Leftists lament.

Matt Stoller - who appears to be a homme de gauche from his "I support the Occupy Movement" banner - laments:

What happened?

I wish I could say I had a new insight, but it’s basically the same problem I’ve been writing about for years. Put simply, it’s that Obama’s policy framework is now the policy framework of the Democratic Party, liberals, and unionism. Up and down the ticket, Democrats are operating under the shadow of the President, associated with unpopular policies that make the lives of voters worse and show government to be an incompetent, corrupt handmaiden to big business. So they keep losing.

It should be obvious that if you foreclose on your voters, cut their pay, and legalize theft of their wealth by Wall Street oligarchs, they won’t be your voters anymore. Somehow, Democratic activists continue to operate as if policy doesn’t matter to voters, or that policy evaluation is a Chinese menu of different stuff, some of which you like and some of which you don’t, as in “Oh I’ll take a pro-choice moderate, with a bailout, and gay rights. And a Pepsi”. But that’s not how it works – voters’ lives get better, or they don’t. And under Obama, stuff has gotten worse. Obama’s economic policies have made economic inequality sharper than it was under Bush, due to his bailout of banks and concurrent elimination of the main source of wealth of most Americans, home equity. With these policy choices, Obama destroyed the Democratic Party and liberalism – under Obama’s first two years, the fastest growing demographic party label was “former Democrat.” Liberalism demands that people pay for a government, but why should anyone want to pay taxes for the terrible governance Obama has implemented?

We saw Democrats lose elections badly in 2009 and 2010 because of this dynamic. They didn’t self-correct, instead doubling down on Obama. Then, in Illinois and Maryland in April, liberal labor-backed candidates were absolutely wrecked in primaries. I noted at the time in a piece titled “Why Is the Left Slice of the Democrats Getting Crushed?” that this is a consequence of Obama’s policies and a general discrediting of liberalism. In Wisconsin, the stage was much more high-profile, but the dynamics were the same. This quote could just as easily apply to either contest.

The Washington Post's "house conservative" writes:

Obama also has wrecked havoc in the the Democratic Party. He’s firmly affixed the “tax and spend” label to it after Bill Clinton declared that the era of big government was over. He’s made Clinton into a pitch man for Mitt Romney. His rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline has split the party. His refusal to adopt the Simpson-Bowles commission’s recommendations has turned Democrats into reactionaries, defending the status quo on entitlements. He’s alienated Jewish voters. He’s re-McGovernized the party, which now stands for appeasing despotic powers, turning on allies and slashing defense spending.

National Journal observes:

For all of Obama's political talent, he's been a major drag on his party since taking office. In 2009, Republicans won two hotly-contested gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, with the victors (Chris Christie/Bob McDonnell) now on Romney's vice-presidential short list. During the heat of the health care debate in 2010, Scott Brown picked up Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in deep blue Massachusetts. Later that year, Republicans regained control of the House, by winning a whopping 63 seats while picking up six Senate seats. And now, Walker wins the recall by a bigger margin than in the 2010 election, which was already a watershed year for Wisconsin Republicans.