Assessing my Midterm Election Predictions–Part 1

 

No…Bama? Well, not "old"-Bama. So-Bama after his "shellacking" in the midterm election's de-Bama-debacle, O-better turn "Yes we can't" into an Ameri-CAN comeback. Will he do it?

Friends,
I’ve allowed nearly a week to pass before I write an assessment of my 2 November 2010 midterm election prophecy so that close elections count themselves through to a winner.

Now let’s assess my predictions recorded the day before the elections (see 2010 midterm election predictions). First let’s start with the opening prediction in that last blog. It was made a year before in Predictions for 2010:

When making my occult enquiries to the oracle I received this message. The road to a second term [for President Obama] is successfully ventured despite what the contentious Democrat legislators and president promise but do not deliver. It has far more to do with the Republican Party losing further seats to Democrats in 2010 because the GOP (the Grand Old Party) devolves farther to the right. The GOP wants to go rogue elephant led by its most ideologically dogmatic core followers marching to the pied piper tunes of the likes of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, right-wing radio rishi Rush Limbaugh and …Glen Beck.

ASSESSMENT
Sarah Palin, Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh had rallied the core right wing Republicans to lead the charge carrying with them the independent swing voters disenchanted with President Obama and the Democratic controlled Congress. Together they brushed aside donkey-cratic brand Obama’s generally incoherent and lackluster counter arguments for more patience and time to turn eight years of Bush bungles and the economy around.

Beck in his Washington DC rally, Palin with her many endorsements conjoined with that ever present barometer of Republican rage, that magic meteorologist of “mad” — Rush Limbaugh on radio — engaged at least one national emotion that no-drama Obama, being the more cerebral Mr. Spock than bare fisted Captain Kirk, could grasp: Anger. Lots of it. That most alien, un-Vulcan of human emotions, Mr. Spock.

Put your Vulcan mind-meld around this: It is ever, EVER, about the economy and jobs, stupid. Whatever your preppy Secretary of the Treasury Mr. Geithner and your Skull and Bones special economic adviser, Mr. Austan Dean Goolsbee, pontificate about jobs being the last in the dogma of economic recovery — make them first or fail to earn a second term in office. You could become a great president though that future is fading, Mr. Obama, if you O-bam!-blow it by not bringing a change beyond economic dogma: make jobs come first.

Because you did not bring real change, the voters have recoiled back to the past, to the old, to the dogmatic, in spades. Over 100 new freshman Republican and Tea Party candidates you elected in reaction to your unsubstantial change platform are indeed farther right and ideologically dogmatic than any GOP House majority in this young 21st century.

Thinkprogress.org reports that 50 percent of the new Republican and Tea Party legislators deny the existence of man-made climate change. Eighty-six percent are opposed to any climate change legislation that increases government revenue.

Brace yourself also for an immigration backlash. Thirty-nine percent have already declared their intention to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship and 32 percent want to reduce legal immigration.

Ninety-one percent have sworn to never allow any income tax increase on any individual or business — regardless of deficits or war. Seventy-nine percent have pledged to permanently repeal the estate tax and 48 percent are pushing for a balanced budget amendment.

Although I predict the new Republican majority might proffer some refreshing ideas about simplifying the tax code, streamlining government and cutting waste, the 112th Congress is not going to be all that friendly to jump-starting the green industrial revolution, or leading the world in such. If you have been reading me over the decades, my collection of documented ecological and climate change prophecies sourced from all times and world traditions has cast their vote on our near future. Their collective vision foresees an impending, catastrophic climate change disaster possibly undermining human civilization in the 2010s if legislators in Washington and other capitals don’t get real about the scientific climate change evidence.

Now to the first part of that prophecy from a year ago:

The road to a second term [for President Obama] is successfully ventured despite what the contentious Democrat legislators and president promise but do not deliver. It has far more to do with the Republican Party losing further seats to Democrats in 2010 because the GOP (the Grand Old Party) devolves farther to the right.

ASSESSMENT
The 2012 presidential campaign began the day after the midterm election with the new Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sounding a not too subtle war cry. In short, a.) we’ll work with the president if he passes our ideas; and, b.) we will work harder to get him fired by the American people, whilst taking back the Senate and then really get things done.

Such firebrand messages thrust to the public when the body politic of the midterm post mortem is still warm seems a bit hasty. One might expect a few months of collegial platitudes, such as, “We can work together in a bi-partisan way”, etc. Not from this polarized Congress, It has shed its moderates on both the left and the right for firebrand partisans.

By the way, the Republicans have lost seats, prophetically speaking in a double entendre of meaning. The GOP establishment moved aside to sublet seats to a Tea Party Caucus in House of Representatives and Senate unmindful that the new red blooded conservatives are not going to behave like dutiful sycophants.

This is not your daddy’s Reaganite Republican Party. They are going to behave more undisciplined and cantankerous like Democrats. They’ll venture a partisan stance with Democrats while fomenting a schism with the Republican establishment. In two years time the inner civil breach of conservatives might divide and dilute opposition handing to Obama a chance to redeem everybody’s fallen political Lothario with a second term. So, in this way, Republicans lost seats to angry Tea Party panthers who will ultimately give seats back to the Democrats in 2012 when the people vote to wildly swing the tsunami to left of center. (Don’t judge this interpretation until the first Tuesday of November 2012. The polls at that time will be my final judge.)

