Mar
5
House Democrats Would Love This!
Filed Under American Politics | 9 Comments
So just a brief summary of where the healthcare bill is.
1. The House passed their version of the bill.
2. The Senate passed their version of the bill.
3. Democrats in the House and Senate disagree as to which bill is the best. House Democrats won’t pass the Senate bill as is and are looking for a fix.
4. The current strategy is for the House to pass the Senate bill as is because that means that the two different bills won’t need to be reconciled and Obama can sign the Senate bill into law straightaway. However, to appease House Democrats, the Senate will pass (via reconciliation) several “fixes” that will appease House democrats. The fixes are vital, otherwise, progressives in the House will see the Senate bill as far too conservative.
So with that backstory, this analysis by Judd Gregg, a Republican Senator, is fairly revealing:
The White House may renege on passing fixes to the Senate’s healthcare bill once the House has passed it, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) claimed Thursday.
Gregg, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, suggested that President Barack Obama may back off making changes to the Senate bill through the reconciliation process, which the White House and the Senate have said they would use to make changes to the Senate bill in order to placate House members.
“They’re using reconciliation to pass the great big bill,” Gregg said during an appearance on CNBC. “Once they pass the great big bill, I wouldn’t be surprised if the White House didn’t care if reconciliation passed. I mean, why would they?” . . .
“If you’re in the House and you’re saying, ‘Well, I’m going to vote for this because I’m going to get a reconcilation bill,’ I would think twice about that,” Gregg said. “First because, procedurally, it’s going to be hard to put a reconciliation bill through the Senate. Second because I’m not sure there’s going to be a lot of energy to do it, from the president or his people.”
“In my opinion, reconciliation is an exercise for buying votes, which, once they have the votes they really don’t need it,” he said.
I think this makes sense. The whole healthcare fiasco has damaged Obama’s Presidency and attempting reconciliation will only drag it out further. Obama needs the win now and then needs to move on to other subjects. It is not in his best interests for another three, six, twelve months (?) of this.
But of course, it is a calculated risk. To ignore the progressive caucus and alienate the base in this way will become a dynamic to his Presidency in it’s own right and would lead to talk of a primary from the left. If this is his plan (and I’m sceptical), his calculation must be that his political strength lies as much outside of the liberal base as it does currently within it. Who needs the liberal base when you can rely on the African-American vote, on loyal conservative Democrats, on moderates and for general election purposes, placate the swing voter who may no longer see him as aggressively liberal. Congressional Democrats are unpopular right now, running away from them might not be an altogether bad strategy. And of course, this would be a strategy looking ahead to 2012 whilst sacrificing Democratic chances in 2010.
I think it’s more likely that Judd Gregg is just trying to stir the pot here, hoping to make progressive Democrats already suspicious of the strategy to pass the Senate bill first and fix it later, balk at the idea and demand a more progressive bill. But Gregg’s analysis does have a ring of truth. Obama needs to kill the healthcare debate soon, it’s sucking all the air (and political capital) out of his Presidency.
And as an additional note of interest, vote counters on the right think that Pelosi is well short of getting the votes to pass the Senate bill in the House right now.
Mar
4
This Is Change?
Filed Under American History | Leave a Comment
Barack Obama, on the same day that he was meeting with some Democratic “No” votes from the House, announced that the brother of one of those “no” votes was being nominated to the United States Court Of Appeals:
Tonight, Barack Obama will host ten House Democrats who voted against the health care bill in November at the White House; he’s obviously trying to persuade them to switch their votes to yes. One of the ten is Jim Matheson of Utah. The White House just sent out a press release announcing that today President Obama nominated Matheson’s brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
“Change We Can Believe In”? I have to confess, I’m having a hard time believing it to be honest. Aliens I can do; little green men from mars are much more plausible than the notion that Obama is different to the usual crud that serve as politicians. A plague on all their houses.
