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03/05/10
Q. Why, in the face of hostile public opinion surveys, hostile press, and anxious blue dogs, would Obama continue his effort to ram, by any means available, a health care bill though the House and Senate?
A. It is because someone at the White House has studied the election results of 1994, and the circumstances that year which led to the Republican takeover of Congress for the first time in four decades.
In 1993-94, Bill Clinton controlled the White House with huge majorities in both the Congress and Senate. The signature achievements of the era included tax increases, deficit spending, midnight basketball and an ill-advised gun control bill that infuriated the right.
Why did Republicans win in 1994? To be sure, there was a natural mid-course correction, Democratic scandals, and Gingrich did a masterful job nationalizing the election. But the chief reason was that liberal democrats sat on their hands, disappointed that Clinton and his Democratic Congress had failed to delivery on their signature promise, health care for all for free.
Advance to present day. What does the President and his supermajority have to show their base? Gitmo is still open, and won't be closing anytime soon. And it is becoming apparent that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed may be denied a civilian trial and subjected to a military tribunal after all. No Bushies have been prosecuted for war crimes or torture or water boarding. The stimulus bill has not worked; it will be months before economic recovery will be felt on Main Street. Cap and Trade is dead. Obama has dramatically escalated a war and failed to stop one he promised to end. The deficit noose is growing tighter, severely limiting what Congress can do during the upcoming months to fund the social programs so near and dear to the hearts of the American left. The health care bill, as during the Clinton years, is mired in a morass of stinky legislative sausage, and the public option now appears a lost cause. In other words, Obama-Reid-Pelosi cannot point to a single legislative achievement that would motivate the left flank of their party to walk streets, make phone calls or vote in the upcoming mid-term elections.
Having studied the results of the 1994 elections, Obama's team has come to the conclusion that, as bad as things are, things will be even worse if they don't keep at least one promise made to the left. Their best, and perhaps only hope is healthcare. Absent something, the Democratic base will sit out the mid-term elections in 2010, as it did in 1994, thereby handing Obama a Republican Senate and a Republican Congress.
Past posts:
Q. Why, in the face of hostile public opinion surveys, hostile press, and anxious blue dogs, would Obama continue his effort to ram, by any means available, a health care bill though the House and Senate? MORE... "If Andrew Cuomo had been governor last year, the state wouldn't have a $7.4 billion deficit this year, and the chaos and dysfunction it has under Paterson wouldn't exist." (NY Post 1-25-10). Or so says a spokesperson for New York's Attorney General and 'Governor in Waiting'. MORE... Sometimes in politics, currents converge is ways that no one could have predicted MORE... Over the holidays two Governors from two large blue states made important pronouncements about their states’ fiscal condition and the health care bill passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve. MORE... The chattering class too often obsesses on the 'big' races, ignoring those at the local level where emerging trends, though harder to spot, are often more telling. MORE... Time will tell if President Obama will be able to ram what he calls his signature issue through the Congress and the Senate this Fall. But the boisterous town meetings and the belligerence of those showing up to air their thoughts on health care don't bode well for the President. At least not on passage of the health care bill in its current form, to the extent that anyone can even say what is in the current bill. MORE... Last Friday evening, I finished the day watching FOX News. To my surprise, there was Evan Bayh, Democratic Senator from Indiana, doing an interview with Sean Hannity. MORE... (July 27, 2009) The President had a bad we... a press conference to tout healthcare, at which he meandered, appeared bored and uninformed…which ended with an ill thought answer to a question about the arrest of an African American professor…in which he insulted a decorated police officer and the Cambridge Police Department. It threw the President off message, destroyed whatever good he accomplished with his press conference, and forced Mr. Obama to personally walk back his remarks at an unscheduled Friday afternoon appearance in the White House briefing room. MORE... (July 16, 2009) Inevitably they end, but this one has ended sooner than expected. MORE... I love Danica Patrick. She races cars. Very fast cars. She's gorgeous. She's hot. She has an American flag tattooed right above her very cute derriere. She has a sizzling website with lots of racy photos. (www.danicaracing.com) And she has the audacity of hope, getting into a man’s sport and daring to believe she can compete with the big boys and win races. MORE... 5-19-09 It was hard to miss the spectacle last week. MORE... He usurped the power of GM's Board of Directors and ordered its CEO fired. He invented, then rigged bank 'stress tests' to dictate which must seek more capital and which ones don't. MORE... Evidently weary of hearing Democrats claim they'd heard no evil, seen no evil and done no evil, last week the CIA released documents showing several democrats in Congress, including Nancy Pelosi, had been fully briefed on water boarding and made aware that lawyers in the Bush Administration had approved this "Enhanced Interrogation Technique." MORE... When President Obama was in Trinidad last week, he did something odd. Instead of talking about what he was doing to forge new relationships with Latin American neighbors, or creating new alliances, or standing American ground on a fundamental principle, he let loose with a Saturday address announcing that he would order his Cabinet to come up with ideas on how to reduce wasteful spending. MORE... The past ten days marked a turning point in the Obama Presidency, the nation and our status as a world superpower. MORE... President Obama is not going to fix this problem by attacking Rush Limbaugh. The boy geniuses who dreamt that one up and have so gleefully prosecuted the assault on a private citizen and talk show host need to revisit their