumbents and entrenched career politicians. It's a fine line, but I assumed Americans were intelligent enough to tell the difference. Instead, I was a little disappointed.