JAMES TARANTO- THE DISUNITED DEMOCRAT PARTY- STARRING CHARLES SCHUMER
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-disunited-party-1417209439
The then-impending Republican takeover of the Senate “is excellent news for Democrats,” Bill Scher of the Campaign for America’s Future opined in a Politico piece two months ago. His prediction—with which we had some fun at the time—was that the new majority, combined with the prospect of a wide-open race for the presidential nomination, would heighten Republican divisions: “Instead of another two years of the same old gridlock that has turned voters off of both parties, Democrats will get to kick back with a large tub of buttery popcorn and watch the Republican soap opera hit peak suds.”
The New Congress won’t take office until January, so Scher’s forecast has yet to be tested. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank holds out hope that Scher will be proved correct: “There will be many . . . tensions within the new GOP majority—and Democrats should be exploiting those.” But for now, he observes, it is the Democrats who are “having an intraparty food fight.”
Or as The Wall Street Journal puts it in a news story today: “Long-muted tensions within the Democratic Party over policy and strategy are beginning to surface publicly, a sign of leaders looking beyond President Barack Obama ’s tenure in the aftermath of the party’s midterm election defeat.”
One point of disagreement arose Tuesday, when “the White House surprised Democratic leaders in the Senate by threatening to veto a tax package negotiated by both parties. The White House said the deal would help’“well-connected corporations while neglecting working families.’ ’’
Another “flashpoint,” according to the Journal, is immigration: “Some House Democrats believe it was a mistake for Mr. Obama to wait until after the midterm elections to take executive action limiting deportations, a delay that the president agreed to at the behest of Senate Democratic leaders trying to protect vulnerable incumbents.” As we noted in September, administration officials touted the delay as a way of deceiving red-state voters into re-electing Democratic senators. It didn’t work: Four red-state Democrats were defeated on Election Day; the fifth, Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, isn’t expected to make it past a Dec. 6 runoff.
The most interesting point of division, however, is over ObamaCare. As this column has already noted in passing, Chuck Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate leadership, “gave a rare public rebuke to Mr. Obama over the centerpiece of his presidency,” as the Journal news story puts it.
ENLARGE The full Schumer speech is available from C-Span; here’s the relevant excerpt: “After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle-class-oriented programs and built on the partial success of the stimulus. But unfortunately Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem: health-care reform. . . . It wasn’t the change that we were hired to make. Americans were crying out for the end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs, not changes in health care. This makes sense, considering that 85% of all Americans got their health [insurance] from either the government . . . or their employer. So when Democrats focused on health care, the average middle-class person thought ‘Democrats are not paying enough attention to me.’ ”
It sounds a lot like the subheadline of our Nov. 6, 2009, column: “Unemployment tops 10%. Let’s wreck health care!” To be sure, Schumer’s belated objection to ObamaCare is only strategic, not substantive. The Washington Free Beacon notes that Schumer allayed any suspicion that he had discovered the virtues of a limited state: “Ultimately, the public knows in its gut that a strong and active government is the only way to reverse the middle-class decline and help revive the American dream.”
Nonetheless, Obama loyalists experienced the senator’s ObamaCare dissent as a dagger to the heart. “If your calculus is solely how to win elections, and that is your abiding principle, it leads you to Sen. Schumer’s position,” the Journal quotes erstwhile White House senior adviser David Axelrod as saying. “But that’s precisely why big, difficult problems often don’t get addressed in Washington, and why people have become so cynical about that town and its politics.”
The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper quotes a tweet from Tommy Vietor (the “dude, that was like two years ago” guy): “Shorter Chuck Schumer—I wish Obama cared more about helping Democrats than sick people.” Halper also has a series of tweets from Jon Favreau, chief speechwriter during Obama’s first term. Among them; “Funny, I don’t remember Chuck Schumer giving that advice when he was privately and publicly championing the Affordable Care Act in 2010.”
Dude, that was like four years ago.
Another Favreau tweet: “So what are Chuck Schumer’s specific ideas for ‘middle-class programs’ we should’ve passed instead of health care and after a big stimulus?” The New Republic’s Brian Beutler picks up the theme:
The health care reform process didn’t begin in earnest until after the Recovery Act had already passed, at which point Congress’ willingness and ability to pass another big deficit-financed stimulus bill had been maxed out. Maybe Schumer has other ideas in mind—labor rights? Housing policy? A different entitlement?—but he’s never laid out what the achievable alternative was, and how the middle-class and Democratic Party would’ve been better off as a result.
It’s a fair question, but it’s also rather beside the point. By analogy, suppose a Republican observed, a few weeks after the 2006 election, that the Iraq war had turned out to be a political disaster for the GOP. One might wonder what he would have done in 2002-03 instead. But even if he was at a loss to answer, that would not invalidate his observation.
It’s not hard to see why the Democrats would be coming apart at this moment. Now that the elections for the last congressional term of Obama’s presidency are (except for the Louisiana runoffs) over, the president and other Democrats no longer have a common interest in re-election. His interest is in assuring his legacy; theirs, in winning future elections, including the presidency in 2016. That militates toward risk-seeking on his part and risk-aversion on theirs. Republicans in the new Congress could turn this to their advantage by holding votes on popular legislation that Obama is determined not to sign.
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