The resurgence of conservative ideology over the past two years and especially following the recent election clearly signifies the voters’ dissatisfaction with the way things are going now; high unemployment, run-away debt and deficit, and the diminishing economic power of the middle class. Republican and the TEA party candidates benefited handsomely from the dire circumstances created by voters’ dissatisfaction.
The truth is that in bad time we always search for villains and someone on whom we can put the blame. In this case there is no shortage of them. However, to many, the main culprit is the government. The conservative and TEA party candidates have successfully made a mockery out of government programs implemented during Obama’s term in the office and promise to repeal them. Fear has been fomented and issues have been blown out of proportion by a bunch of demagogues sought to take advantage of the gullibility of the American voters. They tried, successfully to transform public dissatisfaction into outrage and into the class warfare. And, who knows what comes next.
Obama’s inability to lower the unemployment rate is at the center of the controversy. The fact of the matter is not that he didn’t try hard enough to lower the unemployment rate; it is simply because the US economy is still at the downturn phase of the cycle and has not been propelled by the thrust of the recovery yet. Unless that happens, we don’t see any decrease in unemployment rate. Had the economy was operating under normal condition, president Obama’s economic policies would have been more potent. Besides, the benefits of such polices often materialize in the distance future and people seem to have run out of patience and reluctant to wait.
It was, to me, the credulity of American voters that supplied ammunition to conservatives and the TEA party candidates not the superiority of their agenda. They could successfully lured people into buying the half-true ideas. The public was fooled by the fallacious ideas that look right on the surface but inaccurate deep down; that the prosperity of Wall Street is the necessary condition to the prosperity of the economy, that somehow government can magically cut taxes and continues to spend on exorbitantly expensive social programs that the same voters persistently support. It is a mathematical impossibility to cut taxes and keep, or increase, the level of spending.
American people seem to suffer from social amnesia. They have forgotten the many years of misguided policies implemented by Bush administration that forced our economy into the worst recoded recession in our modern history and the most expensive bail-out plan. The coming to power of the conservative means more tax cut for the wealthy and even wider income gap between rich and poor, cozier symbiotic relationship between politicians and those who are protected by their lobbying power, continuous shrinkage of the middle class, and more divisiveness for our already polarized nation.
