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There's going to be a lot of finger-pointing today. I've already given you my two bits' worth. Above all, I think these results tell us that Democrats have once again failed to understand the value of controlling the narrative -- or at least not letting conservatives control the narrative:

I blame the geniuses in the Democratic Party -- both in the White House and elsewhere -- who failed to establish firmly the narrative after the election that needed to be hammered home daily and relentlessly and fearlessly: that Americans had repudiated conservative rule because it had manifestly proven itself a failure. Instead, Democrats thought "bipartisanship" was more important. Sure it was.

This clearly was The Fox Election. This was a political victory entirely engineered by a fake "news network" that in reality is a relentless and powerful right-wing propaganda machine. Democrats need to wake up and figure out how they're going to beat it.

Larray Sabato last night on Fox did point out that there was at least one real upside to all this: The Blue Dogs are now almost entirely extinct. And good riddance, frankly; a more progressive caucus is more likely to be able to establish and elucidate a more progressive agenda.

But amid the carnage, there are some good, positive lessons for Democrats -- especially in Nevada, where Harry Reid pulled out a convincing victory with the help of Democrats' most stalwart friends: labor unions and Latino voters. Remember that pollsters like Rasmussen had Sharron Angle ahead for most of the closing weeks of the election.

What turned the tide? Angle's vicious Latino-bashing attack ads attempting to smear Reid as soft on "illegal aliens."

The results speak for themselves:

Latino vote for Senate
Harry Reid: 90%
Sharron Angle: 8%

Latino share of voters: 12%
Latino contribution to H. Reid: +9.8

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As voters head to the polls, the conventional wisdom states that a red wave will wash over the United States. While political statistician extraordinaire Nate Silver concluded a Republican takeover of the Senate is unlikely, he estimates GOP gains in the House could reach 55 seats. That's in line with a 50-60 pick-up forecast by Charlie Cook. But the extent of the carnage for Democrats hinges on the much-hyped "enthusiasm gap." And the early, if anecdotal, evidence of strong voter turnout suggests that may not be coming to pass as predicted.

That at least is the word from locations around the country. In a round up of early voting, the Huffington Post reported "shocking" turnout. In Massachusetts, "State and local election officials were already predicting possibly record voter turnout today." In Pennsylvania and Louisiana, too, larger than expected numbers of voters are arriving to cast ballots. At one St. Louis polling place, "election judges said the first two hours had been just as busy as two years ago, when voters formed long lines to cast a ballot in the presidential election."

If so, that would be a surprise, and a welcome one for Democrats. As the data show, over the last decade voter turnout in midterm elections has been as much as 20 points lower than in presidential contests:

Based in part on early voting results so far, the United States Election Project forecasts a 2010 nationwide turnout of 41.3%, the same level when Democrats regained control of the House and Senate in 2006. In absolute numbers, that would nevertheless represent a new record:

Dr. Michael McDonald, who tracks election turnout at George Mason University, projects that a record-breaking 90 million people will cast ballots for 2010 candidates, the largest number of voters to date in a midterm election.

The current midterm record was set in 2006, when 86 million voters went to the polls.

Still, that turnout probably wouldn't be enough to produce happier alternative scenarios for Democrats of the kind envisioned by Nate Silver or HuffPo's Mark Blumenthal. (After all, the Republican Revolution of 1994 saw turnout at 41.1%.) Final polling shows a Republican lead among likely voters ranging from 1 point (NBC/Wall Street Journal) to 15% (Gallup). That gap virtually disappears among registered voters, as the Gallup (R+4) and NBC (D+3) surveys reveal. To overcome the GOP edge, President Obama's party likely needs the share of eligible voters casting ballots to reach 43% or higher.

For Democrats hoping to avoid a midterm bloodbath, that is probably the last, best hope.

(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)

The more things change, the more they stay the same. On the eve of midterms elections that could make him House Speaker, John Boehner announced, "This is not a time for compromise." His lieutenant Mike Pence (R-IN) echoed that line, declaring that with a new Republican majority "there will be no compromise" with President Obama and the Democrats. Of course, with their record-setting use of the filibuster, unprecedented obstruction of presidential nominees, and unified no votes on almost every major piece of legislation, the past performance of Congressional Republicans is a guarantee of future results.