Feb
22
Charlie Cook
Filed Under American Politics | Leave a Comment
Is one of the most respected political analysts in American politics and is regarded as non-partisan. His views are interesting to say the least:
I sort of reject the notion that there is a communications problem with President Obama. I think it’s just fundamental, total miscalculations from the very, very beginning. Of proportions comparable to President George W. Bush’s decision to go into Iraq.
I’ve spent the last couple of days talking to some of the brightest Democrats in the party that are not in the White House. And it’s very hard to come up with a scenario where Democrats don’t lose the House. It’s very hard. Are the seats there right this second? No. But we’re on a trajectory on the House turning over….
I suggest you read the whole thing.
Feb
17
As An American points out in a comment thread, there is now an interview with an “eye-witness” to the Marxist-socialist radical youth that was Barack Obama at college in 1980. Here’s the interview:
I was prepared to treat this interview with some scepticism. For one, the tone of the interviewer really grated, secondly, the interviewee, John C. Drew, is now as he himself stated a Republican activist and thirdly, there’s no actual verification that anything mentioned in this interview actually transpired. But having listened to the whole interview and visited the interviewee’s website I actually find him reasonable, believable and genuine.
But to be honest, I just don’t find the interview all that revealing about the Obama of today. all it tells us is that as a young 19 year old, Barack Obama was a naive radical marxist-socialist who saw the elites as the enemy, thought the USSR was swell and didn’t like America very much. Well no shit Sherlock! It’s not like there weren’t many of those around at that time. In fact, Drew the interviewee was one himself but is now a Republican activist. People can change as they mature.
I just don’t think the radical socialist card is an effective one to play against Obama. The more he was painted as a socialist, terrorist loving radical during the election season, the easier it was for Obama to defy those pre-conceived ideas. All he had to do was appear reasonable and moderate during a debate (as he did) and anyone who had yet to make their mind up about him and who had been regaled with tales of Saul Alinsky and William Ayers would just think “what the hell was that all about?” It just didn’t appear believable. Obama’s opponents should avoid falling into the same trap all over again. It just makes so much more sense to challenge him on what he actually does because there is so much ammunition there. Painting Obama as a socialist boogeyman just wastes the opportunity to effectively challenge Obama as a poor President who is failing to make things better for Americans because he’d rather make things better for Democratic special interest groups.
Less name-calling, more substance please is the gist of my argument.
Feb
16
Gotcha!
Filed Under American Politics | Leave a Comment
Ha ha. Those clever kids at Daily Kos have put one over on Fox this time for speculating about Evan Bayh’s intention to run against Obama in 2012:
Those pesky kids.
Here’s another politician absolutely ruling out a run for the Presidency in a Tim Russert interview in 2006:
MR. RUSSERT: So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?
SEN. OBAMA: I will not.
Because Politicians can be believed when it comes to their future ambitions.
Feb
14
The Right Experience To Be President
Filed Under American Politics | 43 Comments
ABC News/ Washington Post recently conducted a poll looking at Sarah Palin and the Tea Partys. The big story coming out of the poll regarded the perception of Palin’s readiness to be President. Only 26% of those polloed thought she had the necessary qualifications to be President whilst a large 71% felt she didn’t. Even more worrying was the fact that only 46% of Republicans felt she had the necessary qualifications.
Now there’s no way to spin this as a positive, those numbers are going to have to improve drastically if she is to have a chance to win the Presidency. The question is, can they? I’ve always thought that Obama probably had the same problems at the start of his candidacy, that potential voters were unsure about him too, but I haven’t found a poll that looks at the issue of Obama’s qualifications prior to the Democratic primaries. Until now thanks to Conservatives4Palin who link to a CBS poll taken six months before the Iowa caucus that kicked off the Democratic primary season. It’s an interesting comparison:
Qualified to be President?
