THOSE DESPERATE DEMS
Desperate Dems
Posted 11/05/2009 07:33 PM ET
Politics: Despite the whipping they took in Tuesday’s election, congressional Democrats are moving fast on cap-and-trade and health care. Are they politically tone-deaf, or is this some kind of desperate strategy?
Our guess is that Democratic leaders, having gotten a very negative message from the off-year balloting, are moving as fast as they can to pass the main big-spending items on their unpopular agenda. If they don’t act now, the know their radical agenda is dead.
On Thursday, Senate Democrats hustled the cap-and-trade bill out of committee without so much as a hello-and-howdy to the Republicans — knowing full well the GOPers would oppose it.
All this haste, even though global participants in the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks planned for December agree that any CO2-cutting deal is probably a year away.
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in the House want a Saturday showdown for their $1.2 trillion health care takeover after trumpeting support from the AARP and American Medical Association.
As the publication The Hill noted, Democratic leaders are still scrambling to “placate party factions threatening to defeat the health care bill over hot-button issues such as spending, immigration and abortion.” They need 218 votes in the House, and they don’t seem to have them.
What’s the big hurry for a bill that won’t even go into effect until 2013? And why act with such haste to move the cap-and-trade bill out of committee? The only obvious answer is Democratic leaders are running scared. Yet there’s an element of self-delusion to their strategy.
Just listen to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after her party’s shellacking at the polls: “From our standpoint, we won last night.”
“We won”? Sure, and from the standpoint of the Titanic’s passengers, it was a heckuva half-voyage.
Fact is, 2010 has many Democrats — especially moderates in red or purple states carried by John McCain in 2008 — fearful of a wave of anti-incumbent and anti-Democrat sentiment.
It hasn’t helped that voters have been frightened — and justifiably so — by the $787 billion stimulus, the $700 billion in bailouts, the $1 trillion-a-year deficits and the government takeover of key U.S. industries such as autos and finance. There’s practically no evidence any of these initiatives has worked to any meaningful degree.
Recent polls show the president and Congress falling fast in public esteem. The RealClearPolitics poll of polls, which aggregates a number of congressional favorability surveys, shows an average of 25.5% approval and 66.7% disapproval for a -41.2% spread.
That spells big trouble for Democrats, who have controlled Congress since 2006 — and under whose inept tenure the economy has done nothing but crater.
In answer to the question “what’s the rush?” Everything. Democrats need to take advantage of the control they have to jam their agenda down the nation’s throat. Elections loom, and if history holds, Democrats will lose lots of seats in 2010.
As noted Thursday, given the problems in the economy, a swing of 80 seats — as happened in 1938 during the Depression within the Depression — is possible. People are angry.
That’s why the Democrats’ strategy makes no sense. Suppose Congress passes both bills. What then?
Given the public’s opposition, do they expect applause for doing what the public says it doesn’t want them to do? And will the next Congress have to spend a year or more cleaning up the mess these incompetents created?
Tragically, the answer to both of those questions seems to be yes.
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