The Election: What it means and what's next

On the national front, what voters said yesterday was that they don't like the way President Obama is doing his job and, frankly, I must agree with them on this. While I lauded his much-needed health care reform proposals, I felt he was wrong to give it a higher priority than job creation. He should have been devoting all his energies and his political capital to fixing the economy and saving health care for later,

The President must do a much better job of framing the political debate and he must stop neglecting those who elected him to office two years ago. He made it far too easy for his opponents to distort what he did accomplish, particularly a stimulus package that prevented an even worse recession and a financial reform that staved off a meltdown.

Now that Republicans have gained more control, they must come up with ideas of their own instead of just being against everything recommended by the President. If they are truly committed to reducing the deficit, they must come up with something other than just extending the Bush tax cuts which would only make the deficit more severe. Unfortunately, the only thing I've been hearing from Republican leadership are words like those uttered yesterday by John Boehner, who is likely to become speaker of the House, about the President's agenda: “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”  That's not governing, that's obstructioning and it's the kind of gridlock that caused Republicans to lose their majority the last time.

That's not what Americans voted for yesterday. They want action. They want jobs created. They want their government to be "for" something and not "against" everything. It's time for the Republicans to put their cards on the table. Let's see if they have any answers.

On the state level, nothing has really changed. The state has a $25 billion budget shortfall and no one elected to state office yesterday has expressed any idea on how to solve that and most, like Stefani Carter, advocate policies that will make it worse. An astounding 17.3 percent of the Texas population lives below the poverty level and an even more astounding 26.1 percent of the state's population have no health care.  No one on the state level is addressing this issue. There's this from a recent story in the Houston Chronicle: "The state's public schools have more and more low-income kids and persistently high dropout rates - and unless that changes, the future of Texas will contain more long-term unemployment and poverty - and more folks depending on food stamps, Medicaid and CHIP." And Florence Shapiro is correct when she says Texas needs to abandon its current school funding system and start all over from scratch. And yesterday voters blindly re-elected a governor who has never expressed any interest at all in solving any of these problems, and, in fact, fighting national leaders who try to solve them for him.

The future,to these tired old eyes, looks mighty bleak.