Dysfunction will be the order of the day in US politics

Politics in the US continues to be distorted, if last week’s midterm Congressional elections are anything to go by. Here are a few observations from the results.

In October 1994, I was waiting to board a flight to Cairo from New York. My fellow passengers were seated near a TV watching a rather engaging programme. Being just a few weeks before election day, each of the commercial breaks featured political ads. One ad raised questions about a candidate’s integrity, strongly suggesting that he had links to organised crime. Another flashed headlines claiming that the other candidate hadn’t paid taxes and may have been involved in shady financial dealings. These same ads were played over and over again.

That was the situation two decades ago. Today, it is even worse. In the hotly contested race for the Senate seat in Iowa, voters were subjected to 114,000 TV ads. Nationally, over one billion dollars were spent on Senate races alone.

The bottom line is that the real winners in all of this were the media consultants and the owners of local TV stations. And the real losers were democracy and the American people.

So, did Republicans win the election or did Democrats lose it? As early as January 2009, the then minority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell declared that he would do everything in his power to block the newly elected president’s agenda. A year later, he said he would work to make sure that Barack Obama was “a one-term president”. Whatever legislative victories the president won in his first term were delivered over stiff resistance.

There are those who raise issue with Mr Obama’s aloofness or his “lack of relationships” with Congressional Republicans, ignoring the fact that they never wanted to give relationship-building a chance. On too many occasions the Republican leadership chose obstructionism over compromise.

On the flip side, the problem with too many Democrats was that they cowered in the face of this GOP. As has been noted: in this November’s election, while Republicans were busy running against the president, Democrats were running away from him. Too many Democrats sought to deny their connections with Mr Obama, giving Republicans the opportunity to attack without response. When Democrats sought to distance themselves from their national agenda, what choice did they give voters?

This mattered especially as the election became about who would succeed in getting voters out to vote. With the president sidelined, his coalition of African Americans, Latinos, young people and unmarried professional women was not encouraged to turn out in the numbers needed to win. When you lose the struggle to define the stakes in the election, your chances of winning are slim.

There is also the question of what happens next? There was commentary last week describing how Republicans were now working to define their agenda. Implied in the piece was the fact that other than their opposition to the president, there is no consensus as to how to govern. The party is deeply divided between neoconservatives and isolationists. With the 2016 contest looming and with many seeing themselves as potential candidates, it is unlikely that the Republicans will be able to unify their ranks any time soon.

Republicans should remember that while they won the Senate and increased their numbers in the House, a national tally of votes shows that overall more Americans voted for Democrats than for Republicans. Republicans should also remember that voters will watch how effectively they will govern. While Republicans are fond of noting that Mr Obama’s favourable ratings are only 42 per cent, they should remember that approval ratings for Congress stand at 12 per cent.

What we can most likely expect in the next two years is more dysfunction, more rancour and more gridlock. This will not serve the nation, but it will enhance opportunities for the Democrats to regain control of the Senate in 2016. This year, two-thirds of the contested Senate seats were held by Democrats, some of whom were swept into office by the Obama coat-tails of 2008. In 2016, it will be Republicans who will be on the defensive since two-thirds of those up for reelection will be from their party.

In the 2016 presidential election year, the Democrats will again have a demographic advantage. African-American, Latino, Asian, young and professional women – all of whom increasingly vote for Democrats, will all play key roles in the national election. Their participation will also have an impact on Senate contests.

And so it is in this seemingly endless game of politics, one round is over and it’s on to the next.

Dr James Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute

Twitter: @aaiusa