Being bipartisan for bipartisanship's sake is never a good idea when effective policies are being excluded from being implemented.

I never understood the meme that independents were looking for moderation in all things political or governmental. They--like you said--are looking for effectiveness in governance. Whether or not the ideas being implemented are democratic in nature or conservative, the Independents are looking for beneficial results in their pocketbooks.

Democrats should have taken the mandate for leadership when they had the chance to so. However, now, they are laden with the results of moderation or center-right policies at a time when Americans are hungry for more effective policies . Many of these effective policies are progressive in theory and application.

It's like during the Vietnam War when the public cheered peace initiatives and also cheered bombing Hanoi. They didn't have a preference for means. They just wanted the damn war to end.

In 1930 with a stock market crash and rising unemployment, voters punished Hoover and the Republicans by taking away 52 House seats.  Two years later things were much worse and Hoover was booted out and the Republicans lost 97 more House seats.  When the economy improved , Democrats were rearded in 1934 and 1936.  When the balanced budget experiment led to renewed depresssion, Republicans rallied from a pathetic 89 House seats and nearly doubled their numbers.

The same pattern happened in the previous large, sustained slide (5 years of unemployment over 10%) from 1893 to 1898.  In 1894, voters threw out the ruling Democrats in the House.  The losses were an astounding 125 seats in a 357 seat House.  Two years later both the uncumbent Republicans in the House and uncumbent Democrats in the White House were tossed out.  The Democrats went so far as to nominate a virtually unknown 36 year old outsider opposed to both the status quo and the White House.  The establishment Democrats ran their own slate in some states (the Gold Democrats) and even won a few.

Voting for change, any change is an established pattern in times like these.  Too bad we didn't offer the real article when we had the chance.

A two trillion dollar stimulus that reduced unemployment to 6% would certainly have done a lot for Democratic prospects in the 2010 midterms.  But, "Obama and the Democratic Congress" was never a team working together on policy.  I do not think that there were ever enough Democratic senators willing to support a two trillion dollar stimulus.

And even if there had been, and even if unemployment had been reduced to 6%, would the "independents" have bothered to vote in a midterm election?

...isn't the debunking of "the oft-repeated, little supported meme that Democrats lost big on Nov 2 for moving "too far left," against an electorate moving center-right." That's easy to refute (which would be the definition of "little supported"), but the the problem is that continued data crunching doesn't get much in the way of an answer to the question Democrats face - what went wrong, and what can be done to reverse the losses in the future?

The point, I think, is that a lot of this debate over "center right" and "move to the center" is, yes, nonsense. But take away the silly labeling theories, and you still have the grim reality: Democrats lost an enormous number of House seats; the Senate will remain exceptionally polarized and gridlocked. How does the party of the President govern, and how do Democrats create a fresh appeal that will attract the lost voters... who I don't want to label, but who we will need to attract, wherever their supposed political allegiances lie.

This struggle to recover, I think, is the real problem with the data analysis; there's plenty of excuses for why Dems lost - the economy! those "moderates" are really conservative! - but little real hard work in figuring out "what now?" Absent that, what's left is a kind of dopey fatalism - we were doomed, the economy was bad, we should have passed a second stimulus... blah blah blah.

News flash: the economy will not be getting better anytime soon. There won't be another stimulus bill.  So how do Democrats craft a new message that will attract voters?

Again, this is why I harp on the decision to carry over the same losing House leadership team that was in place prior to the election; I don't "hate" Nancy Pelosi, or think she's "too liberal"... I think we've run our course, as Democrats, relying on her strategies for getting and retaining power in DC. We need fresh blood, new voices and a fresh approach. There's really no reason to expect octogenarians and septugenarians who've been in the DC establishment for 15+ years to have the kind of fresh approaches we need. And I admit... I don't know what the next, better message should be. What I do know is that sitting around, waiting for Republicans to fail and gridlock to annoy sing voters... is not a strategy. It's living on the negative hope that, as things get worse, Democrats will look attractive having changed nothing and done little. That, it seems to me, is a recipe for failure... and future disaster. I'm not some angry progressive who's giving up on my left leaning primciples... or the Democratic Party. But, as usual, I'm a lifelong Democrat who, at this late date, has heard all this griping before. Nothing really comes of it. And it's well past the time, I think, to put down the labeling machine and to start figuring out what actions need to be taken to do better next time.