Political Assessment: Democrats are stalled, not inert.

The View from My Soapbox

By King Heifer*


OK, I can't post this kind of stuff on (my) blogs, so I'm subjecting you to it. Please feel free to hit the (escape) key with impunity.

As you might imagine, I've been noodling the current political situation. How in the world do Democrats -- who hold the White House, a big majority in the House, until very recently 60 seats in the Senate and even now a huge majority of 59 in the Senate -- find themselves in a spot where they have been unable to do big things and somehow have made themselves look like they're unable to accomplish anything? What do they do now?

I think that this situation has to do with the unique dynamics of health care and the Obama administration learning the lessons of the last war too well. Specifically, when Bill Clinton tried to do health care in 1993-1994, his administration went with a very top-down approach, with Hillary's commission cooking up a hideous complicated proposal in private, releasing it and then basically saying, "Adopt this now." In his 1994 State of the Union speech, Bill Clinton said, "Send me a bill that covers every single American or I'll veto it." Predictably, the Clinton proposal became a massive target, with the health insurance industry running those Harry & Louise commercials about “There’s got to be a better way” without actually proposing anything. Having been so blunt about what he wanted, Clinton left himself with not a lot of room to negotiate and the whole things cratered.

Obama – and most particularly, Rahm Emanuel, a veteran of the Clinton White House – clearly chose to go with exactly the opposite approach to health care. Specifically, Obama just laid out a few key things that he wanted to be achieved and asked Congress to produce a bill that accomplished them. The problem with this approach has turned out to be that it left all the details to be resolved in Congress, which engaged in its usual sausage-making to produce a huge, messy House bill and a huge, messy Senate bill. Nonetheless, this approach would have worked if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was halfway competent and had managed to exercise any control over his members. He couldn’t, so instead we got the spectacle of Ben Nelson holding out for weeks for a special deal for Nebraska , with both looked awful and ran out the clock when Ted Kennedy died. So now we have Scott Brown, Senator from Massachusetts , the pro-choice Republican who isn’t going to exist in four years because he’s way too liberal for the Republicans generally and is unlikely to win re-election in 2014, but nonetheless is the fly in the ointment right now.

So where does Obama go from here? I think that it’s actually pretty simple and that Obama is already doing what he needs to do. One huge problem with the anti-Clinton approach that Obama took to health care is that he made him passive. Well, he seems to have clearly learned that lesson and has gotten a lot more active. He’s pushing good Democratic proposals like taxing the banks to get back the remaining TARP money and jobs creation. If I were him, I’d keep hammering away on that stuff for a while, take some time to reconcile the House and Senate health care bills, get the reconciled bill through the House, bring it to the Senate for the final, final vote and then dare the Republicans to filibuster. The whole thing with the filibuster threat is pretty comical to me. Has anyone actually seen a filibuster? It’s people talking endlessly with no point whatsoever. They eventually read the phone book. The Republicans don't really want to filibuster -- they just want the roadblock. Somehow, the Senate Democrats have allowed themselves to be cowed by this ridiculous threat.

If the Democrats push the Republicans to actually filibuster, then they can make the Republicans vote over and over again in favor of doing nothing but talking. Let that go on for a couple of weeks – with the Senate Republicans having to keep talking around the clock and having to hold their caucus 100% together in favor of doing nothing – and things would change. Obama and the Democrats would beat the Republicans unmercifully in public about being the party in favor of doing nothing to help the public. Obama could be out at rallies in communities with high unemployment every single day, saying “Look, all they want to do is talk and not do anything for you.” Eventually, some Republican would say something really stupid (a Democrat would, too, given enough time). Finally, one of the halfway-sane Senate Republicans – specifically either Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins from Maine – or one of the Senate Republicans who is up for re-election in 2010 would cave and take some fig-leaf deal on the ground that “now is the time to move on to things that will help the public.”

The strategy here would be to do now basically what Clinton did with the 1995 government shut-down – namely set up a confrontation of your making. Hopefully, it would work out basically the same way, with the party in favor of doing nothing taking a beating.

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This political commentary is provided by King Heifer, a frequent (nom de plume-d) contributor to this blog. King has a good name to protect but because of that, he knows of what he speaks. We are happy to let him to do his ranting here, safe in the knowledge that no one reads this blog anyway. - ed.
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