Forget the man and examine the record – suddenly, President Obama is a left-leaning Republican, relative, of course, to his party’s panderers. Now, forget the record, and examine the man, for lo and behold, Mitt Romney is what the extreme right made him to be and no longer the Massachusetts moderate he once proudly was.
Don’t let party names fool you, and don’t let context escape you. After all, the South was solid blue for 80 straight years before becoming the red fortress it is today. What changed? The color, the ideology or the scale by which the previous two measure themselves? I believe in the latter, and I point to today as evidence strongly supporting my answer.
America’s two standard-bearers reflect the political scale in which they reside, a scale heavily tilted by an unwilling Congress that left the people’s president dangling in the air. Then-Senator Obama touted a progressive agenda in 2008, the closest American ideals had ever come to matching those of the most peaceful countries on earth, and Obama subsequently won both the popular and electoral vote by the largest margin in 12 years. With both chambers behind his back, the 111th Congress became one of the most productive and progressive in modern history. Equal pay for equal work, student loan reform, health care reform, an end to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and the war in Iraq and the federal stimulus, among others – all accomplishments of this Congress, all actions the current Congress can’t pretend to match, and all steps in the forward direction as defined by the free world.
Two years later, when raging conservatives beat ignited liberals for the House, this next Congress earned history’s lowest approval rating. As of today, our current Congress is known more for the bills they didn’t pass rather than the few they did. The 2008 election proved a clear majority existed in this country. It was a call for a new future, and the progressive state of politics over the next two years became the new norm, one that sat comfortably with the nation considering the still-reeling economy from the previous president’s term. America had adjusted as much as they could given the nation’s predetermined circumstances, but impatience dealt its hand anyway when the House realigned.
The president desired the same progressivism the electorate advocated for in the first place, and the Senate helped smooth a path for that natural journey forward. This year, the American people spoke again by excitedly electing unapologetic liberals like Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, two of the five women elected to the new Senate in which a historical 20 percent of its politicians are women. It is the immovable House who fails to embrace the change America and the free world have already decided upon.
What we once knew as progressivism has become the new moderate, and what we currently call moderate will become the new conservatism. All that awaits is for the modern Republican party to accept this inevitability, and hopefully, Mitt Romney’s loss will overcome that obstacle and push a shift toward yesterday’s center. Progressive Democrats won’t accomplish anything without progressive Republicans, and the nation won’t move forward without either.
