Voters Punished Obama, Dems for Going Deaf

Pelosi will try to ram health care through before Blue Dogs bolt

(NEWSER) - The Obama administration is running out of time in its race to enact its liberal agenda before Democratic candidates start caring more about their own re-election than the party line, writes Kim Strassel . Tuesday's results show that Obama's power is weakening, and will be the tipping point for many "Blue Dogs and freshmen and swing-state senators," Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal. More»

President's miscalculations include scale, momentum

(NEWSER) - Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts is the final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s first-year political strategy, John F. Harris and Carol E. Lee write for Politico . The miscalculations cover “three major counts":

• Believing 2008 was a game-changer: The Obama team thought the "election represented something seismic." But "the assumption that Obama would be swimming mostly with the current rather than often against it on issues such as health care, financial regulation and global warming was naive in retrospect."

Obama needs to learn to listen, writes Peggy Noonan

(NEWSER) - A year into his presidency, President Obama isn't reading from the same page as the American people and may not even be reading from the same book, writes Peggy Noonan. A president needs to have a "deep and shrewd sense of the people," but Obama seems blind to the concerns of American citizens and their deep reservations about his policies, Noonan notes in the Wall Street Journal. More»

Voter backlash is about failure to lower unemployment

(NEWSER) - Paul Krugman doesn't buy the GOP conclusion that voters Tuesday rejected the Obama agenda. The election just showed that American voters are worried about their jobs, he writes, and this time next year, with unemployment still high, Democrats will likely regret not having been bolder on the economy when they had the chance. "Voters across America are in a bad mood, largely because of the still-grim economic situation. And when voters are feeling bad, they turn on whomever currently holds office." More»

Prez shouldn't lose sleep over defeated lackluster Dems

(NEWSER) - if the votes in New Jersey and Virginia were a referendum on President Obama, then Ohio's vote for casinos must have been a referendum on health care reform and Cincinatti's public transit vote a rejection of cash-for-clunkers, smirks Gail Collins. Nearly all of Tuesday's results are being portrayed as blows to Obama, despite the president's lukewarm support for some distinctly substandard Democratic candidates, Collins notes in the New York Times . More»