Even before Barack Obama took the oath office, Republicans leaders, conservative think-tanks and right-wing pundits were calling for total obstruction of the new president's agenda. Bill Kristol, who helped block Bill Clinton's health care reform attempt in 1993, called for history to repeat on the Obama stimulus - and everything else. Pointing with pride to the Clinton economic program which received exactly zero GOP votes in either House, Kristol in January 2009 advised:

"That it made, that it made it so much easier to then defeat his health care initiative. So, it's very important for Republicans who think they're going to have to fight later on on health care, fight later on maybe on some of the bank bailout legislation, fight later on on all kinds of issues.."

And so, as the table above reveals, it came to pass.

On issue after issue, even when President Obama extended his hand, Republicans showed him the back of theirs. Despite dedicating 40% of the $787 billion stimulus package to tax cuts (making it, as Steve Benen noted, the "biggest tax cut ever"), Obama got no GOP votes in the House and only three in the Senate. Months of painful concessions to supposedly moderate Senate Republicans only served to produce a watered-down health care bill - and no GOP support.

Time after time, President Obama could count the votes he received from Congressional Republicans on the fingers (usually the middle) of one hand. The expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) to four million more American kids earned the backing of a whopping eight GOP Senators. (One of them, Arlen Specter, later became a Democrat.) Badly needed Wall Street reform eventually overcame GOP filibusters to pass with the support of just three Republicans in the House and Senate, respectively. This summer, it took 50 days for President Obama to get past Republican filibusters of extended unemployment benefits and the Small Business Jobs Act. As for the DISCLOSE Act, legislation designed to limit the torrent of secret campaign cash unleashed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, in September Republican Senators prevented it from ever coming to a vote.

And when they weren't showing up to vote no on President Obama's initiatives, Senate Republicans blocked voting altogether.

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Over this pre-election weekend, CNN will air a special called, "Boiling Point: Inside the Tea Party." Whether or not its right-wing fury brings a conservative wave to Washington, the network insists, "the Tea Party has earned a place in history." But even more than its decibel level, none-too-thinly veiled race-baiting, casual incitements to violence and perfection of a corporate-backed grassroots façade, the rise of the Tea Party marks the triumph of delusion in American politics. Simply put, never has a modern political movement been so utterly wrong on basic matters of fact.

And as a new Bloomberg poll on taxes and economy revealed Friday, the know-nothingism is contagious:

The Obama administration cut taxes for middle-class Americans, expects to make a profit on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to rescue Wall Street banks and has overseen an economy that has grown for the past five quarters.

Most voters don't believe it.

A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Oct. 24-26 finds that by a two-to-one margin, likely voters in the Nov. 2 midterm elections think taxes have gone up, the economy has shrunk, and the billions lent to banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program won't be recovered.

Of course, from the very beginning the cries of the "No Taxation without Representation" and "Taxed Enough Already" flew in the face of reality. President Obama and his Democratic allies as promised delivered tax relief to over 95% of working households. As Steve Benen noted, that $282 billion, two-year tax cut was the "biggest tax cut ever." By May 2010, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported, "Federal, state and local taxes -- including income, property, sales and other taxes -- consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950."

Nevertheless, a CBS poll in February found that only 12%o of respondents thought that the Obama administration had already lowered taxes, while 53% believed they remained unchanged. But among the boiling-over Tea Baggers, the cognitive dysfunction was almost total:

Of people who support the grassroots, "Tea Party" movement, only 2 percent think taxes have been decreased, 46 percent say taxes are the same, and a whopping 44 percent say they believe taxes have gone up.

It's no wonder, as former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett lamented, "For an antitax group, they don't know much about taxes."

Or just about anything else.

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Everyone keeps saying the coming election is a referendum on President Obama. I beg to differ. I'm beginning to believe that it's actually a referendum on Fox News.

Because, well, let's be honest: The Republican Party would be dead in the water right now were it not for Fox and its ceaseless efforts -- primarily through lying and propagandizing 24/7/365 -- at reviving the conservative movement brand.

Voters aren't voting for Republicans or a GOP agenda. They're voting for the Fox agenda.

I was thinking about this while watching our fearless fearmonger in chief Glenn Beck waxing apocalyptic yesterday on his Fox show -- which, as Media Matters points out, Beck is using as his own Get Out The Vote operation. Beck's show was full of warnings about the dire threat posed to the Republic by progressives, and how this election will reverse that course and refudiate progressivism.

But the best part was the little promo that ran near the end of the show, with the following script:

Narrator: On November 2, 2010, you have a choice. You can stand up for freedom and liberty. Or sit back and let the American Dream become a nightmare.

