…goes to Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Evan Bayh.
Because the more unpopular you make the president by refusing to pass his legislation, the less vulnerable you become as a senate candidate in a red or purple state.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
41 Comments
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
Lincoln and Bayh will likely be working on K Street a year from now. They are thoughtfully making themselves as hated as possible so no one will miss them. Aren’t they just the sweetest.
Seems like the key. And note that Blanche helped out by sending her campaign consultant Celinda Lake to run coakley’s campaign.
Bayh will get reelected because of the magic of his last name. His father is Birch Bayh, whose progressive/liberal credentials shows his son up as the Republican he truly is.
Birch Bayh had a hand in the passing of Title IX and an attempt to eliminate the Electoral College, was the main sponsor of and a serious advocate for the ERA amendment, was instrumental in the writing of the constitutional amendment to lower the voting age to 18, and worked on unpopular reform issues. He was swept out of office when he ran for reelection in 1980 (Quayle won the seat), largely because he was a true liberal and as we all remember liberal was a dirty word in the 1980 election.
I’ve often wondered what Birch Bayh thinks of his son’s voting record. But I have no doubt that Indiana will reelect him. He’s just the kind of Democrat they like – a Republican.
Didn’t the Massachusetts poll show that people hate this bill and opposed Coakley in part because she supported it?
No. Can we add you to the Mensa list?
They hated the Senate version .. you know .. the one where they bought off Bad Nelson and Mary Landrieu
They didn’t hate the Senate bill or the House bill. They hated the RW caricatures of those bills that permeated the media and Uncle Fred emails. When asked about key elements of either bill clear majorities say yes.
I think they hated a wooden candidate who refused to shake people’s hands, didn’t know squat about the Red Sox and didn’t run any TV ads until about a week before the election.
We have had similar wooden candidates here in blue CA. Gray Davis was so bad we kicked him out for the Terminator. No Dem candidate is safe in any state if they suck.
Right. They liked extending Medicare.
It really boggles my mind that they think this way. It makes absolutely zero sense. What is going on in their heads?
That’s meant as a real question…what is the political math they are looking at that makes them believe this is a good move?
they’re not really thinking. everything they see is filtered through the $ signs in their eyeballs
Is it just me, or has TPM been hypercritical of Obama since Coakley’s defeat?
I’m a little bemused by how many people still don’t understand that Obama moves with slow but deliberate purpose after setbacks like this. I thought it was obvious at the time that we wouldn’t get a response from Obama on health care or the rest of the agenda until SOTU, the earliest he could possibly have his ducks in a row. Yet the left is screaming like they expected a response immediately. Have they been watching the same guy I have for the last two years?
I think the feeling, even among his strongest supporters, is that he’s gonna have to change his thinking about all the bullshit that “bipartisanship” represents, and that he’s showing no sign of that. The silly “budget cut” business only reinforces that impression.
I totally agree with you there – there wasn’t much of a prospect Repubs would ever work with Obama, and any chance of it went down the second Snowe refused to vote for HCR. It’s over and done.
My mindset is very similar to Josh Marshall. If you have been following politics for the past 15 years or so, nothing that happened last year is a surprise.
Anyone with brains knew that the GOP would try to delay and filibuster everything Obama did. Unfortunately, Obama played into the bipartisanship game and as a result we still don’t have a HCR bill. It is frustrating to see a President who is so smart do so many politically stupid things.
I also think that almost everyone in the Democratic base is desperate for a real legislative victory. Taking HCR away will deflate everyone’s hopes. The Dems have the votes to do great things and it is frustrating that they just won’t do them and Obama doesn’t seem to be making an effort.
Exactly. The progressive blogs have been talking all year about Obama as FDR and how he needs pressure from the left to make him do things, with the implicit assumption that progressive things are what Obama actually wanted to do. No, not really.
I think Obama felt that if he could get the country working together in a bipartisan way, then by definition better solutions to the country’s problems would emerge, solutions that were neither leftwing nor rightwing. He wanted to change the way the United States does government, a monumental task and one I am not sure can be achieved at all.
Perhaps Obama’s strategy of letting Congress deal with health care will now permit him to escape blame for the debacle now taking shape. Doubtful, but perhaps that is what the White House is thinking. As Barney Frank indicated the night of the Mass election, the congressional democratic strategy now is to do nothing controversial and blame Republicans. They are scampering away from health care reform as fast as their little feet can skitter, and it is laughable that they think American voters will be impressed with how close they came.
“I think Obama felt that if he could get the country working together in a bipartisan way, then by definition better solutions to the country’s problems would emerge, solutions that were neither leftwing nor rightwing. He wanted to change the way the United States does government, a monumental task and one I am not sure can be achieved at all.”
