By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

President Obama has doubled down on his latest lie—that last week’s elections were not a repudiation of his policies and governance. The pollsters and the media missed the mark as well, by a long shot. The election was a clear repudiation of an out-of-control, dishonest, incompetent, and corrupt administration. While the voters may not love Republicans, a majority of them recognized that they are the only hope of stopping the Obama agenda, which is disastrous for this country on many levels.

Even when Obama said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” last Sunday that “The buck stops here,” meaning he accepted some responsibility, he added that it was really about his messaging and skills of persuasion, not his policies, his incompetence, or his radical agenda. He also said that the meaning of the election was that the American people just want Washington to work, and that he is committed to that.

His loyalists in the media took a bit of a different position. The view of MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Chuck Todd, along with numerous other analysts, was that the real problem was the Democrats’ rejection of President Obama in the period leading up to the election. Very few incumbent Democrats wanted anything to do with Obama, but the belief of those journalists and analysts, taking their cue from the White House spin machine, was that if the candidates would have only embraced the President and his great “success” with the economy, they would have done much better. But those who did embrace him, for the most part, lost anyway. Some were shockers, such as the governor’s races in the very blue states of Maryland, Illinois and Massachusetts.

Remember, Obama said that while he wasn’t “on the ballot this fall…make no mistake: These policies are on the ballot, every single one of them.” And the voters clearly agreed, either by the way they voted, or their decision to stay home.

The big question following the 2014 November elections is, what will both sides do now? For the GOP, the dilemma is said to be that they need to show that they can govern, and not just obstruct and say no. Without women, blacks and Latinos, we are told, the GOP can’t win another presidential election. So they must move to the left. However, a Gallup poll taken after the election shows that by a 53% to 36% margin, Americans “want GOP legislators in Congress to have more influence over the country’s direction than Obama during the next year.” The voters are saying to the GOP, show us what you’ve got.

At the state level, the Republican wave was even more dominant. According to the website, Vox, “Republicans now control state government outright in at least 24 states, one more than they did before the election. They control at least 66 of 99 state legislative chambers nationwide. And they cut the number of states with total Democratic control from 14 to seven —the lowest number since the Civil War.”

The dilemma for Obama is that he either has to drop the hand grenade of amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants in this country—which by all indications he plans to do—or risk, as Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) said, a “civil war” in the Democrat Party. And if Obama does take that action, he will, in essence, be telling Republicans, “Forget what I said, I have no interest in working with you to pass even compromise versions of your legislation. That is why I worked with Harry Reid (D-NV) to bury some 360 bills you passed in this session of Congress.” The real do-nothing part of Congress was the Reid-led Senate acting on behalf of the Obama White House. And when the results of the election were becoming apparent, leading Democrats blasted President Obama, including Harry Reid’s chief of staff, who did so on the record to The Washington Post.

Obama’s and the Democrats’ problems were the collective weight from the administration’s continued lies about how well the economy is doing; about how well Obamacare is doing; about the handling of the Ebola situation; about Obama’s phony war and phony coalition to defeat and degrade ISIS; about the politics of race; about his desperation to make a deal with Iran; about scandals such as Benghazi, the IRS and the Veterans Administration; and about his shoddy treatment of Israel. It has been compounded even further by the blunt remarks that came to light this week that showed how an MIT economics professor, Jonathan Gruber, who was one of the architects of Obamacare—and paid $400,000 for doing so—unambiguously revealed how the administration counted on what it viewed as “the stupidity of the American voter” to dishonestly push their health care legislation through Congress. Buckle up. We’re in for a hell of a ride.