Steve Dreihaus represents parts of Cincinnati and its suburbs. A big chunk of his district is in Hamilton County, which Obama carried with 53% of the vote. It was the first time in 44 years that a Democrat carried the county. Dreihaus beat Republican Steve Chabot by a measly 14,472 votes, and that was largely on the back of a single ward.
Mr. Chabot said he was impressed by the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote operation, particularly the absentee ballot program, which he plans to try to replicate. He conducted a precinct-by-precinct analysis of the 2008 race, which he said found an “unusually skewed turnout” with margins that increased by 30 percent in Democratic areas and dropped by 10 percent in Republican areas.
“It would have been different if I would have gotten voted out on some kind of scandal or if we’d lost touch with the district, but that didn’t happen,” Mr. Chabot said. “Republicans were not particularly pleased with the nature of the national ticket, and they weren’t very excited.”
This time, as much as the race may be affected by the national mood, along with a 9.4 percent unemployment rate here, it also could be determined by hyperlocal statistics. Will Mr. Driehaus and his Democratic organization repeat the voter turnout of more than 70 percent in the city’s largely black Seventh Ward?
If the OFA has anything to do with it, turnout will be high again.
“Our job is to make sure people don’t take a pass on the midterm,” said Ken Shewmon, a management consultant who volunteers as a Democratic neighborhood team leader. “We know who they are, we know where they are, we know their phone numbers.
“We’re a little bit early now,” he said, “but if we don’t see a lot of volunteers by August, that’s a problem.”
This is why I am pivoting to start talking about the elections. I don’t much care about Dreihaus except for his vote for Speaker. But his race is just a microcosm of the challenge we face all over the country. If volunteers don’t show up at OFA offices by August, we have a problem. So, it is time to get ourselves motivated and get to work.
I’ll ask the same thing that people over at TGOS ask. What have Democrats in D.C. done to make people want to volunteer and vote? HCR/HIR? After they wouldn’t let Dr. Margaret Flowers testify at the Baucus kabuki hearings? For a stimulus that even Obama’s advisers know was too small? Call me a wet blanket, I don’t care. But if you gave the base a reason to turn out, I am sure they would. Saying, “Vote for us, at least we aren’t batshit insane like the other guy,” isn’t good enough.
Wiki
This is from January, so it doesn’t even include the health care bill or anything else done this year.
Washington Post:
And this reaction of yours is exactly what I’m talking about. You are consuming a great deal of progressive media and the effect on you is totally demoralizing so that you can’t seem to even recall any of the accomplishments of the most prolific Congress in our lifetimes.
+1
And honestly, “vote for us, we’re not batshit insane like the other guy” SHOULD be enough. The rest is just butter on bread.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/joshpeck/gGGGd7
The link includes a link to a Rachel Maddow clip which, I believe, is very similar to the WashPost article but still is quite effective.
People who say this administration hasn’t accomplished anything are apparently only concentrating on something that was promised but hasn’t been accomplished YET! They just whine “If my pet project isn’t done YET, then nothing has been accomplished.” Pretty silly. And selfish!
Check the ‘accomplished’ on FactCheck.org. It is pretty extraordinary what has actually been done.
100 Days/ 100 Foreign Policy Accomplishments:
http://www.nsnetwork.org/node/1281
Lots of more current articles at nsnetwork also.
China Trip:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-sindell/obamas-china-shame—-the_b_362534.html
The media got the China trip wrong!
NPR – Most Productive Year:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122436116
Regulatory Agencies:
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/the-quiet-revolution
He made a lot of progress in a lot of areas and you can bet he is pretty disappointed that the one agency that lacked the overhaul that it needed turned out to be such a disaster.
I don’t have a link for this article by Norm Ornstein so I am copying the entire article here. Sorry for the length but I think that it is important! Norm may be the only sane person at AEI.
Washington Post
A very productive Congress, despite what the approval ratings say
By Norman Ornstein
Sunday, January 31, 2010; B02
When President Obama urged lawmakers during his State of the Union speech to work with him on “restoring the public trust,” he was hardly going out on a limb. The Congress he was addressing is one of the least popular in decades. Barely a quarter of Americans approve of the job it’s doing, according to the latest Gallup/USA Today poll, while 58 percent said it was below average or one of the worst ever, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey last month.
It’s not hard to find reasons why Americans are down on Capitol Hill, and why President Obama’s approval rating has dropped below 50 percent in many polls. A year into the 111th Congress, unemployment remains at 10 percent, and many Americans are struggling to get by — even as they’ve watched Congress bail out banks and coddle the same bankers now salivating over massive new bonuses. At the same time, the public has had a front-row seat to the always messy legislative process on health care and other issues, and this past year that process has been messier, more rancorous and more partisan than at any point in modern memory.
