OPINION:
Americans go to the polls on Nov. 4 to cast their votes in a midterm election that’s shaping up to be an angry outcry over the disastrous direction of the country.
For the past six years, the Democrats have effectively been in charge by virtue of the fact that Barack Obama sits in the White House, setting policy, and his party is in control of a Senate (at least for now) that can block any legislation passed by the House Republicans.
Even though Democrats control the major gates of power, President Obama and his party have sought to convince the voters that all of their mistakes and failures are the result of the GOP or the previous Republican administration.
That duplicitous shell game worked for several years, but in the end, discerning Americans learned who was really to blame for all of their woes — and said so when they put the GOP back in control of the House in 2010.
They are likely to inflict the same punishment next week on Majority Leader Harry Reid and his gang of Democrats in the Senate.
Over the past half dozen years, the national news media took great pleasure in endlessly reciting polls showing how unpopular the Republicans had become since the 2008 recession.
They are unsurprisingly quiet about recent polls that show the Democratic Party’s approval scores plunging to their lowest rating in decades.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Sunday found the disapproval rating for Democrats in Congress has now risen to its highest point in two decades.
This is the political environment that the Democrats are facing when voters go to the polls next week in what will be a nationwide referendum to decide which party should be in control of Congress for the last two years of Mr. Obama’s trouble-plagued presidency.
Have you noticed that the president has been unusually subdued in the past few weeks? He has been beaten down by events and his own circumstances, seldom making any major news, or at least the kind that makes the front page or leads the nightly news shows.
The country is in the midst of a competitive, down-to-the wire, midterm election battle, and Mr. Obama isn’t getting a lot of invitations from his party’s besieged candidates to campaign for them.
Quite the contrary, the message has gone out to the White House from Democrats in tight races that he is so unpopular, the best thing he can do for them is to stay as far away as possible.
Even in some heavily Democratic states, where he won big in 2012, he is being asked to stay out. It didn’t get the attention it deserves, but Mr. Obama was asked not to go into Massachusetts to campaign for Democrat Martha Coakley, who is running behind her Republican opponent, Charlie Baker, in the race for governor.
Democratic political pros were hard-pressed to think of a time when their party’s president couldn’t campaign in a midterm election in Massachusetts.
With his approval polls sinking to near 40 percent (the same percentage of people who tell the Gallup poll they’re “struggling” in this economy), he’s no longer the political force he once was.
It is hard to remember a president who has been the cause of so many unpopular reforms — from Obamacare, whose costs are still mounting, to an anemic economy that millions of Americans say is in a recession.
It won’t make the nightly network news, but the latest evidence of this economy’s chronic weakness came out Tuesday, when the Commerce Department announced the nation’s durable-goods orders fell in September for the second month in a row.
The report revealed a 1.3 percent decline in business demand for machinery, computers and other goods, which suggests a sluggish economy.
That followed an 18.3 percent decline in August that signaled businesses were “reluctant to invest in updating equipment,” Bloomberg News reported.
The housing sector isn’t so hot, either. U.S. sales of new homes were close to flat in September — not a good sign in a struggling economy.
As for the jobs issue, Americans are justified in taking the Obama administration’s 5.9 percent unemployment rate with a huge grain of salt. For one thing, it leaves out millions of workers who tell government pollsters they’ve stopped looking for full-time jobs because they can’t find work.
The administration’s shady employment numbers are swollen by part-time, “underemployed” workers who say they need full-time work to make ends meet.
The Gallup Poll, which conducts its own, and probably more accurate employment survey, puts the jobless rate at 6.2 percent and the all-too-often ignored underemployed rate at 15 percent.
Then comes a Federal Reserve study that found the median household is now worth less than it was back in 1989.
Despite Mr. Obama’s claim that we’re doing better than we were before he was president, economics analyst Matt O’Brien, who writes for The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, suggests that’s not true.
“The new harsh reality is that the bottom 90 percent of households are poorer today than they were in 1987,” he writes.
The good part about these elections is that the voters will have a chance to register their disapproval of Mr. Obama and the Democrats. The bad part is that after the votes are counted, Mr. Obama will still be in office for another two years.
However, if the Republican campaign goes according to plan, he will be a president without a majority party behind him or a viable agenda — while a revitalized GOP reaches out to rebuild and expand its party in preparation for the 2016 presidential election to come.
Donald Lambro is a syndicated columnist and contributor to The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.