It’s the Dems, not the Repubs, that should ‘nationalize’ this election. Here’s how:

Best as I can tell, the concept of “nationalizing” this election has been used exclusively to mean that the Republicans want to make this election all about Obama, Obamacare, and such.  Therefore, if the election is “nationalized,” the Repubs win, right?

In a post here at AB two weeks ago, I listed some of the many important financial-matters legislative accomplishments of the Dem-controlled Congress of 2009-10 that most people don’t know about or have forgotten about, and that I would love to see the Dems run on.  Three days after I posted that post, Elizabeth Warren gave this short, impromptu video interview to New York Times reporter Axel Gerdau, in which she discussed, among other things, the Senate Republicans’ filibuster earlier that day of an important bill she had sponsored that would significantly lower interest rates on former students’ student loans.  Warren used it as an example to illustrate the very essence of what is transpiring in Congress, courtesy of the Republicans, and (in the Senate) of Mitch McConnell.

Just as with the financial-industry legislation enacted during the first two years of the Obama administration, virtually no one even knows about the student-loan interest-rate bill, much less why it won’t be enacted.  The clarity and passion with which Warren spoke, about that bill and, more broadly, about the situation in Congress is something to behold.  A simple playing of that videotape as an ad, especially in Kentucky, but also in the other states that have pivotal senate races, would matter critically, I believe—especially if Warren would cut a follow-up ad explaining the filibuster situation.

What political pundits and Dem politicians and consultants don’t get about Warren’s popularity is that her issues are not presented as “women’s issues” but instead as hugely important financial issues that make a difference to men as well as women.

As regular readers of my posts know, I usually pepper my posts with attempts at humorous sarcasm.  But there’s nothing at all funny about so many Democratic candidates’ and officeholders’ consistent failure to educate the public about non-gender-based economic-populist legislation—legislation that has already been enacted, and legislation that has been proposed but languishes.  Off-hand, the only two Dem senate candidates who have done that are the two who are doing well in the polls: Gary Peters in Michigan, and Kay Hagan in North Carolina.

AB is just a little blog, with only a couple thousand views each day, so unless my point is picked up by other, more-widely-read blogs, my comments here will go unnoticed.  I’m certainly no political consultant, but the ones the Dems use apparently think it’s still 1992. (They’ve all been around since then as consultants—many of them since before then—haven’t they?)  This is so painful for me to watch.