One of the best episodes of “Seinfeld” was also arguably the most meta. In it, Jerry and George are dreaming up a television show to pitch to NBC. They’re eating, they’re riffing about salsa, and, boom, George declares they have a plot.
“Just talking?” Jerry asks. “Well, what’s the show about?” “It’s about nothing,” George says.
“No story?” Jerry says.
“No, forget the story.” “You gotta have a story.” “Who says you gotta have a story?”
For months, this is what political reporters told us about the 2014 midterm elections: There’s no story. It’s an election about nothing.
Tuesday night proved them wrong. We know from exit polls that this was quite clearly an election about something – and that something appears to have been voter anger at President Barack Obama, an economy that still isn’t picking up for most people and dysfunction in Washington.
That’s a pretty simple plot, as plots go. But it’s a plot, nonetheless – it’s not as if the electorate spent Tuesday filming itself standing in line for Chinese food.
Election plots sometimes get lost on the way to Washington, though. Remember how 2008 was going to unite the country? How 2010 was going to shrink the government? How 2012 was going to revitalize the middle class? Or, put another way, did anyone go into Election Day thinking this would be an election about repealing a tax on medical devices, negotiating new trade deals and building an oil pipeline from Canada to Nebraska? No?
Those items sit atop the agenda that Republicans laid out Wednesday for the early days of next year, when they will again control both houses of Congress. It’s a pragmatic list, as there’s a lot of bipartisan support for all those items, and it’s a decent bet Obama would sign most or all of them into law. The same may be true of a couple items that Obama named Wednesday as his opening bids for cooperation with Republicans, most notably an overhaul of the tax code to eliminate loopholes and lower rates, although there’s a reason – read: competing lobbying pressures – that such an overhaul has stalled thus far in his presidency.
All of those proposals poll pretty well with voters. But the idea that the 2014 midterms were all about those issues . . . well, not even J. Peterman could sell that.
What that adds up to, then, is an election that was about something – just not what the public thought it was voting for. Obama is still president. There’s little evidence that Republicans and Democrats will work together on big-ticket ideas to lift the middle class. A few small compromises like medical-device tax repeal would be better than the last two years, certainly, but hardly a sign that Washington can solve problems.
What we had wasn’t a Seinfeld election at all. It was a Kramer election – wacky, tangential and ultimately disconnected from the main plot. America is in Jerry’s apartment, trying to figure out which of its prized possessions has been dropped in the toilet. Washington lives in Kramer’s pad next door, chopping vegetables in the shower.
Kramer, incidentally, had his own idea for what Jerry’s NBC show should be about. “You’re the manager of the circus,” he tells Jerry, adding: “Look at the characters. You’ve got all these freaks on the show. A woman with a moustache? I mean, who wouldn’t tune in to see a women with a moustache? You’ve got the tallest man in the world. A guy who’s just a head.” “I don’t think so,” Jerry replies.
A show about the circus. Remind you of anything?
