Via James Fallows, a slice of Chinese media perspective on the midterms:

Global Times/Huanqiu Shibao (Daily, circ. 1.5 mil) [ 环球时报 - "Global Times," an influential but fairly raw-meat nationalist paper]

The U.S. looks for a scapegoat for its decline (pg1)

Quote: The world media believes that Americans did not take into serious consideration the current administration’s policy adjustments but abruptly hoped their leader would instantly bring them back to the golden time after Cold War, which is impossible. Obama has been completely denied. It is believed to be a “thought riot” in the U.S…. Yu Wanli at Peking University’s Center for International Strategic Research said that Americans will become more impatient than usual due to the elections. What Obama has encountered right now is because he has become the scapegoat for U.S. decline.

To state the obvious, the United States and China are very different societies. But one point we have in common, that separates us from our European partners, is that both are very large societies whose scale has allowed us to preserve a remarkable amount of solipsism even in the face of rapidly falling costs of transportation and communication. So in the United States you had a rash of really thoughtless China-bashing midterm ads, and in China you have this slightly odd conceit that Americans are primarily driven by China-related anxieties rather than primarily being totally indifferent to the world beyond our borders.

Managing this relationship is going to be one of the most important tasks of not only the current president, but all national political leaders for the next generation or two. I wonder if this kind of gigantism-induced mental isolationism will make the landscape easier or harder to navigate. The good news, after all, is that it is a real common point of reference.

I think relatively few people understand that one of the principal substantive complaints the new Republican House majority has about Barack Obama is that he’s been unkind to the incumbent firms in the financial services sector.

But here’s Spencer Bachus, the likely new chair of the relevant committee, firing warning shots on behalf of Wall Street:

Spencer Bachus, a potential Republican chairman of the House financial services committee, has fired the first salvo in a battle with regulators – warning them against harming US banks by curbing their trading activity. [...]

Underlining the change in Congress, Mr Bachus, who as ranking Republican on the committee could replace Barney Frank as chairman of the panel, expressed concern that shareholders of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase will be hurt because the banks will be less profitable. [...]

“The derivatives provisions in Dodd-Frank alone… as they stand now they’re going to take a trillion dollars out of our economy. Think how many jobs that’s going to kill,” he said.

Rising stars in the conservative media firmament have painted an appealing picture over the past two years of a populist right outraged by allegedly undue entanglement between government and big business and eager to help out the little guy. But this is the reality. The article is via Tyler Cowen who remarks “It is difficult to fathom how that last pararaph can make any sense, other than as fabrication.”

I think this exit poll result is even more striking than the one about the age composition of the electorate:

Now the median American household makes $50,222 so this vote split should generate a pretty even division of the electorate. But 63 percent of voters came from households with above-average incomes. In part that’s because two-adult households are more common in the above-average bracket, in part that’s because non-voting non-citizens are more common in the below-average bracket, and in part it’s because high-income people turn out at higher rates.

This not only partially explains the election results, it shapes the larger political climate. You can’t win an election on the basis of the votes of children and immigrants. You need actual voters. And the median voter is quite a bit richer than the median person over and above all the other ways in which higher income people have more political influence.

To me it seems obvious that having the 111th Congress press hard to get big things done was the right call, even if it contributed to electoral defeat. This is especially true because as I said yesterday you need to do the analysis at the margin. Losing 65 House seats is way worse than losing zero House seats. But dropping the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t have saved 65 House seats. Maybe it would have saved 15. But that’s not nearly as big a deal. The reason you try to win elections is it gives you the chance to pass important laws, so saying you want to avoid passing laws in order to slightly reduce your midterm losses seems silly.

So I agree with Ross Douthat that I don’t quite get what all the conservative exultation is about:

Politics often gets covered as though the legislative sessions are just a long prelude to the real action of election season. But for all the breathless horse-race coverage, elections only matter to the extent that they produce (or forestall) actual legislation. And where the policies of the United States government are concerned, all the ground the Republicans regained tonight doesn’t change the fact that what liberals achieved in Barack Obama’s first two years in office was more consequential than any conservative victories in recent memory.

