Excuses, excuses

Whenever there’s a special election to fill a U.S. Congressional seat, the winning party sees a significant national trend in the outcome and the loser makes excuses. That is precisely what happened after the huge Republican victory in New York’s historically Democratic 9th Congressional District last week.

The Democrats have had to do the fastest talking because the loss certainly looks like something the party and especially the president should be very worried about.

The national  party chairman, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), had a point when she noted the seat became available “under what can be best called unusual circumstances.” She refers to the resignation of Rep. Anthony Weiner, who got too sociable on a social network with women not his wife, as the saying goes.

Less convincing was the argument of New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer, Weiner’s predecessor. He claimed the Democrats lost because the district is among the least liberal in New York City.

Sure. It’s so conservative, it last sent a Republican to Congress during the Harding administration.

The election in the Brooklyn and Queens district wasn’t the only setback for the president and his party last week. Even Connecticut doesn’t look safe.

Although a Quinnipiac poll showed the president defeating the favorite candidate of state Republicans, Mitt Romney, by 13 points, the president’s approval rating dropped to a 48-48 percent tie with those who disapprove of the job he’s doing. It was 71 percent in his first year, higher than even our former governer Jodi Rell’s.

The 48 percent approval is just five points higher than the president’s all-time national low of 43 percent in a CBS-New York Times poll released the same day and he is in the 40s in other blue states as well. Nor can we ignore the 72 percent of the voters saying the country is going in the wrong direction.

Despite his poor showing, the president’s approval rating is four times higher than the Congress, which enjoys the approval of all of 12 percent of the voters. I can’t imagine who they are.

That isn’t all. CNN did one of those “are you better off now than four years ago” polls but changed the time frame to the three years Obama’s been in office. Of those asked if they are better off today than they were three years ago, only a sad 27 percent said yes. More than 70 percent said they are not.

If these numbers don’t go up in the coming months — and there’s plenty of time for that to happen if the economy improves and unemployment falls — Obama could lose, even if the Republicans nominate one of the extremist types favored by the Tea Party. Maybe it’s time for not only Democrats, but also Republicans to think about the consequences of that once unlikely event.

James Carville, a Democrat who helped make Clinton president, warns that unless the Obama campaign undergoes a complete change of direction, “We are on the brink of a crazy person running our nation.”

Before that happens, responsible Republicans must find a way to take their party back from maybe not crazies, but the extremists and incompetents, who have dominated the nominating process so far.

It may be thrilling for conservatives to envision the election of another Reagan but they don’t have another Reagan or even another Goldwater running at the present time. They have Rick Perry, Michelle Bachman, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and one respectable candidate in Mitt Romney. But this isn’t an endorsement of Romney; it’s a hope that Republicans will keep looking and try to find someone better.

The last time the nation faced an economic crisis of this magnitude, the Democratic opposition offered Franklin Roosevelt. And now, Rick Perry?

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.