Election rejection and dejection for Republicans, conservatives, the Tea Party and Big Money.

 

The party is over, literally and figuratively for the Tea Party,conservatives and Republicans. If you're a Republican you might want to point out that the popular vote in the presidential election was close. If you're a Democrat when you hear that you roll over laughing.

 This election was as decisive a rejection of conservative principles, Republicans in general and the Tea Party most specifically, as one could get.

 Yes Obama won the popular vote by a narrow 3 million while winning a decisive and very large electoral college vote. But only weeks before the election, in national polls which proved to be reliably accurate this time around, when asked if Obama deserved re-election, 54% said no. And understandably so given Democratic voter disgust with his first four years in office and all that could have accomplished and wasn't when he had super majorities in congress his first four years.

 Yet given that 54% said Obama didn't deserve to be re-elected, he was re-elected anyway given the voters choice between Obama or Romney whose vice-presidential candidate drafted Tea Party endorsed economic proposals that the rest of the country soundly rejected.

 That isn't just rejection or losing an election. That is repudiation. And that is in spite of tepid, even weak Democratic campaign commercials and political strategy. In the end the election was about people making up their own minds. Had Democrats had better strategists who knew how to hit harder, the margin of victory would have been much larger, especially in the House.

 Along with Obama's win, the Democrats substantially increased their control of the senate in an election where Republicans thought they would take control. Instead they lost 3 seats, the long held Republican seat in Indiana thanks to the Tea Party and a candidate who replaced Richard Lugar who  said a pregnancy from rape was a gift, Elizabeth Warren beating Scott Brown in Massachusetts and a pro-choice independent who took Olympia Snowe's seat in Maine and will caucus with the Democrats giving the Democrats and liberals a 55-45 majority. 

 Then there was good old Todd Akin another Tea Party candidate who made medieval comments about rape and was landslided by Democrat Claire McCaskill.

 Along with the Tea Party and Republican conservatives the other big loser was Big Money. No one got less for their money than Karl Rove, his super PAC and  other Republican and conservative PAC's.

 The Koch Brothers poured hundreds of millions into this election and lost big. Republican Linda McMahon who ran for the Senate in Connecticut reportedly spent $100 million of her own money. She was destroyed by the Democratic candidate in a landslide defeat.

 According to post election statistics, the NRA, once but probably no longer feared by Democrats who oppose their agenda, spent over $7 million and received a 0.018% return on their investment based on money spent on candidates and who won. Conversely, Planned Parenthood, constantly and irrationally attacked by conservatives saw a better than 99% return on investment in terms of  money spent on candidates they supported and candidates who won.

 The corrupt and preposterous Citizens United 5-4 Supreme Court decision in which conservatives on the court undid years of precedent and declared that corporations were people and therefore had the same right of freedom of speech as individuals ( a proposition utterly preposterous since corporations employ thousands even tens of thousands and in some cases hundreds of thousands of people none of whom have a say in who the corporation decides to support, a decision generally made by one person) in the end, gave corporations enough rope to hang themselves.

 The hundreds of millions they spent trying to push candidates and ideas the majority didn't want made the alternatives look even more attractive. So it all backfired.

 Their money bought nothing. And it proved to Democrats as well, who kept sending out hysterical fund raising emails about being outspent and begging for more money, that as I kept telling them, it wasn't about money but message.

 In the end, the election was clearly more about a rejection of conservatives than an embrace of Obama. A majority decided they would prefer to give Obama another chance at not being a political cigar store Indian and actually do some of the things he promised rather than see a Republican in the White House implementing polices most didn't want.

That Obama won in this economic environment is testimony to just how unattractive Romney, Ryan,  Republican and Tea Party polices both econimic and social really are. When facing a choice between a failed Democratic president and Republican ideas and polices, a majority chose the failed Democratic president. Again, not just rejection but a resounding repudiation.

 So, does that mean that voters will now see the liberal ideas and policies they voted for  become reality? Not exactly. Because now that the election is over, Democrats and liberals still have to face the very sobering fact that the person in the White House is Barrack Obama.