‘We The People’ Failed Ourselves

By Colin N. Clarke – At a time in America where citizens are faced with a credit crisis, a soft stock market and questionable confidence in our financial future, we committed the ultimate failure on election day.

I’m not talking about presidential politics, although the presidential race was undoubtedly a big factor. Where Americans failed themselves was in the lemming-like parade to mindless re-election of their congressional representatives.

Say what you will about presidential approval ratings, truth is, no serving president has ever had an approval rating as low as the rating held by congress as of July, 2008, a mere 9%.

So how did America act upon that horribly low 9% approval rating?

When you back out those who retired or who passed away, only 30 seats out of 435 total were turned over as a result of an incumbent failing re-election. This is equivalent to a 93% re-election rate among incumbents!

‘We The People,’ given a prime opportunity to completely change the face of congress, failed ourselves by re-electing 93% of the people that we so soundly disapproved of.  

Political scientists will serve some of the blame to the theory of congressional stagnation which essentially says that name recognition and fat political contribution war chests make it very difficult to topple an incumbent. But truth be told, the power lies within the voters.

Here we were, standing on the cusp of true political upheaval. Hearing the echoes of “change” ringing throughout presidential political circles. Completely embroiled in the promise of a different direction… and how do we choose to serve ourselves? By turning our back on change and embracing the status quo through re-election of our belovedly untrusted congressional representatives.

You’ve heard the statement “grasping defeat from the jaws of victory.” Well America, we did it to ourselves.

I sit now and watch as congress mulls giving more money away that America does not have. More bailouts to more industries in more sectors that have FAILED as a result of the very leadership of the congress we chose to re-elect. We’ve given congress the ultimate “do-over.” 

So we chose to place our faith in new leadership at the presidential level, but whatever America thought she did by bringing in new presidential leadership was completely undone by the blanket re-election of the same congress.

Bottom line: America didn’t want change. America is afraid of change, and she proved it by not holding congress accountable with their jobs.

What scares me now is knowing that the same congress that made a mess of our economy today is coming up with ideas to fix what they broke. Recall Einstein:

“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.”