So I recall around inauguration day seeing so many young kids bleary-eyed with excitement over the election of Barack Obama. While he wasn’t my guy, it was kinda neat seeing little kids excited about politics. Somehow, then-Senator Obama made politics something of a pop-culture phenomenon. As a certified political junkie, I was interested in, and somewhat amused by, seeing that I (or, perhaps just my interests) had become hip.
But, alas, all my dreams (and those of little kids) have been dashed on the rocks of recent polls and elections, leaving them (and the President) in tatters. How could the hopes and dreams of young children be so brutally and violently taken away from them? Who was the culprit who crippled the President and corrupted the policy making process so badly that the kids who had life-sized cardboard cut out President Obamas in their bedrooms, are now wondering why no one seems to like their hero anymore?
It’s the Democrats.
Let me back up a couple years. Back in the 2006 election cycle, when the D’s first secured big wins in the off-year elections, they were successful in part because it was an off-year election (one in which the President was not up for election). The party out of power always does well in off year elections. But, they were even more successful than most thought they would be because they went out and recruited a lot of conservative leaning Democrat candidates to run for House seats in conservative districts.
A clever move at the time. But, in the midst of our (Republicans) defeat, I recall consoling a number of my allies that all was not lost. “Speaker Pelosi now has a bunch of ‘blue-dog Democrats’ that will not go along with every whacky thing she’s got. They may for the first year or so, because they owe her for all the money she funneled into their election campaigns. But sooner or later they’ll want to stay in the House. And to do so, they’ll have to try to reflect the values of their conservative districts.”
So, the House may have peaked too early for the D’s. They peaked too early because the ideal time for the House to muscle through their most ideologically pure objectives would have been in 2007. The Senate on the other hand, was primed for their ideologically pure dominance between the times Arlen Spector handed the D’s the 60 vote supermajority back in April of 2009 (see my April 28 note) and Senator-elect Scott Brown rocked the political world by placing his red-bum in the darkest and purest of cobalt blue Senate seats in the country (the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts seat).
Of course, for the White House anytime between January of 2009 and now, President Obama can sign any whacky legislation he wants. But you gotta have all three (House, Senate, and the White House) primed for action at the same time.
If you look purely at the numbers (as I did during my September 4, 2009 note), the D’s could have passed any piece of legislation they wanted – without 1 Republican vote. They could have had their Health Care bill and eaten it too. They could have changed the national anthem to Zipadee Doo Dah.
But could they really have? Were the blue dog dems in the House going to go along with it? The House did pass a health care bill. The Senate, then, changed it. Stripped some things out, put other things in. The hope, they say, was that so long as the Senate passed something, the House and Senate negotiators could have sorted out the differences (made the bill more pure) in Conference Committee (where different versions of bills coming from the Senate and House are reconciled into a final draft).
But then that pesky promise of then candidate-Obama about putting C-SPAN cameras into the Conference Committee chambers got in the way. Televising Conference Committee negotiations, in my opinion, is absurd. We see enough grand-standing on the House and Senate floors on C-SPAN that would NEVER take place if the cameras weren’t there. Never would a bill get reconciled in Conference if cameras were involved. Not a chance.
But, Senator Obama (perhaps in his naiveté as still a newcomer to the Senate, or in his zeal to say anything that sounds good – as some politicians are wont to do) made the stupid promise…many times. C-SPAN seized on that, and started pummeling the House and Senate leadership with it, bludgeoning them (and the health care bill along with it) to death. (The voters, really, put all the nails but one in the coffin of the bill. However, C-SPAN added one last nail for good measure.)
So here we are. The President’s popularity hovering in the upper 40% area, and Congress’s effectiveness shot. Who should the children look to as the “bad guys”?
I submit it can’t be the impotent R’s (who now, finally, are showing signs of life). I submit the D’s are the ones who shot themselves in their collective foot – perhaps making the President, after one year, a lame duck.
