The sight of Margaret, dressed in gray, pulled at my emotions. I don’t think she’s worn yellow in two years. It’s true, there have been great moments for her; she was solemnly pleased when her beloved HRC became Secretary of State, tears ran down her bony cheeks when health care passed, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act gave her spirit a warm sense of retribution. But I had not seen her for some months before the mid-terms and now, and finding her in the darkened study of her upstate home, watching her grandchildren play on the lawn, gave me pause for concern.
“Ma puce,” I said, taking a spent drink from her hand. “Is it really that bad?”
She looked up; her strong strong face had aged and aged.
“You’re kidding me, Pierre, tell me you are kidding me. Jim fucking Boehner is the Speaker of the House! They killed us, they absolutely killed us. A ‘Shellacking’, he called it! We lost eleven governorships, the control of nineteen state legislative chambers, nearly the majority in the Senate and they took away sixty-odd seats in the House! McConnell and Boehner are hell bent to leave Obama to one term; that’s all they have ever wanted from the start!”
I refreshed Margaret’s drink at the bar, then rethought the matter and kept it for myself, sitting down at the piano bench across the room from her.
“That is where the hope begins, my dear,” I say softly. “Orangezilla and Gamera haven’t got now and never had anything but fight. They, like most of the GOP, are monkeys at the ready to fling poop with or without reason. Two years ago, the party was a crumble and on it’s last legs. You are familiar with the phrase ‘Dead Tiger Bounce’? It’s a financial term for a declining stock that experiences and inexplicable, yet short lived bump. I’m telling you, Margaret, this is the twitching of a dead animal. Let me explain.
“In 2008, over 130 million Americans went to the polls. Last week? 75 million. Where in 2008, the youth vote was counted at over 23 million, the vote of the elderly at about 16. Last week, those numbers flipped. These mid-terms found white numbers up, especially among the over sixty set, no harm meant, while Latino and Black voting was down.”
“You see?! We’re giving in! We’re laying down and letting the Teahaddists win!”
“Not at all. If anything, the Tea Party crimped the GOP style in places like Delaware, Nevada, and probably Alaska, of all places. In fact, nationally, Sarah Palin came out smelling like those grizzly mommas she so admires.
“You see, this was no rebuke, this election was about a volatile and impatient public living, admittedly, in some very hard times. I’m afraid an irrational public as well. Forget what the Tea people think about birth certificates and Islam; people want to lash out and the Dems are the ones they see, mostly because the Right is hiding behind them pointing fingers. They believe that Health Care will increase the deficit, you and I know it will cut it by 1.4 trillion (Congressional Budget Office estimate). They believe that eliminating tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% is in some way to their advantage, when we know that Obama signed permanent tax cuts for the middle and lower classes. They believe that the party that turned our budget surplus of the Nineties into the massive deficit will be able to cut spending without increasing taxes, this the party that also drug us, dishonestly, into a multi-trillion dollar war. They just aren’t thinking straight.”
“And that’s going to make me feel better?”
“It will, eventually. The only thing the GOP is going to be able to do is just what they’ve been doing for two years. They haven’t got what it takes to repeal anything, they haven’t got the sense or organization to pass anything of their own. It will give Obama the time he needs to get the mojo back, to re-mobilize the base he left behind when he decided to play Washington Insider. If he’s smart, if the Democrats can grow a pair, this thing should come out alright.”
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