The Democratic Party has a problem: Barack Obama wants bipartisanship, and Nancy Pelosi doesn’t.
Here is Nancy Pelosi suggesting the media and the public are making too big of a deal out of the Democrats’ failure to win substantial votes from both parties in support of a $800-billion-or-so economic stimulus bill:
“Washington seems consumed in the process argument of bipartisanship, when the rest of the country says they need this bill,” the California Democrat said, seeming to sweep aside the Obama administration initial desire to have broad GOP support for the plan. …
Pelosi’s increasingly partisan tone comes a day after Obama stepped up his pressure on Republicans, who have sought to downsize spending and increase tax cuts. They have been joined in their efforts by a coalition of centrist Democrats in the upper chamber, led by Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, who has criticized the House stimulus as wasteful and ill-targeted.
Unfortunately, Pelosi apparently isn’t up on the latest news. The “rest of the country” is NOT saying we need this bill. Here’s this from a recent CBS news report:
Slightly more than half the country approves of President Obama’s $800 billion-plus stimulus package, a new CBS News poll finds. But support for the bill has fallen 12 points since January, and nearly half of those surveyed do not believe it will shorten the recession.
Fifty-one percent of those surveyed support the stimulus package, while 39 percent do not. An additional 10 percent don’t know. Last month, 63 percent supported the package and just 24 percent opposed it.
I think it’s safe to assume that the 39 percent of Americans who oppose this bill aren’t all from Washington, and they aren’t opposed because they are all “consumed in the process argument of bipartisanship.” Many of these folks just don’t trust Nancy Pelosi, who set the stage for this entire debate over the stimulus bill when she and other top House Democrats drafted the first version that passed the House. Consider this from the CBS News Report:
President Obama’s approval rating stands at 62 percent, while the overall approval rating of Congress is 26 percent. …
The approval rating for Congressional Democrats is 48 percent, while the approval rating for Congressional Republicans is 32 percent. Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is unknown to most Americans, but she gets a 3-to-1 negative rating from those familiar with her.
Obama’s approval rating is a full 14 points higher than his fellow Democrats in Congress. We can blame the right-wing spin machine all day long for the unpopularity of Pelosi and her colleagues, but let’s not make the mistake of seeing value in their unpopularity. It’s not an asset, it’s a liability.
Republicans made it clear at the outset that the first draft of this bill was a product of Pelosi’s leadership — and Democrats could never effectively refute this charge because (guess what) it’s true! – at least according to conservative Democrats, also known as “Blue Dog” Democrats.
Many of the 49 members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition are going public with deep misgivings about the goodie-packed $819 billion stimulus package the House passed last week.
That’s hardly surprising, considering it’s a deficit-spending behemoth that inherently offends their balanced-budget sensibilities. But the Dogs are really growling about the way in which the bill passed the House — how Pelosi shepherded it through, and how she suspended “regular order” during the passage of the $700 billion financial markets bailout late last year.
“A lot of the Blue Dogs were unhappy with the [stimulus] bill and even angrier because they felt they had zero input — like their caucus doesn’t matter anymore because of the padded majority,” said a staffer for a prominent caucus member.
“I got in terrible trouble with our leadership because they don’t care what’s in the bill; they just want it to pass and they want it to be unanimous,” Tennessee Rep. Jim Cooper, the member deepest in Pelosi’s doghouse, told a Nashville radio program over the weekend.
“We’re just told how to vote. We’re treated like mushrooms most of the time.”
Why does Obama remain so popular? It has a lot to do with the fact that people believe Obama is sincere when he talks about bipartisanship.
Americans believe the president is following through on his promise to establish greater bipartisanship in Washington: The public overwhelmingly thinks Obama is reaching out to Congressional Republicans, with 81 percent saying he is doing so.
Americans do not believe that Congressional Democrats and Republicans are following suit, however: Only 49 percent believe that Congressional Democrats are striving for bipartisanship, and just 41 percent say Congressional Republicans are seeking bipartisanship.
It is simply astonishing that 81 percent of respondants to this poll give Obama credit for reaching out to Congressional Republicans — this means that a majority or near-majority of Republicans believe Obama is reaching out. In contrast, it’s likely that the overwhelming majority of people who believe Congressional Democrats are reaching out are themselves Democrats.
It isn’t just Washington that’s “consumed” by the idea of bipartisanship. It’s also Barack Obama and the American people. Consider the following from a recent CBS news report:
Eighty-one percent of Americans say the stimulus bill should be a bipartisan effort. Just 13 percent think it is okay for a bill to be passed with only the backing of the Democratic majority.
