with the healthcare bill is about 90% crap and I'm just not willing to let it slide anymore. There's 3 reasons why things turned the way they did and swinging too far left was not one of them.

The first was Citizens United. 2010 was the first opportunity for the Corporations to try out their new gift and boy did they. Particular Congressmen like Allen Grayson were targeted like a buck on the opening day of deer season and they were not able to overcome the massive amounts of money thrown towards their challengers.

The second huge reason was the economy. As predicted when the shit hit the fan in 2008 there was no solution that was going to undo the damage in a short period of time, even if Obama had an agreeable Congress to work with. And we all know that Obama lost any chance the Senate would back his play the day Ted Kennedy died. The filibuster record proves that. The negative unemployment numbers and the growing frustration of the masses was the perfect storm for the Koch brothers to throw massive amounts of money to motivate the angry fringe of the right wingers to organize to the point of "legitimacy", those models of deep thinking, the Tea Party. Many of the Republicans who won House seats came right out of the ranks of, and were voted in by, these reactionaries.

The third reason, and it was a real killer, was that many Democrats avoided the polls. And one of the biggest reasons for that is because the Obama administration didn't show a lot of fight in their response to the Republican's obstinacy. Dems felt betrayed by the willingness to throw in the towel on campaign promises, the most blatant of which was the public option. Polls at the time showed that nearly 70% of Americans wanted the public option, yet it was compromised away. So one could say that the Dems stayed away because the administration didn't swing far enough to the left.