Do Democrats Really Believe It Was Message, Not Policy?

Rush commented today about the fact that Nancy Pelosi intends to fight to retain hre position as head of the Democrats in the House, and she's got supporters who say the fact that the House lost 63 seats to the Republicans wasn't her fault.

I mean how tone deaf do you have to be to insist on keeping not just Pelosi, the same party leadership in the House, they want to keep it, the Democrats are gonna keep it. You just had a 69 seat blowout -- well, 63 seats in the House, it could reach that high, six seats in the Senate, and they want to have the same leadership back? Here's Jim Clyburn, TheHill.com: "'Underdog' Clyburn Says Dem Losses in House had 'Nothing to Do' with Pelosi -- Outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) leadership had 'nothing to do' with Democrats' losses in last week's election, the No. 3 House Democrat said Monday. Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) blamed the poorly-performing economy for the party's electoral drubbing, which saw them lose around 60 seats in the House, along with their control of the majority."

They also are saying health care had nothing to do with the loss. That's the big thing. If you've watched, if you spent any time watching the Sunday shows, you even saw this develop late last week. Mara Liasson was one of the first out of the box trying to keep her job at NPR after seeing what happened to Juan Williams out there, so she's leading the charge, Juan Williams following up. Health care had nothing to do with this. The health care bill had nothing to do with the reason the Democrats lost. I hope they continue to think that. They think it's messaging. They went back and they talked to George Lakoff (rhymes with) to get more information. They think it was lousy marketing, lousy messaging. Well, if they think health care had nothing to do with it, we got a golden opportunity here. The Republicans need to send up to the White House a repeal of the health care law en masse, in toto, every month, send it up every week and make him veto it, make the Democrats defend it. If health care had nothing to do with the reason they lost, make the Democrats defend it. It was all the economy, who's in charge of that? Make them defend all of these things. In other words, if they just had a better message, then this wouldn't have happened, because it wasn't policy.

Let's not forget that in mid-term elections, the "ruling party" usually does lose a lot of seats. So some of the Democrats losses were to be expected. But, they sure as heck did lose a lot more than they thought they would.

I think it makes sense that it's the economy that is the killer. Let's face it, if the Republicans can't bring the unemploymet rate down by at least 3 points in two years - they will all be out on their ears, too.