Demsplaining: 11 rationalizations for Democrats' midterm whupping

7. Democrats weren’t progressive enough.
“Whether it was immigration reform, climate change, healthcare, women’s choice, or addressing income inequality, all important issues to voters and the President, every Democrat running for office should have embraced the President instead of running the other way toward Republicans,” muses a figure by the name of Rmuse at Politicsusa. “What is not a surprise, is that despite voter support for the President’s agenda and position on issues important to them, Republicans won; except against Democrats who ran on either expanding on the President’s successes, or campaigning on those he championed for good of the people.”

Obama has had a remarkably easy time in office. When he was sworn in, a partial disinflation of real estate had the GOP in great disfavor. (A substantial part of the population still blames Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush for the hobbling of the American economy.) He confronted no major crises, foreign or domestic, that were not of his own choosing. He had two years of single-party control of Washington, and until January he will still have the Senate on his side — which puts the Obama administration well within historic norms for presidential power — possibly even a little better than the average. By his own calculation, the president achieved 75 percent of his first-term goals. Ronald Reagan couldn’t even get rid of the Energy Department. At some point the Left will need to make peace with the truth that Obama put many, many favorite ideas of the Left into practice, and the results are now part of the historical record.