Main Street America made clear its unhappiness in the 2010 midterm elections. Astonishingly, those in power in the Beltway ignored this. Main Street has another chance to be heard on Tuesday-Salena Zito

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11/3/12, “Main Street in revolt,” Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

“Two years after suffering a historic shellacking in the 2010 midterm election, Democrats astonishingly have ignored Main Street Americans’ unhappiness.

That 2010 ejection from the U.S. House, and from state legislatures and governors’ offices across the country,

didn’t happen inside the Washington Beltway world.

It didn’t reflect the Democrats’ or the media’s conventional wisdom or voter-turnout models. So it just wasn’t part of their reality.

In Democrats’ minds, it was never a question of “How did we lose Main Street?”

Instead, it was the fault of the “tea party” or of crazy right-wing Republicans.

Yet in interview after interview — in Colorado, along Nebraska’s plains, in small Iowa towns or Wisconsin shops, outside closed Ohio steel plants and elsewhere — many Democrats have told me they are furious with the president. Not in a frothing-at-the-mouth or racist way, as many elites suggest. They just have legitimate concerns affecting their lives.

These Main Street Democrats in seven battleground states supported Obama in 2008. Now they are disappointed by his broken pledges: Where is the promised bipartisanship? How could health-care reform become such a mess? What direction is the country going in?…

Obama’s progressivism no longer seems universal, upbeat and forward-looking; instead, it appears divisive, shrill and based on the worst kind of shortsighted power calculations.…

It is something else altogether to have today’s arbiters of political correctness order you to march “Forward” to a future

• with less promise, fewer choices, more intrusive government —

and to justify it by telling you to accept that the new normal of high employment, low growth and diminished world influence is good for you.

Is it any wonder that Main Street America is in revolt, since no one is telling its story?

Perhaps election night will tell it, at long last.” via Free Republic


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