Now to my predictions from 1 November:

The Republicans are not going to win both the House of Representatives “and” the US Senate by one or two seats tomorrow on midterm election day. The help of candidates of the Tea Party movement will win these seats. They will carry the Republicans on their backs to a breathtaking protest referendum victory against Barack Obama’s first two years in office.

ASSESSMENT
It is true that the Republicans did not win the House without Tea Party candidates. Clearly, I was wrong about the Republicans with Tea Party support winning the Senate, which is the biggest “goof” of my midterm predictions. Moreover, one can’t blame the Tea Party loonies, Sarah Angle and Christine O’Donnell for undermining their chances. Democrat Michael Bennet and Patty Murray won their close elections giving the Dems a US Senate victory in Colorado and Washington State. As it stands now, the Democrats have a slim balance of power with 53 seats versus 46 Republican. They only need 50.

Even if you factor in right wing Tea Party candidates in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada not losing but winning elections the Democrats would hold a 50 to 49 majority with Vice President Joe Biden available as President of the Senate to break ties, if independent Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut would swing with Republicans.

The Republicans took back 63 seats in the House of Reps. It was “breathtaking”; however, my prediction of both houses going back to the Republicans via Tea Party aid is wrong. I misread my oracle in that important detail but not in the spirit of the prophecy about a Republican wave passing across the USA. Just look at local and state results. Over 19 state legislatures passing over to the Republican side. The Democrats lost two incumbents in state gubernatorial elections. The Republicans lost none.

Obama has not yet learned how to sustain political momentum and thus his presidency suffers a major midterm setback.

ASSESSMENT
Correct.

I have said since early 2007 that Barack Obama if elected in 2008 will come to his destiny too soon without enough seasoning and maturity. Obama has the audacity if not yet the reality to hope that he is a great communicator. The cerebral President “Spock” missed an opportunity in his first year in office to gather emotional capital from the American people. On 2 November 2010, watch Obama stumble. Greatly!

ASSESSMENT
This president has the audacity to consider himself a great communicator, multitasker and orator. Barack Obama has bewildered supporters with his lack of focus and follow-through after he won the “bride” called a majority of the American electorate. He naively gave stimulus in the hundreds of billions of dollars to banks without strings attached demanding bank reform. He pushes through a completely compromised Health Care Bill, while postponing Immigration reform, and stimulus for small business he promised to tackle early on. He nominated a new supreme court justice candidate Elena Kagan who worked as his chief solicitor for Supreme Court trials not apparently worrying about half the important court cases scheduled for 2011 that she must recuse herself from judging because she was a lawyer involved in these cases. I could recount many more instances of political in the diaper poo doo but I will save them for my forthcoming ebook Predictions for 2011.

After nearly two years in office, Obama is living up to my prophecy. That doesn’t mean these shocks to his political system might change his destiny.

In tomorrow’s midterm election, he will lose the House and by the slightest of margins, lose the Senate too.

ASSESSMENT
Half correct, but saw the Senate result backwards. The Republicans “lost” taking the Senate by the slightest of margins.

The Tea Party Caucus will tip the balance for them and the Republican establishment riding rough-shod on the backs of Tea Party anger will take back the gavels of House and Senate halls at the high price of making a Faustian deal with a third party rebellion that will not be tamed.

ASSESSMENT
They did tip the balance in the House and they won some important seats in the Senate with Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul for Kentucky. Watch for them to bear down on the Republican Senatorial establishment. I hold to my prediction that Tea Party legislators have two parties in their target in the coming two years: Dems and the GOP.

The Republican establishment rides a mandate of anger. It is a negative and destructive political force if it stays angry. I predict now, as I did exactly one year ago in the following from Predictions for 2010 that an opposition party divided against itself paves the way for a two-term Obama administration. To prevent this happening the GOP has to learn how to adapt its platform to these irrational times.

ASSESSMENT
That is the challenge for the GOP. Right now the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is openly declaring the opposite, a two-year campaign to take back the Senate and have Obama thrown out of office. The great Republican wave that even I predicted wrongly is actually a mix decision. The Democrats hold a thin majority in the Senate. If McConnell speaks for the GOP, there will be more polarity. There will be a classic Mexican standoff, when two adversaries are equally matched in a stalemate and can only confront nose-to-nose with no decision possible.

I would propose to the GOP leadership that bi-partisan progress has a better chance of seeing them win both houses and the executive branch in 2012 rather than gridlock.

I don’t think that spark of enlightenment is going to happen.

I’m writing right now my predictions for 2011 that have much to say about the future of Wattsington — the new and riotous Congress of 2011-2012.

John Hogue

(08 November 2010)

PS—Unless world events require another article first, part two will assess the rest of my 7 July and 1 November midterm election predictions.

http://hogueprophecy.com/2010/assessing-my-midterm-election-predictions-part-1/