Post-mortem: An anecdote from years ago, repeated:
Many many years ago here I posted a story about a hot-shot Democratic fund raiser who was a patient and, I would suppose, friend of mine and my family. This guy was as big as it got in Philadelphia and some of you out there who know our landscape probably can guess who this fellow was. He's passed on now...
Once upon a time there was a Democratic candidate for the US Senate who was running against then-Senator Santorum. Now Santorum was not that popular in the Commonwealth and many rank and file democrats believed that he was beatable. But incredibly, there was little to no campaign and Santorum won by six points. SIX POINTS and the Democrats essentially ran zero ads and zero high profile endorsements. This meant that a swing of three percent would have changed everything and doomed Santorum to a one-term status. All the Democrats had to do was do something...anything. But they didn't.
So soon after the election, the hot-shot was in my office and we were talking a bit of politics, which was difficult due to his, shall we say, "interesting" point of view. Undaunted, I asked him why the Party had not done more to promote its candidate. The answer came crisply and sharply: "We didn't want to win. This was not the right time." My angry response...angry but measured was, "Not the right time? Since when is it not the right time to win a Senate seat in a state as large as Pennsylvania?" His terse reply, "Not our call." and that was it. He never spoke of it again. I always wondered, who was calling the shots at that point and who is thus, calling them now?
So is it not strange that you had so few candidates running on the successes of the USA whilst they were in control: Stock Market very bullish, low gasoline proces, low unemployment, saving the auto industry and associated businesses, the death of Osama, the Affordable Care Act, and many other useful policies for the American People. These are not praiseworthy? Of course they are...it must have been a deliberate attempt to lose. How the hell else do you explain the lack of a cohesive message, the inability to appeal to voters on the most fundamental bases, the fumbling of the ball in almost every state. Here in PA, Mr. Wolf won because he rejected the state party and handled his own campaign. I wouldn't give you a hoot in Hell for the Party people. Look who they were going to put up before Wolf announced: probably Allyson Schwartz who had ZERO...and I mean ZERO chance of winning a statewide election here. She was the annointed one but ran the WORST primary campaign anyone remembers for an erstwhile major candidate. I would wager that she would not have gotten 42% of the vote over the universally-hated Corbett. And we were awaiting her "candidacy" when I received the phone call to meet with an unknown Tom Wolf, a meeting which I chronicled at the time and is in my DU Journal http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024140848 here.
I knew he was going to give Corbett a run for his money because he wasn't messing around with platitudes and half-assed statements. He was laying it on the line and going after Corbett as a Democrat should go after a Republican who betrayed the trust of the voters. He's going to have problems with the Republican legislators who control Harrisburg but at least we have a shot at coming out of this funk here, what with schools grossly underfunded, special education in trouble, allowing the oil companies to dictate policy without having to pay any extraction tax. Can you imagine? In Texas of all places they have a tax, but not here...but I digress.
In reflecting upon the nightmare that was Tuesday, it seems as though not only was it a foregone conclusion from 2012 that this would be the result, but that it was facilitated by the power structure from on high. I am alternately appalled and impressed that the Nation is heading inevitably and inexorably towards the goal line as defined in the post-war era by a shadowy group, all of whose names we will never ever know. I'm reminded of an incident which occurred years ago: a gnetleman of my acquaintance with a fairly weird, somewhat perverse affect for an adult, once said to me, "So you think I'm strange. What if I told you that I was an alien?" My response was, "Well, it would explain a lot about you."
"Deliberateness of loss" explains a lot about Tuesday.
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