Observations on the off-year elections ... by gimleteye

The voters of Miami elected a new mayor, Tomas Regalado, as a vote against the growth-at-any-cost policies manifesting in so much economic misery. In this case, the voters knew what they were voting against: an incumbent mayor and candidate, Joe Sanchez, who stood for the building and construction boom. If challengers to incumbent Miami-Dade county commissioners can raise enough money to get out the same message, certain members of the unreformable majority could be in trouble in 2010.

Voters are angry, but even in the worst economy since the Great Depression it is not clear they know what they are voting for. Democrats lost the governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia. President Obama had hoped that the grass roots would re-assemble at his urging; unsurprisingly, it is enough of a task to hold the center together without being distracted by the challenges of political organizing.

But before claiming that voters want change again, Republican strategists should be cautious. In New York's 23rd Congressional District, the plan to push out an incumbent because she was not conservative enough, backfired. Take a district that hasn't voted Democrat since the Civil War to prove a point that voters don't just want conservatives, they want a putsch to cleanse the party of moderates. It sounded like a no-brainer on paper. They had roughly one hundred fifty years of precedent to believe that even their most extreme plan would work. It didn't.

They didn't plan on the backlash of enough local Republican voters to tilt the election to the Democrat. Now, Glenn Beck and Limbaugh have egg all over their faces. To me, it looks pretty good there. (Doug Hoffman, the candidate they discovered, has the charisma of a doorknob! Check out Jon Stewart Daily Show at minute 5:38)

Still, this political problem finds its way to the heart of the Obama White House. Obama needs to persuade American voters that the crises at our doorstep are not of his making, but arise from fraud and greed underlying the conservative claims to the "free" market. This is not a point that Obama has spent much time on. Instead of making regulation of Wall Street excess his first priority, he has allowed Wall Street behavior to further inflame the American public. Obama says he prefers to look forward, not backward, but the American public is mired in quicksand and underwater mortgages; it is incumbent on the president to spend a little more time focusing on how we, as a nation, came to this point.

For Obama, assigning responsibility for our economic crises is a secondary theme that has played softly beneath the primary chords of creating bipartisan support for his initiatives. It was clear from the first that radical wing of the Republican party would have nothing of bipartisan comity. In Florida, it is not wing nuts so much as pure power politics funded by Big Oil to push US Senate hopeful Marco Rubio over a governor rapidly losing altitude with the public, Charlie Crist.

The Florida Senate race is instructive for another reason: the Democratic candidate, Kendrick Meek, is struggling to connect with voters. Democratic politicians in Florida are fearful of assigning blame for the economic crash on special interests who fomented the housing and development boom, now in cinders. That is where the campaign cash comes from. Republicans are attacking Obama policies as though they and Democrats are the cause of this jobless economic "recovery" and that the fiscal stimulus wasn't necessary.

The public's short attention span is a fearsome consequence of the Age of Stupid. I learned a long time ago that keeping people dumb is a key part of the program. Now that our economic recovery depends on parsing out truth from fiction, and the high stakes of making mistakes at the edge of a meltdown, there is only a little time left before the 2010 elections to educate voters how the "for" moves us forward.