President Carter comes to mind and we know what became of him.
disagree – I think the “bipartisanship” is a strategy not a goal. since it doesn’t work it gives a green light to ignoring the repubs – think of the screaming if he’d gone ahead without first demonstrating that the repubs have no sense for the common good. didn’t some of the major flaws in the senate bill originate with the abovementioned democratic slime
Obama’s bills pass with a bare Democratic majority minus blue dogs. The true bipartisanship is between the far right and the sucker left.
I agree on the ‘strategy not a goal’. However, it hasn’t worked as well as it should because he hasn’t gotten the backup from us that he really needed. The Repubs keep claiming that they were not included in the process, even though they were included. Because the Repubs yell more frequently and louder, most or at least many, voters probably think that the Repubs were not included. When the WH points out that the Repubs were included, the right-wing and the MSM just accuse them of being arrogant. It is so sad that we let the Repubs frame the debate so completely to the MSM and general public while we talk in circles to ourselves.
Also… my prediction… the budget freeze will turn out to be a way of gradually getting some programs that don’t do anything useful out of the budget. Everyone knows that it is practically impossible to get specific things out of the budget. Getting rid of these programs is fulfilling a campaign promise, it is just really hard to do, but this is a start. What is saved by freezing the budget on specific items, will be used to increase specific job creation programs. So it will end up being pretty budget neutral.
good point about the budget freeze. Obama will frame it as jobs programs vs. something useless or geared only to a narrow special interest.
I agree with most of your first point. I don’t think all the voters are fooled by the repubs screaming, msm just paints it that way. sounds, for example, like the MA voters had a fairly complex reaction to the perfect storm of their horrible candidate. msm really is afraid of change (hcr, energy policy, stimpak, whatever), and spinning against Obama all the way.
You are right about the MSM. Just like they are still emphasizing the number of Dem Representatives, mostly, who are retiring, saying that Dems are fleeing when actually more Republicans have resigned than Dems! Barely more Republicans, but still more Republicans.
It is the MSM meme that 2010 is a tough year for Dems. The reality is probably that it is a tough year for incumbants but distorting the facts by only reporting how many Dems are retiring is biased journalism.
I keep saying, the Republican meme is important to counter-balance. We do a terrible job of that.
I fear that a lot of his strongest supporters (like me) are feeling gutshot today after the “spending freeze” debacle. I honestly don’t know who Obama is anymore, but perhaps the fact the Evan Bayh was on his VP short list should have told me something at the time.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that Bayh’s people themselves put the rumor of him being on the “short list” out into the ether. And then, of course, once it’s out there, you have to preserve party unity and stick to the story we like to tell about ourselves. Obama or his closest advisers would hardly have been able to say, if questioned about it, “No way. No how. Never happened.” Bayh was a HUGE Hillary supporter and actually spoke out against Obama during the primary in Indiana. The Obama team could hardly have seriously imagined that this would have been anything close to a workable, electable team, even considering Bayh’s conservative credentials.
Looks like you’re starting to wake up and smell the coffee.
When I post stuff like this you think it means I hate Obama.
You are not alone. I have noticed the headlines at TPM getting a bit out of control. To be honest, I am starting to cringe each time I click on the website. Many of the headlines seem to be jumping the gun. They don’t always seem to match the story.
I am a big fan of Josh Marshall. I think TPM is one of best blogs on the internet. I was introduced to Josh when Al Franken had his radio show on Air America. I always enjoyed the interviews with Josh. My guess is that Josh is just frustrated like all of us at the feckless and unorganized Democrats.
Another way to look at it is that they think the budget reconciliation strategy has legs and want to cover their asses with this preemptive strike. Not that it makes any real sense, given that a passed healthcare bill will be the Dems’ top sell in the upcoming election and they’ll be left out in the cold.
Except they all voted for it once already … and an unpopular version at that
Sorry, Booman,
but the President has become “unpopular” because of his own actions/inactions.
Why do you not see this?
I agree somewhat. Obama has failed to fight for most of his initiatives. His “hands off” approach really gets under my skin. But the Senate under Harry Reid has been the main problem.
I wish we had a Majority Leader who pulled the trigger on the nuclear option sometime back in September. Or at least threatened to take away seniority from caucus members who vote against cloture.
Reid and Obama both have each other to blame, I suppose. Reid will be gone next year I think; hopefully the Dems pick an actual fighter from a blue state to be the next leader.
A higher approval-disapproval rating than Ronald Reagan at a similar point in his presidency is “unpopular”.
Latest polls:
54-44 (Research 2000)
50-46 (MSNBC)
Neither of those constitutes “unpopular”.
