I hope we’re not going to get lectures about how Democrats lost so many states in the midterm elections because they didn’t communicate their message clearly enough, they didn’t find the “magic words.” Nothing presents more clarity than a family desperate for healthcare visiting doctors for the first time in years. You can’t be clearer than life and death. I don’t think those people have been “tricked” if they then choose to elect politicians desperate to take that benefit from them, as they did with Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Sure, it would have been great for the media to explain recently how universal healthcare lifts the threshold for a plague in America, imported or “home-grown,” than to engage in ceaseless fearmongering about Ebola, a virus yet to claim a single U.S. citizen on American soil. But I think the people get the media and government they deserve. If they want to vote their ideology and aspirations rather than their reality, that’s what going to happen. The matter with Kansas, at long last, may be Kansans. From Paul Krugman at the New York Times:

“But the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. From Day 1 of the Obama administration, Mr. McConnell and his colleagues have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.

This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.

Will things change now that the G.O.P. can’t so easily evade responsibility? I guess we’ll find out.”