Or I guess I do get what the exultation is about. It’s like being a sports fan. The Wizards beat the Sixers in a close overtime game last night and the crowd was loving it. We all know the team’s not winning a championship, but it’s fun to watch your boys win. So Republicans won big and conservatives are psyched about that. But in policy terms progressives are in way better shape today than we were two years ago when we were flush with “victory” but hadn’t actually done any stuff.

What I don’t understand is Douthat’s effort to introduce more balance into this analysis:

The question is what happens next. If the backlash persists into 2012, if the Republicans get serious about policy, if this cycle’s conservative gains are a prelude to conservative legislative successes down the road, then the Democrats’ decision to gamble their majority on health care reform may come to look reckless and self-destructive, and the victories of the 111th Congress will seem pyrrhic rather than enduring.

That doesn’t make much sense to me. Whether or not the “backlash” persists into 2012 in a way that permits major conservative legislative success in the 113th congress is going to hinge on whether or not Obama gets re-elected. And it’s just not realistic to think that legislative tactics chosen in 2009 and 2010 are going to have a meaningful impact on this. Either Obama will succeed in presiding over some decent personal income growth and he’ll win, or else he won’t and he won’t. That’s a big deal, but I think it emphasizes the central importance of getting things done when you have the chance.

Meanwhile, I’m still really unclear on what this current backlash is about. Canceling the stimulus that’s already phased out? Refraining from cutting Medicare? Complaining about the deficit while refusing to name offsetting spending cuts? “[I]f the Republicans get serious about policy” I would consider that a good thing not a threatening development.

One reason it’s difficult to read midterm elections as reflecting shifts in the “national mood” is that the actual set of voting people is quite different. According to exit polls, for example, the relative proportion of youth voters and senior voters shifted quite dramatically:

That under-30 bracket still strongly backed Democrats by a 57-40 margin, turning only somewhat more skeptical of the party. But it also shrunk precipitously as a share of the voting public. But Americans didn’t react to “liberal overreach” by suddenly aging four decades in the span of eighteen months. Older people are just more inclined to stay engaged with lower profile elections.

The mainstream press has a vested interested in overreading every election result as do, naturally, the proponents of the winning party. So the pro-overreading faction also wins the argument and one doesn’t want to be a “protest too much” type on the other side. But I do think it’s worth emphasizing that the state to we’ll be entering next year—divided government—is entirely typical in the past thirty years of American political history.

The only episodes of unified partisan control we’ve seen were 1993-94 and 2009-10 for the Democrats and 2003-2006 for the Republicans. You could posit that the existence of a strong “Boll Weevil” faction of conservative Democrats gave Reagan an effective governing majority in 1981-82 but then by the same token this same phenomenon denied Bill Clinton an effective governing majority in 1993-94. Either way, the point is that this is normally how elections turn out. And when elections turn out in a more lopsided way, they tend to revert to division quite quickly. I think it would be a mistake to infer from this that “Americans prefer divided government” since if you add the Democratic partisans to the Republican partisans you get a clear majority of partisans. But the dynamics of the overall system tend to settle into this kind of equilibrium.

And as far as episodes of divided government go, Barack Obama will, in virtue of Democratic control of the Senate, have a stronger hand legislatively than Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush had in 1983-1992, than Bill Clinton had in 1995-2000 or then George W Bush had in 2007-2008. So this could plausibly be the beginning of the end for Democratic political power (as it was for Bush) or merely the end of the beginning (as it was for Reagan and Clinton).

In any event, knowledge of all this is part of what drives my frustration with supermajority rule in the US Senate. People spent much of the past two years acting as if the 60 vote requirement was the only thing standing between the United States and some kind of plebiscitary democracy. The reality is that most of the time legislation requires bipartisan compromise because most of the time the electorate doesn’t deliver the House, the Senate, and the Presidency to one party simultaneously. But it seems to me that when unified government is the outcome, that the winner ought to get the chance to govern. As we saw last night, if the people don’t like the results they both can and will vote the other guys back in.