Make no mistake. If this indeed becomes a "wave" election Tuesday night, it will be a referendum on President Obama and the pushy policies of the Democratic Party.
You will hear a lot of lines from Democrats Wednesday morning about how, "all politics is local" and how President Obama wasn't on the ballot or how these midterm election results are typical for a first term president. As Jerry Seinfeld would say, "Yada yada yada."
Look, I've been traveling around the country quite a bit and the main complaint by the electorate is that there has been a blatant encroachment by the federal government. Indeed, you can make the case that this has been overreach by the Obama administration from the beginning. The stimulus, the bailouts, healthcare reform. The list just keeps going. It all just became too much.
President Obama reasoned that the stimulus and the bailouts were needed to save the economy. He labeled both as a crisis. The problem is he said the same thing about healthcare reform, too. Yet another crisis! Everything's a crisis! The president figured he could sell healthcare to the American people by emphasizing the consumer friendly aspects of the plan. But even though he was able to pass healthcare (and the stimulus and the bailouts) through Congress, he never was really able to sell the government involvement aspect to the American people.
Compounding the problem, when it came to healthcare this president did away with the promise of bi-partisanship when he made the determination that Republicans were planning to stop him at any cost. He made the calculated decision that since the GOP wasn't going to work with him, he was going to press on and do healthcare without them. He got the bill passed, but he lost crucial independents in the process.
The conventional wisdom will be that the economy is the reason behind the problems that the Democratic Party and President Obama are having right now. While clearly that is part of this, it misses the real story. The real story is how these federal government encroachment policies have awoken a sleeping giant filled with independents, tea partiers, and evangelicals. They have all said, "Enough is enough," and they are about to get off the couch and make their voices heard.