There seems to be little to endear citizens to their legislature or to the president trying to influence it. It’s too bad, because even with the wrench thrown in by Republican Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, this Democratic Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president — and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson.
The deep dysfunction of our politics may have produced public disdain, but it has also delivered record accomplishment.
The productivity began with the stimulus package, which was far more than an injection of $787 billion in government spending to jump-start the ailing economy. More than one-third of it — $288 billion — came in the form of tax cuts, making it one of the largest tax cuts in history, with sizable credits for energy conservation and renewable-energy production as well as home-buying and college tuition. The stimulus also promised $19 billion for the critical policy arena of health-information technology, and more than $1 billion to advance research on the effectiveness of health-care treatments.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has leveraged some of the stimulus money to encourage wide-ranging reform in school districts across the country.
There were also massive investments in green technologies, clean water and a smart grid for electricity, while the $70 billion or more in energy and environmental programs was perhaps the most ambitious advancement in these areas in modern times.
As a bonus, more than $7 billion was allotted to expand broadband and wireless Internet access, a step toward the goal of universal access.
Any Congress that passed all these items separately would be considered enormously productive. Instead, this Congress did it in one bill.
Lawmakers then added to their record by expanding children’s health insurance and providing stiff oversight of the TARP funds allocated by the previous Congress. Other accomplishments included a law to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco, the largest land conservation law in nearly two decades, a credit card holders’ bill of rights and defense procurement reform.
The House, of course, did much more, including approving a historic cap-and-trade bill and sweeping financial regulatory changes. And both chambers passed their versions of a health-care overhaul. Financial regulation is working its way through the Senate, and even in this political environment it is on track for enactment in the first half of this year.
It is likely that the package of job-creation programs the president showcased on Wednesday, most of which got through the House last year, will be signed into law early on as well.
Most of this has been accomplished without any support from Republicans in either the House or the Senate — an especially striking fact, since many of the initiatives of the New Deal and the Great Society, including Social Security and Medicare, attracted significant backing from the minority Republicans.
How did it happen? Democrats, perhaps recalling the disasters of 1994, when they failed to unite behind Bill Clinton’s agenda in the face of uniform GOP opposition, came together. Obama’s smoother beginning and stronger bonds with congressional leaders also helped.
But even with robust majorities, Democratic leaders deserve great credit for these achievements.
Democratic ideologies stretch from the left-wing views of Bernie Sanders in the Senate and Maxine Waters in the House to the conservative approach of Ben Nelson in the Senate and Bobby Bright in the House, with every variation in between. Finding 219 votes for climate-change legislation in the House was nothing short of astonishing; getting all 60 Senate Democrats to support any version of major health-care reform, an equal feat. The White House strategy — applying pressure quietly while letting congressional leaders find ways to build coalitions — was critical.
Certainly, the quality of this legislative output is a matter of debate. In fact, some voters, including many independents, are down on Congress precisely because they don’t like the accomplishments, which to them smack of too much government intervention and excessive deficits. But I suspect the broader public regards this Congress as committing sins of omission more than commission. Before the State of the Union, the stimulus was never really sold in terms of its substantive measures; it just looked like money thrown at a problem in the usual pork-barrel way. And many Americans, hunkering down in bad times, may not accept the notion of “countercyclical” economic policies, in which the government spends more just when citizens are cutting back.
Most of the specific new policies — such as energy conservation and protection for public lands — enjoy solid and broad public support. But many voters discount them simply because they were passed or proposed by unpopular lawmakers. In Massachusetts, people who enthusiastically support their state’s health-care system were hostile to the very similar plan passed by Congress. Why? Because it was a product of Congress.
Well before Sen.-elect Brown’s Bay State upset, it was clear that a sterling legislative record in the first half of the 111th Congress did not guarantee continuing action in 2010 or beyond. And now, Democrats’ success at keeping 59 senators in line means little if they cannot find someone on the other side willing to become vote No. 60. With Republicans ebullient over the Massachusetts election, the likelihood is that they will feel vindicated in their “just say no” strategy, Obama’s leadership lectures notwithstanding.
If the midterm elections in November turn out to be more like 1994, when Democrats got hammered, than 1982, when Republicans suffered a less costly blow, the GOP will probably be emboldened to double down on its opposition to everything, trying to bring the Obama presidency to its knees on the way to 2012. That would mean real gridlock in the face of a serious crisis. Given the precarious coalitions in our otherwise dysfunctional politics, we could go quickly from one of the most productive Congresses in our lifetimes to the most obstructionist.
And voters would probably like that even less.
Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the co-author of “The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track.”
Oops, sorry Booman! I didn’t read your comment closely enough to realize that it was Norm’s. Guess he gets double credit.
Shorter: “change is returning Blue Dogs to Congress.”