I make it a point not to argue (too much) with someone who happens to be right. Let me be more specific: I make it a point not to disparage legislators who realize that, to co-opt a little Dylan, “the times they are a-changin’”. “Ron Burgundy had never heard that song, so when he fell, he fell hard.” An amicus asked my opinion the other day about why it was that Democratic legislators seem to be dropping faster than the price of pie in Poughkeepsie. I had this to say to my compadre, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Poughkeepsie - An Increasingly Cheaper Place to Live

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them to another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” TJ, of course, was ramping up to tell King George, “Your Highness, we beseech you on this day in Philadelphia to bite me, if you please.” The importance of any government is to affect the will of the people. Vox populi, vox Dei.

The answer to the question is that Democratic legislators are getting caught with their pants down in the same way that dear old Dubs did: when things go wrong, we like to blame people. The people to blame these days (with their high-falootin’ “healthcare reform” and their namby-pamby “Republicans won’t play nice”) are the Democrats in Congress and their Maestro-North-of-the-Ellipse. The fact of the matter is that politicians in this country are facing the stark realization that the Change-meister-in-chief has changed doodly-squat.

Why So Glum, Dems?

Politics in Washington (should I point out he was a Senator?) haven’t changed. The reason that Democrats are dropping so quickly isn’t that, in the words of retiring Congressmen Bayh, “There is much too much partisanship and not enough progress”; the real reason is that the partisanship from the President’s party isn’t carrying the day. It isn’t doing what Obama wanted it to do: be an echo of the Bush year’s dominance.

Remember when most of us were teens-on-the-rise? When I was sitting in my eighth grade English class and watching smoke billow from the North Tower, there was a Texan in the White House. There were Conservatives running the show on the hill. When Dubs spoke, Congress listened; having listened, Congress acted. Obama has yet to get the same kind of fight, the same kind of dominance, out of his Congress. Here’s the punch-line: he has a larger majority. Obama’s margin is larger than Bushes (I’m comparing the 109^th to the 111^th, gang); the reason he isn’t getting what he wants is that what he wants isn’t what America wants. The Bush Whitehouse spun their policies far better than Obama’s has.

Democrats are dropping like flies. The reason is simple: partisan politics are wartime politics; the first rule of war is “fighting to win”. Democrats in Congress have yet to realize that winning is the important part; you bring about change by winning. The retirement spree isn’t just about sex and politics. Democrats are resigning because they’re losing. That’s the ball-game kids, thanks for playing. Democrats are dropping like flies because they’re losing; they’re losing the battle for hearts, minds, and policy initiatives. Until Democrats find their own Karl Rove, the Democratic ballgame is unwinnable.

Rick Snyder, the GOP candidate for governor and Ann Arbor businessman, seems to be struggling with more than just weak name recognition. You may have seen an advertisement aired by the Rick for Michigan campaign during the Super Bowl – labeling him as “One Tough Nerd“. Now, last summer during the Mackinac Island conference and the huge initial GOP buildup to the primary season, he adopted a “Rick for Michigan” logo in which the preposition “for” was so small, it appeared as if his name was “Rick Michigan,” a potential miscalculation that has many prognosticators scratching their heads.  However, with the new year came a new rebranding for Rick Michigan, accompanied by the One Tough Nerd spot on Super Bowl Sunday.

I remember my dad often making jokes about people called pencil pushers, wearing something called a pocket protector and using mysterious tools known as slide rules. Even with the great value placed on the pursuit of learning in my family, there was a distinct generational attitude towards the stereotype of the nerd as a negative thing. I can’t speak to whether this was rooted in a 1960s grade school experience or a distaste for bureaucrats coming out of the Reagan years, but either way, older folks just don’t like nerds. The opposite seems to be true of millennials – especially in these uncertain times, both genders favor finding a mate who will be able to carry their own weight financially, and like it or not, that grants a certain advantage to nerds. Apathy is no longer trendy – and being involved and aware of what’s going on in the world requires involvement on several different platforms.

The gamble the Snyder camp seems to be making is that the Tough Nerd message will resonate with a wide swath of the population, but he faces a twin set of difficulties. First is that young people just don’t turn out to vote to the same degree that their older counterparts do, which will be compounded in an August primary. Furthermore, despite the relative unpopularity of the Democratic Party in Michigan today, the fact remains that young people (even or perhaps especially conservative ones) generally don’t like Republicans, and certainly not enough to go to all the trouble to support one candidate over another in a GOP primary.

So Rick Snyder, once considered the frontrunner, seems to be dealing with the age-old dilemma that the more people know about you, the less they like you. But this will only be an issue if he sticks with the One Tough Nerd meme even close to as long as he did with Rick Michigan.

Political strategists of all stripes have been pulling their hair out over the last year about the seeming fragmentation of the US into five voting blocs – progressives, Democratic Party faithful, centrists, GOP faithful, and the so-called Tea Party. The reason this is so problematic for US politics is because the United States has a voting system known as First Past the Post, used exclusively in only a smattering of countries with functional governments. Comparativists call the different forms of group identification in the US and in other states where parties are purely ideological “cross-cutting cleavages” – essentially the idea is that party identification will be fluid because parties aren’t allowed to purposefully represent one ethnicity or religious group. So, a committed Roman Catholic might believe strongly in the Puritan value set of it being everyone’s responsibility to care for the weaker brother – Jesus referenced this in the Beatitudes – and thereby identify best with the Democrats. Or, that same Roman Catholic might decide that protecting the rights of the unborn is the most important thing this election cycle, and so will vote with the Republicans.

The beauty of this system is that it balances group identification to prevent our political system from becoming overly fragmented. But in 2010, my America looks very different. Disillusioned voters on both sides, upset with a lack of leadership in Washington, are flocking to their respective pundit classes to be told the way of the future. Now, with a balanced and responsible Fourth Estate, this would be workable. But talking heads on the right such as Glenn Beck (the keynote speaker at CPAC 2010) and Sarah Palin are passing themselves off as mainstream, and in efforts to both widen the tent and make more cash, have refused to exclude even the dangerously crazy from their faithful following.  It is irresponsible to pretend that attacks from “birthers” pretending that there is something to contest about the first African-American president’s birth certificate are anything less than racist. However, it is equally irresponsible to write these conspiracy theorists off as some kind of fringe movement.  Although their ideas are certainly not typically associated with the mainstream, they seem to have found the perfect blend of ambiguity and populism to bring as many people in as possible, whether out of terror at the health care bill (“ObamaCare”) or out of fear for Obama’s tax hikes (while actually, the opposite is true).

It is fair to assert that these groups will be somewhat marginalized by the realities of the 2010 election. However, it doesn’t necessarily take a huge amount of people to push mainstream candidates out of the way. New York’s 23rd District was nearly hijacked by a Conservative Party candidate after he won support from Beck and Palin. And the dearth of leadership and epidemic of opportunism in the GOP right now is so desperate, it is not unrealistic to anticipate a new Republican Party after 2010, tied to the coffin of Ronald Reagan and some amorphous agenda focused on tax cuts and smaller government – as long as we keep the government’s hands off my Medicare.