Taking a Midterm View

[Editor's Note: This week we look back with fondness on the midterm elections just past and hear what some of the experts at national media organizations think about what happened.]

In a pre-election interview with CNN earlier this week, Vice President Joe Biden told me that the "President and I have to figure out how to better communicate." That may be true, but what happened last night is not a communications problem. It's a governing problem. Almost 8 out of 10 voters who voted yesterday don't trust the government to do the right thing -- and the president runs the White House and his party controlled the Senate.

So the voters, done with hope, voted change.

~Gloria Borger, CNN

Across the nation Tuesday night, Democrats saw massive political casualties. The war on women got trumped by the war on coal and deep anger toward ObamaCare. But if the Democrats try to make this Barack Obama's defeat, they will see what others are now forced to see. The Democrats' coalition has always been Barack Obama's.

Distancing themselves from Obama will just make their fight over his coalition nastier. Embracing Obama will make their 2016 outlook more difficult.

~Erick Erickson, Fox News

Welcome to the 114th Congress, in which the warfare within the GOP will only be amplified by the party's new power. The pragmatic desire of mainstream Republicans to transcend their "party of no" label and show that they can actually govern will clash with the forces that continue to pull the GOP to the right and oppose anything the president does. This fight within the party will define the new Congress nearly as much as the battles with a Democratic president.

During the 2014 cycle, Republicans ran disciplined campaigns for the Senate - there were no candidates along the lines of Todd Akin or Sharron Angle to sabotage the party's larger ambitions - but a disciplined anti-Obama message hardly means that the GOP establishment has beaten back the insurgency.

~Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Washington Post

The liberals who have cheered on Mr. Obama as he drove his party into this ditch are now advising that he should double down on partisanship. Veto everything. Rule by regulation, including a vast immigration diktat that would poison any chance of bipartisan and thus politically durable reform. Demonize Republicans at every opportunity to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016.

If we judge by Mr. Obama's six-year record, that is what he will probably do. But there is a better way that would do more for the country and his own legacy. Start by recognizing that many Republicans want to do more than merely oppose him. They know their own political brand needs burnishing, and that even their most intense partisans want some results from electing Republicans.

Above all that should mean focusing on measures to lift the economy out of the 2% growth trap of the Obama years. We offered this same advice in 2012, pointing to the way rapid growth had helped Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan survive the traumas of their second terms.

~Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

There was a time when midterm elections made sense - at our nation's founding, the Constitution represented a new form of republican government, and it was important for at least one body of Congress to be closely accountable to the people. But especially at a time when Americans' confidence in the ability of their government to address pressing concerns is at a record low, twoyear House terms no longer make any sense. We should get rid of federal midterm elections entirely.

~David Schanzer and Jay Sullivan, The New York Times