A quickly emerging question on the political scene is now this: are the Democrats going to do it again? Are they really going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?
It certainly seems like it’s headed in that direction.
Although events — and political takes — in our increasingly hyperactive political culture can suddenly change the calculations, it seems several factors are at work. But the bottom line is this: all talk of a new Democratic majority now seems so outdated..so.yesterday…as polls show the Democrats’ as a party and Barack Obama as a President suffering image hits. Meanwhile, the party’s liberal wing is making rumblings about accepting absolutely nothing less than the “public option” — raising at least the possibility that if it doesn’t get what it want it could help sink health care reform, regardless of the misinformation campaign waged by some Republicans and political talk show hosts.
Second bottom line: watching the Democratic party seemingly twiddle away a mandate (again) raises the issue of whether the current generation of Democratic strategists and tacticians are as savvy as their Republican counterparts. This isn’t a matter of Democrats matching some of the GOP’s often reprehensible tactics; it’s a matter of whether the Democrats are so naive that they could not have anticipated some of them and been ready to counter them. Political junkies love to watch a fair fight and in August 2009 you have to conclude that it is lopsidded.
But this isn’t just the view from here. Here’s Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson:
Here’s the least surprising news of the week: Americans are souring on the Democratic Party. The wonder is that it’s taken so long for public opinion to curdle. There’s nothing agreeable about watching a determined attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
A poll released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center reports that just 49 percent of respondents have a favorable view of the Democrats, compared with 62 percent in January and 59 percent in April. This doesn’t mean, though, that Americans look any more kindly upon the Republican Party — favorability for the GOP has been steady at 40 percent throughout the year, according to Pew.
What it does mean, however, is that Republican efforts to obstruct, delay, confuse, stall, distort and otherwise impede the reform agenda that Americans voted for last November have had measurable success. And it means that Democrats, having been given a mandate — one as comprehensive as either party is likely to enjoy in this era of red-vs.-blue polarization — don’t really know how to use it.
That the Democratic Party is no paragon of organization and discipline is almost axiomatic. That’s not the problem. The Pew poll suggests that the Democrats’ weakness is neither strategic nor tactical but emotional. To quote the poet William Butler Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
There’s not enough passion on the Democratic side, not enough heat. There’s some radiating from the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, too little emanating from the Democratic majority in the Senate, and not nearly enough coming from President Obama. Republicans, by contrast, have little going for them except passion — but they’re using it to impressive effect.
Robinson seems truly stunned by the often seemingly tepid support Democrats are giving their own party. And here’s a revelation: weblogs are NOT the political universe so posts on weblogs are not what he’s talking about even thought those who own computers think the political world hings on their golden words:
Where are the millions who so passionately chanted “Yes, we can!” at Obama’s campaign rallies? Where are the legions who cried tears of joy on election night and tears of pride on Inauguration Day? Is Sarah Palin now the only politician capable of inspiring “passionate intensity”?
Democratic leaders should stop backpedaling, stop apologizing and show their followers — by words and deeds — that the principle of universal health care is worth fighting for. They should even allow themselves to raise their voices at times — not motivated by anger but by conviction.
Passion finds expression in anger, but also in hope. Democrats knew and felt that during the campaign. If they forget it, they might as well also forget about achieving the kind of fundamental change that the country sorely needs.
The reality is that there were a large number of Americans who truly wanted fundamental change.
Then there were a large number who truly wanted George Bush, Dick Cheney and his separate branch of government, and the Republicans to get out of the White House ASAP.
And then there were some Republicans disappointed in or angry at the Bush brand of Republicanism or revised conservatism.
Increasingly polls show that the Democrats are holding their base in Obama’s ratings — but losing or starting to lose the other two pegs. Meanwhle, Obama’s once-pristine brand name is taking a big, fat hit. The L.A. Times’ Andrew Malcolm:The new Post/ABC News poll of 1,001 Americans between Aug. 13-17 shows that only 49% now believe Obama will make the right decisions for the country.
That’s down from 60% at the 100-day mark of his presidency. Worse, only 49% now think he will achieve significant improvements in his hallmark campaign of healthcare reform, a drop of 20 points from last winter.
Fifty-five percent now see the nation as seriously off-track, up from 48% in April.
The president’s overall approval now stands at 57%, down 12 points from April. Disapproval has jumped to 40%, the highest of his seven months in office.
Despite all the travel and good talking, fully 42% now “strongly disapprove” of Obama’s work on healthcare, with support collapsing especially among seniors and the highly-prized sector of political independents. A bare majority (52%) still support creation of a public option, but that’s fading too — down sharply from late June’s 62%.
Obama seems caught in a pincer: liberals are angry because they don’t feel he is keeping promises to come down on the progressive side on insisting on a public option or deep sixing the don’t ask don’t tell military policy on gays. Republicans who are part of the talk radio political culture (which is now a large chunk of the GOP) want to halt Obama’s agenda on health care and other issues and have an eye on 2010 — and 2012. Independent voters have never been monolithic but remain vital and he’s losing some of those who leaned to the GOP side or who had once been in the GOP.
