I was expecting him to run a better campaign. Not run the campaign, he's also running the country, but to run his own campaign as head of the Democratic Party better, much better, than he in fact did. And as for the results of the election, I've said several times that I never expected the Democrats to "win" this election. I didn't expect them to hold the House. What I expected was, again, a far better campaign by the President. Maybe my next post will be all caps. Think that would help?
I think the issue here is that Obama is still thinking like a Senator and not like a President. He's thinking like he's part of the party and not the leader of the party.
new book on the rise of the Texas GOP reviewed: Turning Texas from Blue to Red https://lawliberty.org/book-review/turning-texas-from-blue-to-red/ excerpt: Major political change tends to be gradual. The bland title of Wayne Thorburn’s latest book, The Republican Party of Texas: A Political History, is thus somewhat appropriate. The glacially-paced growth of Republican dominance in Texas was nationally important, since the state is large enough to significantly affect which party controls Congress or wins a close presidential race. The history of the once-minuscule, now-mighty Texas GOP is worth knowing as one of the Republican Party’s great success stories. And the possible loss of its majority due to demographic trends, should that occur, would be a political earthquake. Without Texas, it would be much harder to elect a Republican president. Thorburn’s book is most useful as a tightly organized, semi-official record of the party’s growth in Texas, written with apparent evenhandedness by a major participant in the state GOP. More significantly for non-Texans, it’s useful as a stimulus to reflection on the nature of partisan dominance and its potential decay or reversal. It reminds us of the sheer weight of institutions in what we may mistakenly view as America’s freewheeling political marketplace—or its dynamic “battle of ideas.” Reading this detailed account from the Reconstruction years to the present, one is likely to conclude that the shifting currents of public opinion which supposedly shape democratic politics have been a secondary factor in the rise of Texas Republicanism. *** Texas has long had among its higher officeholders some zealous liberals comparable in substance, though not accent, to the bluntly partisan House speaker from Massachusetts. Senator Yarborough, for example, easily held off a challenge from George H.W. Bush in 1964, and the caustically partisan Ann Richards defeated the rough-edged Republican nominee for governor, Clayton Williams, in 1990. The younger Bush’s serious political career began when, despite his thin resume, he beat her for re-election with a skillful campaign in the Republican-friendly year of 1994. With Richards as perhaps the most prominent example of a Texas Democrat who lost due partly to a shrill, in-your-face partisanship, there’s also an unhelpful equivalent at the grassroots level that sounds more like New York or California than Texas. “Democratic primaries in Austin,” a political consultant lamented in 2011, “can be as humorless and judgmental as telling a bride that she doesn’t deserve to wear white. We inflict purity tests on one another’s partisan fidelity that Barack Obama couldn’t pass.” In the legislature, arguably the truest indicator of a state party’s fundamental strength, the Democrats held large albeit shrinking majorities until the early 1990s. But more and more non-liberal Texans voted in GOP primaries, better-qualified Republicans chose to run, and the state’s economy flourished under a long succession of Republican governors, still unbroken since the mid-1990s. And then, in the early 2000s, the new Republican legislative majorities got to draw the district lines, winning a court battle and thwarting a determined walkout by Democratic legislators that temporarily denied them a quorum. For all of these reasons, the Democratic Party gradually melted into pathetic weakness in much of Texas. Roles have reversed: today, there often isn’t a Democratic candidate in many races. But what of the future? Republican senator and ex-solicitor attorney general Ted Cruz won a surprisingly close re-election over his unimpressively credentialed liberal opponent “Beto” O’Rourke in 2018. The Democrats made major gains that year in metro Houston and Dallas-area offices, including congressional seats, and it seemed possible (although it didn’t happen) that they might even retake the legislature in 2020 after nearly two decades in the minority. They didn’t, but the state’s white—or, as they say in Texas, Anglo—residents have long been a declining share of the electorate. In addition to Hispanics, Texas has many African American and more recently Asian voters, especially in its urban areas. Furthermore, white suburbanites’ support for the GOP has recently declined, as it has elsewhere in the country. more at the link
