AS EXPECTED: Democrats' betrayal deepens

Two weeks before US midterm election—

Democrats embrace right-wing austerity policies

By Patrick Martin | 
18 October 2010
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With only two weeks remaining in the 2010 election campaign, Democratic Party candidates in closely contested races for the Senate, the House of Representatives and many statewide offices are highlighting their right-wing policies and minimizing any differences with their Republican opponents.
Some 40 states are electing governors as well, with Republican candidates expected to sweep a belt of economically devastated industrial states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin—from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. There are more closely contested gubernatorial races in three of the four largest states: Florida, Texas and California.
 The anticipated Republican victories are due mainly to a projected collapse in turnout by those who voted for Obama and other Democratic candidates in 2008, not to any great surge of popularity for the Republican candidates, many of them associated with the ultra-right Tea Party movement. An Associated Press-Knowledge Networks poll published over the weekend found that one-quarter of Obama voters were considering voting against the Democrats this year, and an even larger number were not planning to vote at all.

The Obama White House, like the congressional Democratic leadership, has already begun planning for an expected Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, if not the Senate. Obama gave a lengthy interview to Peter Baker of the New York Times, published in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, in which he suggested in broad strokes the coming shift further to the right.
  In the dozen or so Senate races still closely fought—New Hampshire, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Colorado, Nevada, California, Washington, Alaska—the contests between the Democratic and Republican candidates show a definite pattern.

In West Virginia, for example, Democratic Governor Joe Manchin, who faces millionaire businessman John Raese for the seat vacated by the death of Robert Byrd, declared that he would support repeal of Obama’s healthcare legislation, at least in part, and trumpeted his opposition to any environmental restrictions on the coal industry.

Several incumbent Democrats who voted for Pelosi as speaker in 2007 and 2009 have declared that they will not do so in 2011, when the next Congress convenes. A Mississippi Democrat boasted that in 1,466 votes over the past two years, “Nancy Pelosi agreed with my vote 34 times.”
PATRICK MARTIN is a senior political commentator for the World Socialist Web Site.