Meanwhile, centrist writer John Avlon flatly suggests that history is repeating itself — the Democrats are indeed poised to do it again.
Liberals revolt against a Democratic president’s pragmatism. Self-defeating stupidity ensues.
We’ve seen this movie before. Here’s a highlight soundbite: “The idea of all or nothing has been pursued now for nearly three decades. No one has benefitted from that.”
That was Jimmy Carter back in 1979, proposing phased-in health-care reform, creating insurance for catastrophic illness. He was opposed by Ted Kennedy and the unions who wanted to hold out for a Canadian-style single-payer system on the grounds that Carter’s plan was “too inequitable.” There were 18 million uninsured Americans then. Now there are 46 million.
Time for a wake-up call. With all the hate-filled hyperbole festering around the summer’s health-care debate (Hitler references now seem to appear almost daily), it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there is essentially one substantive sticking point separating the center from the left: the public option.
That’s the proposal that is acting as the thin-edge of the wedge in conservatives’ apparently effective argument that health-care reform represents a slippery slope toward socialism.
Remove that plank and replace it with a nonprofit cooperative based on local models that have existed in the heartland for decades—as a bipartisan group of senators has proposed—and the reasonable edge of the opposition evaporates along with most of the cost.
The creation of a nonprofit co-op—run by its members—would cost an estimated $6 billion in startup seed capital from the government. In contrast, the public-insurance option—run by a new government bureaucracy—would cost between $500 billion and $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars. If you take the president’s pledge that any health-care overhaul will be deficit neutral seriously—or if you can read a poll or balance a checkbook—you’ll quickly see that the difference isn’t trivial. It’s a fight about adding another trillion dollars to the deficit.
He goes on to say this further down:
Liberals are arguing that without the public option there is essentially no health-care reform. That’s absurd—President Obama was right when he said this weekend that the public option was “one sliver” of health-care reform….
Indeed: Obama is now being blasted by prominent pundits from the left and from the right. Here’s Avlon’s conclusion:
Liberals are in deep denial about the source of the president’s falling poll numbers during this summer’s health-care debate. They think the problem—perceptions of arrogant over-reaching liberalism—is the cure. It’s the same self-serving mistake that the extremes always make.
President Obama needs to depolarize the health-care debate. He got off-message because he got off-center. Embracing a bipartisan bill that replaces the public option with a nonprofit co-op will not “muddy” the debate but help clarify it. It will not be a retreat but a way forward.
Lyndon Johnson once joked that “the difference between liberals and cannibals is that cannibals don’t eat their friends and family members.” In half-century-long history of failed health-care reforms from Harry Truman on down, liberal cannibalism has been as much to blame for defeats as fear-mongering from the far right.The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. The goal is to decrease costs and increase coverage. If today’s liberals don’t understand the lesson of their own political history and insist on attacking their president, they will have the failure of this health-care reform on their hands.
(Read his column in full)
Avlon will most certainly now be pilloried as a tool of the right (in fact, he has worked with Rudy Guiliani and also with Bill Clinton) but it is a fact: if progressives do wind up sitting on their hands because the final version accepted by the White House doesn’t have everything they want, then than no matter how many GOPers screamed “Nazi” at rallies, no matter how many stories there are of GOPers bringing guns to Presidential town halls (will the bar soon be lowered to allow Uzis, tanks and missiles?) no many now Senate Republicans seemingly played a shell sham game in bipartisan negotiations to eventually oppose health care reform to save their hides in primaries or close upcoming elections, the GOP in 2010 will say “See? Even Democrats didn’t like the President’s lousy plan!”
Talk radio will then run with the talking point, talk show listeners who trust and love their hosts and use their very words in arguments with the other side will run with it and the Republicans’ massive new and old media machine will repeat it.
And if history does indeed repeat itself and it seems like the Carter and Clinton eras all over again, exactly which party that was in the majority during those times suffered at the polls after those failed attempts at health care reform?
UPDATE: Charlie Cook sees the Democrats as facing political problems, according to The Politico:
Charlie Cook, one of the best political handicappers in the business, sent out a special update to Cook Political Report subscribers Thursday that should send shivers down Democratic spines.
Reviewing recent polling and the 2010 election landscape, Cook can envision a scenario in which Democratic House losses could exceed 20 seats.
“These data confirm anecdotal evidence, and our own view, that the situation this summer has slipped completely out of control for President Obama and Congressional Democrats. Today, The Cook Political Report’s Congressional election model, based on individual races, is pointing toward a net Democratic loss of between six and 12 seats, but our sense, factoring in macro-political dynamics is that this is far too low,” he wrote.
“Many veteran Congressional election watchers, including Democratic ones, report an eerie sense of déjà vu, with a consensus forming that the chances of Democratic losses going higher than 20 seats is just as good as the chances of Democratic losses going lower than 20 seats.”
Read it in full.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.