Consequential

Today is election day, and if the Democrats take significant loses, their media hamsters will be quick to assure the public that those loses are meaningless. If the Dems hold on to the Senate, then regardless of other loses, it will be characterized (possibly correctly) as a great victory for progressives, but if they lose the Senate, well, that's an entirely different matter. The lose will be characterized as nothing really—just a bump in the road that leads to big government's utopia.

Steve Hayes characterizes the MSM's battle space prep in this way:

The Washington Post may have been first in declaring the coming midterms “kind of—and apologies to Seinfeld here—an election about nothing.” But the Daily Beast chimed in: “America seems resigned to a Seinfeld election in 2014—a campaign about nothing.” And New York magazine noted (and embraced) the cliché: The midterm election “has managed to earn a nickname from the political press: the ‘Seinfeld Election,’ an election about nothing.”

Soon enough this description was popping up everywhere—the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg, Politico, and many others. The 2014 Midterms, the Seinfeld Election.

Others posited something even worse. “The 2014 campaign has been the most boring and uncreative campaign I can remember,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks. That wasn’t harsh enough for Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post, who went further. The election isn’t just “boring,” he wrote, “it’s vapid and inconsequential.”

Indeed, humility among progressives is highly unlikely if loses occur. Their montra will be that it's a "messaging" problem or that the president's unpopularity dragged them down or that their "ground game" failed to produce adequate results.

In fact, this election is consequential. It's an opportunity for the electorate to re-examine the impact of B.I.G. (big intrusive government) and decide whether that's a reasonable direction for our country. It's about whether the Democrats will move us ever closer to a socialist state in which businesses that create jobs are denigrated, government assistance is not only accepted but encouraged, victimization is the norm for everyone but white males, and crushing taxes and national debt (with all of their unintended consequences) will be the norm for our children and grandchildren.

Hayes continues:

Not only is this election not about nothing, it is being fought over exactly the kinds of things that ought to determine our elections.

It’s about the size and scope of government. It’s about the rule of law. It’s about the security of the citizenry. It’s about competence. It’s about integrity. It’s about honor.

Democrats state openly that Obama's unpopularity is dragging them down, and there is considerable truth to that. But they seem to forget that it was Democrats who supported his first and second election without any clear-eyed consideration of his complete lack of experience, his serial dishonesty, his inability to make solid decisions, his vicious partisan slant on all things, and his hypocritical populist rhetoric. It was Democrats who did nothing to reign in this president, to investigate the scandals that have plagued his administration, to control and temper a foreign policy that is both a disaster and an embarrassment. Now, to quote one of Barack Obama's mentors: "The chickens have come home to roost." Maybe.

After my serious misreading of the 2012 presidential election, I've acquired the humility to state that I truly don't know what the results of today's election will be. Curiously, polls no longer provide a good indication of the final result, so it's up in the air as far as I'm concerned.

I'm hopeful that a strong message will be delivered, but I'm not at all hopeful that Democrats will accept the message or recognize that new, far more moderate governance is needed.