What Do the Results of the 2010 Mid-Term Election Mean?

The 2010 mid-term elections in the United States have come to pass. American democracy has again shown that we can select individuals to govern the country and carry on an orderly and peaceful transfer of power. 

What is less evident is what the results of election are going to mean for the core issues facing the United States at this moment in history: jobs, the national debt, our response to the aging of the population and immigration, and the large-scale deployments that continue in Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither the Democrats, Republicans, or the Tea Party really suggested anything that would create jobs, aside from providing a scapegoat (government regulation) for a stalled recovery. The Tea Party, and now the Republican party, have tried to make the yearly budget deficit--and hence the national debt--one of their key policy points. Yet when questioned specifically about what programs they would downsize or cut to deal with the deficit, the single largest budget items: Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending, are all off the table. The election was full of immigrant- and Muslim-baiting, suggesting that no realistic and reasonable reform of immigration policy, if even anything at all, will occur on that front. And the Republican hawks largely remain in Congress, meaning that the potential for agitation for military adventurism in Iran will continue, even as the military, and military families, remain incredibly overstretched over continued deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, still without a draft in place. Perhaps some of isolationist tendencies of the Tea Party will manifest themselves in "bring the troops home" slogans? Nobody really knows. 

Does the political posturing that dominated the election really reflect what the new Tea Party/Republican party is going to pursue? Maybe. Will the opposition just continue trying to destroy Obama and not bother with trying to find ways to fix the economy? Probably. Again, we really don't know.

As many suspect, I think that the radical philosophies suggested by the Republicans and conservative Democrats during the election will be tempered by reality. Conservative supporters who might find their children lose their health care because the COBRA plan extensions will be rolled back (among other issues) might end up clamoring for reform of health care reform, rather than repeal followed by another decade of negotiation. Most, on all sides, think that health care reform needs further reform. But any realistic person needs wants to see it reformed.

We still have a little ways to go before we see what the new Congress will do. Lets hope that some of that "common sense conservatism"--which remains a meaningless phrase--will mean what it says: common sense. Otherwise I fear what may come.