strategy. MORE... In 1965, Lyndon Johnson could have been excused for believing he had a mandate to alter the course of a nation. He'd defeated Goldwater in the 1964 election 61-38%, carried 44 states and had not been shy about telling a country where he would take it. MORE... President Obama has now signed the stimulus bill. It is a victory he had to have, for he could not, having staked so much on the passage of one, afford to lose. MORE... Jay was on the Fox program "America's News HQ" on February 1. MORE... Jay appeared on Fox News Channels "America's News HQ" on January 26 and discussed the Obama stimulus package. MORE... Nancy Pelosi's remarks on Sunday prior to the inauguration were not an accident. She drew a line in the sand and essentially told the new President to keep his campaign promises... promises that Obama jettisoned long ago and no longer wants to keep. MORE... A couple events of the past few days worth noting for those interested in political careers. MORE... FOX news devoted much of its Saturday broadcast time to Hamas, and to speculation about whether the war in Gaza will become Obama's first foreign policy test. The answer is it will be if Obama declares it so. It will become a foreign policy "crisis" if Obama calls it one. MORE... John McCain's Presidential obituary was etched in stone at the conclusion of his third and final debate with Barack Obama. MORE... Recently I went on Fox's America's Election HQ to discuss the Obama and McCains Presidential campaigns. MORE... Parallels between the elections of 1960, 1980 and 2008. MORE... A Lesson in Winning by not Losing, and Losing by not Winning MORE... When the credit crunch took a sharp turn south 14 days ago, the dynamics of the Presidential race changed. McCain's Palin bounce ceased, and as economic concerns moved front and center, McCain's percentage of the vote gradually diminished until he was running behind Obama beyond the margin of error. Then came the announcement that McCain was suspending his campaign and threatening to skip the debate to return to Washington to help hammer out an agreement. Did McCain make the wrong decision? MORE... Gov. Sarah Palin's visceral style and tendency to attack critics contrast with her public image, her record shows. MORE... Barack Obama and Joe Biden wasted 10 days attacking Sarah Palin. Obama questioned her experience, highlighting his lack of experience. Biden called her "good looking," highlighting his (Biden's) penchant for sticking foot into mouth. In attacking Palin, they gave McCain a pass, played on the wrong end of the field, offended the very blue collar Wall Mart moms they need to win and squandered precious time they will never get back MORE... In picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain took an enormous risk. For no matter how well his team vetted Palin, she remains untried, untested and unvetted by the mainstream media. To the mainstream, Palin was unwelcome surprise. To the mainstream, because she may prove a godsend to McCain, and because she exploits a division in democratic ranks, she is to be destroyed. MORE... Just when Obama had given numerous openings to McCain, his media team gratuitously sticks pictures of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears into an attack ad that obliterates the essential point of the spot. MORE... "People of Berlin. People of the World. This is our moment. This is our time." So proclaims a not-yet-elected President on foreign soil to 200,000 Germans. MORE... Senators travel. Within reason, they are expected to, especially Senators who are would-be Presidents. But not in modern times has a presumptive Presidential nominee engaged in the kind of over-hyped spectacle we are witnessing this week with Obama's forays into Afghanistan, Iraq, Berlin, Paris and London. MORE... When primaries have run their course, all wise candidates seek to grab center ground prior to the fall campaign. MORE... The following video clips are from my appearance on Fox News' Strategy Room. MORE... Wesley Clark went on a Sunday talking head show and blasted John McCain's military credentials, claiming that he "hasn't held executive responsibility... " or "commanded troops in wartime" or "ordered bombs to fall."
Dumb move. MORE... I was on Fox News Channel's America's Election HQ on Saturday. MORE... Talking to the press about your "game plan" and your strategy isn't something you do unless you are doing it to throw your opponent. MORE... Everyday that a campaign has to apologize for something is a day lost, a day spent off message, a day that has been wasted, a day that an opponent has had the upper hand. MORE... Smart campaigns never telegraph their real strategy. And Obama's team isn't dumb. Mike Bloomberg notwithstanding, no campaign is so flush with resources that hard choices don't have to be made. MORE... McCain has cancelled a fundraiser that was to be hosted by Texas oil baron and cattle rancher Clayton Williams. MORE... It did not take long to Obama to realize that putting Jim Johnson on his Vice-Presidential search team was a mistake. And rather than let the problem fester, he quickly got rid of the problem. MORE... Everybody has a Russert story, for he was an unusually kind and gracious man who worked in a cutthroat town in a cutthroat profession. Here is mine. MORE... If you have so many enemies that you have to make a list, you have made too many enemies. MORE... Dick Morris has written one of his best pieces of the year on the challenge now facing Obama. MORE... Missed in the postmortems this weekend about all the mistakes the Clinton's made was the credit due Obama. MORE... I was once involved in a gubernatorial campaign that had two of everything. Two polltakers. Two media consultants. Two radio producers. Two mail specialists. Two media buyers. MORE... Back from a week in Paris where I intentionally ignored e-mails, the internet and newspapers. Until today. MORE... McCain's mission: keep the campaign focused on "values." MORE... The winner of the 2008 Presidential election will be the one who controls the agenda. MORE... Dan Rather was once asked why he never swore in private conversations. He said it was a bad habit and he feared unwittingly putting such a habit on display when the cameras were rolling. MORE... Peggy Noonan bit Mrs. Clinton today, and her teeth were razor sharp. MORE... More on Clinton's sniper fire problem. MORE... Obama spent little time in Kentucky, a state he knew he would badly lose, and instead went to Oregon and drew 75,000 to a rally. MORE... Bold face lies will disqualify you. MORE...
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