Let me just add that I think the White House’s bill management has been terrible. Maybe there’s been a crack tiger-team in close contact with Congress, but I’ve yet to read about it. And it’s led to this situation where the only option now is the Senate bill with the excise tax, which I think will trigger a serious backlash towards HCR in the near future.
I remember a very poignant post by BooMan back in December 2009 that said the following:
Update [2009-12-21 1:23:56 by BooMan]: Senate invokes cloture on Reid’s manager’s amendment by a 60-40 vote. I will remind you that we needed every single victory from 2006 and 2008 to achieve this. We needed Tester and Webb and McCaskill and Whitehouse and Klobuchar and Franken and Begich and Merkley and Sanders and the two Udalls and Brown and Cardin and Hagan and Casey and Hagan and Shaheen and Warner. We needed to seat Bennet and Burris and Gillibrand. We needed to replace Kennedy with Kirk. With had to flip Arlen Specter to the Democratic Party. If we lost any single one of those battles, health care reform would be dead. Instead, it lives. And you have yourselves to thank for that. Your activism made the difference.
What a nightmare this 60 vote requirement has become.
If Nelson and Lincoln (and Lieberman for that matter) hadn’t become primadonnas and hostage takers over health care, their poll numbers would not be crashing like they are.
Their actions only accomplish a deadly three-step:
I’ve known Ben Nelson was one of the stupidest men on the planet for quite a while. But the way he’s played this HCR game has been amateur hour. He should have kept his mouth shut, voted for cloture and voted against the final bill. Same for Blanche.
One constant from early in Obama’s Presidential campaign all the way through his first year in office: a cacaphony of advice, criticism, presumption and overreaction to leaks PRIOR to a speech; then, more often than not, a different, usually more temperate discourse emerges AFTER each speech. I refuse to be manipulated by Huffington Headline disease. I’d like to listen carefully to what he has to say tomorrow night and then digest it fully. If I’m pissed off after that, so be it. He has as least earned the right to be listened to with care and judged by what he actually says and whether or not he follows through.
By the way, a trojan horse spending freeze that increased spending on progressive priorities–education, green jobs, etc.–while cutting cancers like the corn subsidies that, among other things, promote obesity and cause health care costs to soar, would be an interesting political maneuver, wouldn’t it?
fb: “By the way, a trojan horse spending freeze that increased spending on progressive priorities–education, green jobs, etc.–while cutting cancers like the corn subsidies that, among other things, promote obesity and cause health care costs to soar, would be an interesting political maneuver, wouldn’t it?”
It would if it happened. But a more likely outcome is all of the politically connected spending is protected and WIC gets cut. If Obama fought for specific things, maybe. But he doesn’t. He suggests and then stands back and watches what happens in Congress. Any number for congressmen have pleaded for his direct engagement in pushing HCR, to no avail. I see no reason for this to be any different. And that makes me totally heartsick.
Obama advocated getting a HCR bill on his desk by early September, and seemed willing to pass a flawed bill to move the ball down the field. Not that he ISN’T without blame in his messaging and lack of advocacy, but isn’t it entirely possible that he read the Congress, especially the Senate, correctly as the dysfunctional kindergarten it is? Imagine how much better off we’d be now if we had a flawed bill in place in the fall that was now being fixed through reconciliation.
My point is that so much negative energy is being expended and so many concrete assumptions are being made based purely on fragmentary leaks. It has become a pavlovian ritual. So many “experts” are weighing in with such specificity and confidence. Why not hold on, listen to the speech carefully, then let the chips fall where they may?
With the double standard being shown for Bernanke’s nomination, the idea that Obama misjudged the Senate is 100000% false. When he wants it, he applies the levers of power. How else do you describe the Senate having it’s members voting for cloture and against the nomination as has been reported at DKkos & other places.
The fuckup caucus of Lincoln, Bayh, Lieberman, Landrieu, and Nelson could have simply abstained from voting on the final bill while still voting for cloture. But Obama doesn’t want it, so they were allowed to fuck up the bill. Now it’s toast while Bernanke will sail through.
Priorities.
Are they the same senators?
It doesn’t matter. The Senate leadership and the White House are asking individual members to vote for cloture and then vote against Bernanke if they so choose. HCR was not given this courtesy when we had 60. The conservatives could have voted for cloture and against the bill and progress would have been made. But the White House and Senate leadership did nothing to stop the hostage-taking.
What burns the most is Connecticut aside, the conservatives’ states would have benefitted the most from HCR because their states have some of the highest uninsured rates in the country.
Amen. I also refused to be manipulated by (thanks for the wonderful phrase) “Huffington Headline disease.” Or the circular firing squad hysteria that I’ve seen on several blogs.