The Mid Term Election

Here's a blog post by Paul Krugman with his take on it:

Obviously, Democrats are going to do badly today, the only question being how badly. And we’ll be drenched in punditry, most of it about how Obama overreached, etc..

So, to say the obvious: it’s mainly the economy, stupid.

...

To the extent that Democrats do worse even than the economy explains, one can point to a number of factors. Given that the stimulus was inadequate — which was obvious early on — Obama could have tried to warn Americans of a long hard road ahead, and placed blame on Republicans; instead, the WH kept pretending that things were going swimmingly, never once acknowledging that the original plan wasn’t sufficient (they still haven’t). Remember the Summer of Recovery?

Worse, since the fall of 2009 the White House has systematically adopted Republican positioning on the budget; remember how the State of the Union included a freeze in domestic spending?

...

On the organizational side, it’s still mind-boggling how the White House deliberately shut down the whole network of grass-roots organizing that helped put Obama there in the first place. All that idealism, all that energy — and they were told to go away and let Rahm Emanuel do his deals in peace.

There are a few more details in Krugman's posting, but those are the key ones. It comes down to this: leadership. Obama blew it.