Past Shock: "the sense that recent history is reappearing at a troubling and lightning-fast speed"

This was written by Richard Eskow for the Campaign for America's Future. It was written in August of last year.

Eskow foresaw a lot that would be happening in this election year.

First he links to and quotes from an article at Politico

It’s one thing for Democrats running in red parts of the country to sound like Republicans on the campaign trail. It’s another when Democrats running in purple or even blue territory try to do so.

Yet that’s what’s happening in race after race this season.

Faced with a treacherous political environment, many Democrats are trotting out campaign ads that call for balanced budgets, tax cuts and other more traditionally GOP positions. Some of them are running in congressional districts that just two years ago broke sharply for President Barack Obama.

The article then gives some examples:

Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff, who’s running in a district that Obama won in 2012 and 2008, has started airing a commercial that strikes a tea party theme. It highlights his record as speaker of the state House of Representatives when, he says, he helped balance the state’s budget.

As Romanoff narrates, a graph of the nation’s soaring debt pops up on the screen. The image looks strikingly similar to one that appears in a Web video Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan released in 2011 to sell his controversial budget plan, though a Romanoff spokeswoman insisted that the campaign hadn’t borrowed from the former GOP vice presidential contender.

Eskow's words:

“Running as Dems While Sounding Republican.” Hey, What Could Go Wrong?

Past Shock

You’ve heard of “future shock”? These stories bring on a sensation that might be called “past shock.” That’s the sense that recent history is reappearing at a troubling and lightning-fast speed. These stories are likely to trigger a severe case of déjà vu in anyone who has followed U.S. politics for very long.

Democratic rhetoric began echoing GOP talking points in 1994 under President Bill Clinton – and Democrats lost control of the House. When Democratic rhetoric once again tacked right in 2010 under President Barack Obama, Republicans ran to their left with a “Seniors’ Bill of Rights” – and the Democrats lost the House once more.

They can’t lose it again, since they no longer hold it. But they can lose more seats, and they can give up the Senate, too.

He was right. We did lose the Senate a few months later.

They already have their work cut out for them. President Obama, their party’s leader, may very well spend the next 90 days defending renewed military action in Iraq. Hillary Clinton, the party’s presumptive 2016 candidate, is likely to spend the time between now and Election Day repeating her Republican-like, hawkish foreign policy talk. And these Democratic Congressional candidates will be repeating GOP economic talking points on the home front, too.

That’s not “change you can believe in” – unless you’re talking about a change in Senate leadership.

Eskow was prescient in some ways about this year's primary, but of course he could not address the fact that the populist message of Bernie Sanders is resonating so strongly.

We've been trying to tell that to the party for years now, that if you quit sounding like the Republicans you would get more attention from the voters.