As election results filtered in Tuesday night, a stately Tom Brokaw delivered the most salient point from a long night of chirping and chatter on the airwaves.
“No one who’s gotten elected tonight has a plan for creating jobs,” Brokaw said.
It will take awhile for everyone else to realize that. Despite all the heated campaigning and over-the-top attack ads leading up to mid-term elections, voters may soon realize that we’re no better off than we were yesterday because feasible plans to resuscitate our economy don’t exist among our elected leaders.
Our problems of today are too vast, too endemic, too complex and too cyclical. Making matters worse, a deficit in compromise in Washington has grinded government to a screeching halt — yet this notion that party politics can fix our systemic economic woes remains.
It’s a pressing issue, that pesky economy. But it’s not one that’s going to be solved by such a divisive government. Sixty-two percent of voters listed the economy as the most important issue this year, according to exit poll results. Despite the GOP’s high-strung cacophony surrounding Obamacare, health care ranked a distant second, with 19 percent saying it was the most important issue to them.
The huge swing in the House means that we’ll see a superficial change in Washington, and the rhetoric — from both sides of the aisle — will shift accordingly to match some partisan message about how the other party is preventing real work from being done.
And we’ll continue to have the empty sound bites, too. Just think of Harry Reid, who’s thanking his lucky stars he defeated his media-phobic Republican challenger and will hang on to his majority leader spot in the Senate.
“As far as I'm concerned, my No. 1 job is to help create jobs, and I'm going to do everything I can,” Reid said Wednesday on CNN’s “American Morning.” “The only thing that's going to solve our economic problems in this country are jobs, jobs and more jobs.”
Thanks for the confidence in yourself, Harry. But saying jobs are going to solve our economic problems but not saying how you’re going to create them is like a baseball coach telling reporters that “the only thing that’s going to solve our losing games problem this season are runs, runs and more runs.”
Any ball player can tell you it’s unwise to contest the skipper, but it’s one thing to say you need to score and another thing to know how to put runs up on the board — and actually do it.
Republicans, most notably the teary-eyed soon-to-be Speaker of the House John Boehner, are claiming a mandate from the people after their victory, but we’ve heard that one before, too. Voters didn’t give either party a mandate on Tuesday because they just want the economy to get better. By and large, we don’t understand what steps need to be taken to make things better, but the American people are a fickle bunch. And if something doesn’t work out after two short years, we’re prone to do something drastic.
Two years ago that drastic step was elevating a super liberal freshman senator and the first African-American to the presidency. This time around, it was supporting a growing movement of “no” spearheaded by Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The pendulum continues to swing, but the divisiveness that all but shut down the cogs of government in Washington will continue.
And for a while, many Americans will still be looking for jobs. Fixing the economy, as the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein put it, is Ben Bernanke’s job, anyway.
Reach Dustin at dustin.volz@asu.edu
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