No other way to read it: Democrats are in trouble

Ed Dornlas, Las Vegas

Sunday, May 23, 2010 | 2:02 a.m.

I enjoyed E.J. Dionne’s column in Thursday’s Las Vegas Sun, “A smorgasbord, not a tea party.”

Mr. Dionne does not see much import to the various elections last Tuesday, and I have to agree. But to extrapolate those results as good news for the Democrats is really a bit much.

Viewing the upcoming November midterm election as anything but a referendum on the president’s agenda would be ridiculous. Looking at the big picture (and overlooking the possibility that it’s all George W. Bush’s fault), the party in power has muscled through auto company bailouts, about $800 billion in stimulus funds, gotten the cap-and-trade bill through the House, and forced through the unpopular health care legislation.

Even though it’s fairly widely recognized that the government, through Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged lenders to grant the subprime loans that were the proximate cause of the recession, the currently proposed federal regulations don’t address Fanny and Freddie, but do regulate all manner of ordinary financial transactions.

The latest area where the administration is out of step with the electorate is immigration. The administration does not want to actually do anything about immigration except bad-mouth Arizona for asking for help in what was apparently the only way they could see to attract attention to their problem.

So here’s the Democratic administration on the wrong side of the majority of the county for each and every one of their major actions, and Mr. Dionne thinks that maybe the Democrats will be OK. I wonder what he’d bet on that.