Are the Democrats Trying to Lose in November?

Frankly, my frustration with Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats seems to increase almost every passing day. It's to the point that it seems they want to lose horrifically come November's mid-terms. Otherwise, why would a party that still holds commanding majorities - at least for now - in Congress (1) fail to push for needed jobs legislation and (2) have a president who simply refuses to get on the bully pulpit and go on the attack against Republican obstruction and flat out lies. And why aren't they tying the tea party crowd and Sarah Palin - which a majority of Americans deem scary - firmly around the GOP's neck? Frank Rich looks at the potential coming debacle and the terrifying policies the GOP would bring in should they triumph in November largely because the Democrats have sat on their hands, demoralized their own base and done little to prove they can deliver effectively on campaign promises. The entire approach to the Party base has been you need to support us because they other guys are worse/scary. It is driving me crazy. Here are highlights from Rich's column:
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The 2010 campaign against the Bush administration is in full cry, with President Obama leading the charge. The Republicans are “betting on amnesia,” he confidently told the claque at a recent fund-raiser. . . . Sounds plausible, but it’s Obama who’s on the wrong side of that bet, to his own political peril.
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Betting on amnesia is almost always a winning, not a losing, wager in America. Angry demonstrators at health care town-hall meetings didn’t remember that Medicare is a government program, and fewer and fewer voters of both parties recall that the widely loathed TARP was a Bush administration creation supported by the G.O.P. Congressional leadership.
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The president is also wrong when he says that every single current G.O.P. idea is a Bush idea. Many are not. And those that are not are far more radical. A political campaign built on Obama’s faulty premises cannot stand — or win.
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Bleak as this picture looks for the Democrats, it is so only up to a point. No one knows what will happen on an Election Day almost three months away. One encouraging sign for the party in power is the over-the-top triumphalism of the right.
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But rather than wait for miracles or pray that Bushphobia will save the day, Democrats might instead start playing the hand they’ve been dealt. Elections, the cliché goes, are about the future, not the past. At the very least they’re about the present. It’s time voters were told just how far right the G.O.P. has lurched since Bush returned to Texas. And the White House might also at long last — at very long last — craft a compelling message, not to mention a plan, to offer real hope to the jobless.
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Some 16.5 percent of America’s workers are now either unemployed and trying to find a job, involuntarily working part time, or have stopped looking for work altogether. That figure doesn’t even include the many Americans who’ve had to settle for jobs for which they are overqualified.
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[W]hat we can discern of the Republican “ideas” lying in wait almost makes Bush’s conservatism actually seem compassionate. The public is largely unaware of this because the conservative establishment in both Washington and the press has been relentless in its effort to separate the G.O.P. from the excesses of the Palin-Fox-Beck-Breitbart bomb throwers and from wacky Tea Party senatorial candidates like Sharron Angle of Nevada and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
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The leaders who would actually take over should the Republicans regain Congress are far closer to the revolutionaries than most voters imagine. . . . . Once that election is won, the road will be clear and the ideologues will take over the asylum. Ryan’s radicalism will be abetted by the new House speaker, John Boehner, who didn’t even wait for the BP well to be plugged to announce that “a moratorium on new federal regulations” would be “a great idea.”
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In the theoretically more sober Senate, the G.O.P.’s rightward shift is arguably even more drastic. . . . . Now we have a Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, joined by such onetime “moderates” as John McCain and Charles Grassley, calling for hearings to “look into” the 14th Amendment. That Reconstruction landmark, guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in America, was such a prideful accomplishment of the old Party of Lincoln that the official G.O.P. Web site has been showcasing it to counter the Republicans’ current identity as a whites-only country club.
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The Hispanic-bashing has gotten so ugly that Michael Gerson, the former Bush speechwriter, wrote last week that Graham and McCain “may never fully recover” their reputations.
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But even if the Democrats sharpen their attack, they are doomed to fall short if they don’t address the cancer in the American heart — joblessness. This requires stunning emergency action right now . . . The Democrats have already retreated from immigration and energy reform. If they can’t make the case to Americans like Alexandra Jarrin that they offer more hope for a job than a radical conservative movement poised to tear down what remains of the safety net, they deserve to lose.

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The thought of the Republicans back in charge is indeed frightening. Political junkies of the middle and left know this, but too amny voters who don't start paying attention untill the last minute do not. The Democrats need to do something now to show they can actually govern and carry the attacks on the GOP as well. Relying solely on the latter will be a disaster.