It's way too late for politics. Instead, vote as if your way of life depends on it. Because it does.

Vote for government by the people, of the people, and for the people. Vote Democrat, Republican, or Independent. But whatever you do, vote for Honor. Restoration. The Constitution. Vote for America.

This is just about the endpoint of the campaign that Fox has been waging for the past two years -- beginning the day after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008. Think about it:

-- The engine of their comeback, the Tea Parties, is almost wholly a Fox concoction. Without Fox's endless promotions of the various Tea Party events -- and Tea Party figures, including its corporate overseers like Dick Armey -- the "movement" would have been nothing, a brief blip on the screen.

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Got Democratic (or at the very least, non-crazy) friends and family members who say they're not gonna vote this November because they're disappointed with Congress or Obama or something? Make 'em watch this.

Republican "Young Gun" (how is he a young gun at age 68?) Thomas Ganley is running against Rep. Betty Sutton in Ohio Congressional District 13. But no matter what one's political outlook is, he should not be allowed anywhere near Washington, DC.

Last week a lawsuit was filed against Thomas Ganley, not by a Democrat, but by a Tea Party supporter who wanted to volunteer for his campaign. His conduct as described in her complaint was so reprehensible and entitled that it smacked of a man who watches too much online adult fare, and a man who really, really despises women. This is a man who should be in jail, not running for the United States Congress.

The incident happened about a year ago. It came to light after settlement negotiations between his lawyer and hers failed. It isn't some election-year invention. It's attempted rape. From her complaint (PDF):

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So. In response to a Politico piece in which the authors and White House whine about the left wing blogosphere not being happy with all of Obama's "wins" and not caring about potential losses in 2010, Kevin Drum writes:

Here's the good news: this record of progressive accomplishment officially makes Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. And here's the bad news: this shoddy collection of centrist, watered down, corporatist sellout legislation was all it took to make Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. Take your pick.

Here's the thing. What matters is whether policy works. It does not matter if what Obama did was more left wing than anything that's been done in a while (though in absolute terms I would argue it mostly wasn't left wing, the health care plan, for example, was essentially a Republican plan from the 90s), what matters is if it was left wing enough (big enough stimulus, smart enough health care plan) to improve people's lives enough that they noticed.

It wasn't, and that's all that matters. Policies such as the stimulus were not done well enough, and everyone from Nobel prize winners with good predictive records like Stiglitz and and Krugman, down to nobodies like me, predicted it at the time. The President hired the wrong people to give him advice, didn't even do as much as many of them wanted, and now we all pay the price.

Sometimes half doesn't work. Half-assed rarely does. All Obama's half assed "left wing" policies have done is discredit the left for another generation. Combined with the ability of the media, Republicans and hysterical Tea Baggers unable to use a dictionary to define him as a "socialist" this means that Obama's policies are seen as left wing, and left wing policies are seen to have failed.

I don't want Obama doing anything I agree with, because he will screw it up and discredit it. In this respect he is like Bush. He is poison because he is incompetent at policy.

As for the original Politico post, the hysterical ranting at the peanut gallery the authors clearly don't even read, says more about them and the White House than it does about the left wing blogosphere they try to blame for Democrats own failures.

It seems that, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which allowed uncontrolled corporate money into elections, that (surprise!) Republicans have a huge warchest from outside actors like the Chamber of Commerce:

On the left hand side of the chart is a list of ten Republican aligned institutions, ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Family Research Council. Next to it is a column listing the amount of money each group has pledged to spend by Election Day. A third column on the right details what those groups actually spent in 2008 on federal elections.

The number at the bottom delivers the key message. If their pledges are fulfilled, these ten groups will unleash more than $200 million in election-focused spending -- roughly $37 million more than every single independent group spent on the 2008 presidential campaign combined. This time around, almost every single penny will be going to Republican candidates or causes.

So, how did this happen?

First, Democrats didn't make an all out effort to torpedo either Roberts, or more reasonably, Alito. With both on the Supreme Court, decisions like Citizens United were inevitable.

Second, when given a historic opportunity to break the power of the rich and corporations by not bailing them out, Democrats bailed them out. They did not make shareholders get wiped out (as they deserved, they took the profits from housing bubble fraud, after all) and they did not let the bondholders take their losses. Be very clear, this was never about saving the economy, the trillions of dollars used to bail out these corporations could have been loaned directly to consumers and businesses which needed loans. In fact, at this point, it is entirely likely that bailouts made things worse, not better.

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