(COMMON DREAMS) John Acheson, August 15, 2018 — Democrats will win the House in 3 months, and they have an outside shot at the Senate.  But it’s not because they’ve figured out how to win elections, it’s because Republicans have – once again — handed it to them.

That’s the only way Democrats win these days.  Obama’s victory was a direct result of the disastrous Bush Cheney years. When their tax cuts for the rich, Wall Street-big bank coddling, neocon perpetual war machine dragged the economy into the mother of all recessions, and his clown version of the presidency finally woke up enough fear and loathing that people got up off their chairs and voted them out, Democrats captured the House, the Senate and the Presidency.

The only way they lose is when their policies are so overtly pro-oligarchy, or so explicitly damaging to the country – as with Bush’s recession and his Iraq folly – that they arouse a sufficient degree of fear and loathing among the rest of the cynically disaffected that they show up and vote.

But there’s a world of difference between winning because people are fed up with the other guys, and winning because they’ve embraced your values.  Obama’s “hope and change†campaign was designed to appeal to people who were fed up with the status quo, but something that vague could never deliver a mandate.  What was conveniently left out of the campaign was hope for what and change to what.

Similarly, Hillary’s painfully scripted campaign, in which she claimed to be a centrist, a progressive and then a centrist again in the space of nine months; in which she backed fossil fuel interests while claiming to take climate change seriously; in which she talked tough about Wall Street in public and talked kindly to them in private – was doomed to lose at a time when people were angry at the status quo politicians.  They still are.

via With 3 Months To Go, Pundits and Democrats Still Clueless.