Eighty-one percent is a huge number. It obviously represents a large number of Republicans AND Democrats, and this polling data may explain how Barack Obama managed to win. That’s what Charlie Cook — probably the smartest non-partisan pollster in the country – points to in a recent column:
In a recent article for The Democratic Strategist, a Web-based publication that provides a forum for some of the smartest Democratic pollsters, theorists, and thinkers, Andrew Levison argues that the strength of Obama’s appeal last year was in his determination to build a large and durable coalition, not to merely win with a very narrow majority. This strategy was crafted to bring about significant social reforms and change; it is not an abandonment of progressive values but instead a more effective way of achieving those objectives. To make real change, you have to try to do big things with broad-based support. History shows that the biggest and most meaningful public policy changes of the last century were achieved through bipartisan efforts, not by one party muscling its agenda through.
Most left-wing activists hate bipartisanship because they hate conceding anything to Republicans. I know how they feel — it’s frustrating to share a country with people who don’t share your beliefs about what should be done — but overall, the American people love bipartisanship. Left-wing activists may be deluding themselves that if they can just grab the reins of power for a brief period, they can implement policy changes that the rest of America will have to accept — even if a majority of Americans don’t actually support these changes. But this is called overreaching — it is precisely the political mistake the Republicans made during the Bush years, and Democrats who follow in Bush’s footsteps will face the same fate.
As Cook writes:
Congressional Democrats are understandably anxious to put into place those programs and priorities that got nowhere while Democrats chafed under Republican rule. Expecting them to take naturally to this very different approach by Obama is unrealistic. For that very reason, the Obama White House must begin sending in the plays, or it risks having Hill quarterbacks call their own in ways that run counter to the president’s game plan and have much less likelihood of success.
The “Hill quarterbacks” to be wary of are Pelosi and other House Dems who originally drafted this stimulus bill. The first draft of this bill ran counter to the president’s game plan because it was too full of random items that couldn’t be sold in a coherent way to a right-wing public. As Cook put it,
But the House-passed package suggested an effort exclusively of, by, and for Democrats, and it played to some of the worst stereotypes of the Democratic Party and of politics as usual on Capitol Hill. It implied that Obama had become a captive of, rather than the victor over, old-style politics.
Those who think it’s weak-minded and ignorant for me to repeat the “talking points” of conservatives who say this bill could have been drafted differently, consider the following discussion during Slate’s Political Gabfest, which features Slate writers Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson and David Plotz:
Dickerson: … A lot of people think that Daschle, plus the fact that the stimulus bill is now having some trouble, there are Democrats who are saying they won’t vote for it until it’s fixed, and as it starts to get fixed, that’s causing House Democrats to get angry about the things that are being taken out. I was talking to somebody who was, to an aide to a House leader yesterday, who said that the Senate Democrats were merely “mouthing GOP talking points.” That’s kind of a rough thing to say about your fellow Democrat already in this era of hope and wonder. I mean, we’re only in our second week of the Obama Administration and you already have intra-party sniping. So there is, some, kind of, the sky is falling. My own view, basically is, if you were one of the people who panicked during the election, and said, “oh my God, the sky is falling, Barack Obama is not going to win because he’s not tough enough, he’s too cerebral, he doesn’t act quickly enough, too much the law professor, blah blah blah, that you then can’t now panic about Republicans having the upper hand in the stimulus conversation …
Plotz: … Frankly, as we discussed a bit last week, there is stuff in that bill which is kind of hard to justify as a short-term economic measure. You don’t have to use this bill to do every single thing that the Democrats want to do over the next four years, or in the next two years. The bill can be more limited, and I think that it’s perfectly fair to have this kind of deliberation. …
Bazelon: … I have to say that now that I actually understand what is in that bill and all the different moving parts to it and how creaky it is, I don’t think that the version that Obama proposed should just pass.
Dickerson: Well, to be fair to him. It wasn’t the bill he proposed. It was the roughly 700-page bill that the House put together.
Are Bazelon and Plotz “mouthing GOP talking points” when they say the bill is “creaky” and contains elements that are “hard to justify”? I don’t have time to provide their credentials — but I’ve listened to them long enough to know that they have absolutely no inclination to echo Republican spin.
Pelosi and House Dems who thought Barack Obama’s talk of bipartisanship was “just words” need to realize that Obama was being serious — and furthermore, his approach to governance will do more for this country in the long-term than theirs will.