According to NPR, voters in what I think of as this off-off year election were very, very focused on local issues, and the candidates who won tended to be those that kept themselves focused on local and regional issues, regardless of party.

I am inclined to think It is way to early to evaluate the effectiveness of the Obama administration or the divided Democratic House of Representatives. He inherited the responsibility for an unbelievable mess, and we are in uncharted territory as far as figuring what is going to work.

The problems didn't develop in a year, and they are not going to be fixed in a year.

What "fixed" means is also going to have to be redefined, and the American people steered toward acceptance of lower and more reasonable expectations about what it means to be prosperous and to have "enough." That is going to be a long, slow, incremental process that will take more than the 4 or 8 years allotted to any one administration.

The Republican Party continues in the midst of a struggle over what is going to define them. If the very active and vocal right wing of the party does indeed ultimately win control the party, they are likely to put up a significant number of candidates that can win the Republican primary, but not a general elections. If that occurs moderate Republicans and moderate and conservative Democrats will have much greater impetus to make common cause and find ways of building consensus to accomplish moderate change, and it is likely the Democrats will pick-up the votes of enough moderate Republican and independent voters to maintain a significant majority in the mid-term elections.

If the Democratic Congress is going to be effective in bringing about even incremental change, they are going to have to find more effective ways of building consensus among themselves, and moderate to conservative Democratic congressmen are going to need to be listened to.

There is not likely to be any revolutionary health care bill passed in the next year or so. Hopefully, however, something will be passed that will nudge us in the direction of actually assuring decent health care for everyone. As Bill Clinton recently said to my favorite "talking head", John Stewart *grin*, we just need to start stumbling down the road in the right direction.

By the same token, concerns by both moderate and more right wing Republicans about the cost and the debt burden we may leave for our children and grandchildren are legitimate concerns. I share the concern of Republican and moderate Democrats about paying for health care through reducing rates of Medicare reimbursement, unless measures are also put in place to reduce the cost to providers of providing the service. Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates by-and-large do not cover the cost of providing the service as it stands now. But talk about a complicated task!

If much of what I have posted appears to some to be thread-drift, I apologize, but it seems to me to be quite pertinent.