Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Blue Dog Blues

Far from hastening the dawn of a post-partisan utopia, President Obama’s election has led to near-absolute polarization.

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Since the passage of health care reform, few major bills have passed the Senate. Although the Democrats have a 59-vote majority, party leaders can barely find the votes for something as benign as extending unemployment benefits.

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Since President Obama’s election, more than 420 bills have cleared the House but have sat dormant in the Senate. It’s easy to forget that George W. Bush passed his controversial 2003 tax cut legislation with only 50 votes, plus Vice President Dick Cheney’s. Eternal gridlock is not inevitable unless Democrats allow it to be.

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In 2005, Howard Dean, who was then the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, carried out a campaign to elect as many Democrats as possible. In long-ignored red states, both Mr. Dean and Rahm Emanuel, then the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, backed conservative Democrats who broke with the party’s leadership on core issues like gun control and abortion rights. [...] The party leaders did not give much thought to how a Democratic majority that included such conservative members could ever effectively govern.

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As a result, the activists who were so inspired by Mr. Dean in 2006 and Mr. Obama in 2008 are now feeling buyer’s remorse.

Margaret Johnson, a former party chairwoman in Polk County, N.C., helped elect Representative Shuler but now believes the party would be better off without him. “I’d rather have a real Republican than a fake Democrat,” she said. “A real Republican motivates us to work. A fake Democrat de-motivates us.”

  NYT

[What] incentive do conservative Democratic senators have to work with the rest of the party? They know Harry Reid is never going to have the stones to push things through on reconciliation, because then Republicans will say that he is mean. They know he's never going to make Republicans actually filibuster anything, as in stand there for 10 hours reading the phone book, because then Republicans would say that he is mean. They're certainly not afraid of Obama calling them into the Oval Office and bitchslapping them, or endorsing challengers primary or otherwise, or taking their perks away, because they know Republicans would say Obama is mean.

  First Draft

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

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