The Democrats’ Waterloo

Their refusal to acknowledge the administration’s failures did not make them go away.

The Duke of Wellington said of his close-run victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo that the French “came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way.”

Something like that happened to the Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, as they lost the Senate, a few more seats in the House, and additional governorships. They came on with the same old strategy, but this time they went down with it.

Obama and the Democrats chose not to defend the administration’s record of the last six years. On foreign policy, no Democratic chorus seconded Obama’s 2013 claim that this chaotic period in world affairs has been the most stable time in recent memory.

No Democratic senator insisted that Obama’s Russian reset had calmed Vladimir Putin.

Democrats did not argue that Obama had rightly distanced the U.S. from Israel.

Could Democratic candidates have pointed to the Middle East — the Iranian bomb-making efforts, the civil war in Syria, the collapse of post-surge Iraq, the rise of the Islamic State — to confirm Obama’s diagnosis that these were mostly manageable problems?

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