Palin – 26%
Obama – 29%
Not qualified to be President:
Palin – 71%
Obama – 51%
Considered qualified by members of candidates own party:
Palin – 46%
Obama – 41%
The point of this post is not to try and project that just because Obama had similar numbers, that Palin can follow the same trajectory that Obama did, but just to observe that considerations of a person’s qualifications to be President this far ahead of an election mean very little. There are differences: Palin’s unqualified numbers are much higher than Obama’s and that suggests that more people are aware of Palin than they were of Obama and have made up their mind about her. Not good for Palin. On the other hand, Palin is still more than two years away from a potential first primary which gives her plenty of time to affect her numbers positively. The Obama poll however was taken only six months before his primary season.
The big difference however may well be the role of the media. Obama’s candidacy was one in which the MSM became invested in and supported. Initially, it was to create an opponent to Hillary. There’s nothing more boring than a coronation. And following Obama’s success in the primaries, the media bought into a number of aspects of his candidacy. The desire for the first black President, the underdog nature of his campaign and others. Palin on the other hand is likely to have to gain people’s trust despite the media who are determined to undermine her whenever possible.
Palin’s path to the Presidency will be a tough one should she decide to go that route. But precedence now shows that just because people don’t think you have the necessary experience this early in the process doesn’t mean that the impossible can’t become probable.
Feb
12
Flip Flops
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Victor Davis Hanson has a damning indictement of Obama’s flexible attitude towards campaign promises:
The problem with Obama’s new hedging on taxing those who make below $250,000, or his administration’s taking credit for victory in the Iraq war that they so once fervently tried to abort, or the flip-flop on renditions and tribunals, or the embarrassments over closing Guantanamo and trying KSM in New York or Mirandizing the Christmas Day bomber,or trashing/praising Wall Street grandees, is not that presidents cannot change their minds as circumstances warrant, or even that all politicians are at times hypocritical. No, the rub is that Obama is not merely flipping and triangulating on issues in a desperate attempt to shadow the polls, but he is doing so on matters that he once swore were absolutely central to his entire candidacy and his signature hope-and-change agenda, critical to the future of the U.S., and proof of his opponents’ either ignorance or disingenuousness.
Serially he once screamed about taxing only the wealthy and airing health care on C-SPAN. He advocated taking out all combat troops from Iraq by March 2008 and asserted the surge was failing — at a critical time when our soldiers were in a life-and-death struggle to make it work. Obama built an entire narrative about Bush the Constitution Shredder who presided over Guantanamo and renditions. There was no place in his promised new politics for lobbyists and Chicago tactics. After a single year of governance, there is now scarcely a single issue that Obama & Co. have not backtracked on, flip-flopped, redefined, or quietly dropped — mostly matters that were once demagogued to score political points. At some point — I think it was around mid-January — the public collectively shrugged and concluded of Obama, “I don’t trust anything that this guy says.” And when that happens in American politics, it is almost impossible to restore any modicum of credibility. All we are left with now is three more years of the president’s “Bush did it” mantra and a buffoonish Robert Gibbs, like some strutting carnival barker, showing off ink on his palm to a bored press corps.
So what should we make of Obama’s flexibility? Should we condemn it, accept that it’s the nature of politics or congratulate Obama for being flexible enough to adjust to the changing nature of the times?
It’s more than right to condemn Obama for his flip-flops, but I think the important take-away is that it’s damned hard to govern a centre-right country with a left-wing agenda after having seriously misjudged your mandate. And that’s Obama’s biggest failure to date.
Feb
5
Obama’s Mistakes
Filed Under American Politics | 5 Comments
I think he’s made a number of them in his first year and I might turn this into a series of posts, but for now, I want to focus on one mistake from his first year in office that lends itself easily to hindsight.
Do you remember from this blog last year the discussions about Obama’s declared war on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Within his first week in office, Obama was warning Republicans that they can’t “listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done”. Rahm Emanuel called Limbaugh “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party”. And then there was Fox News. The White House Communications Director, Anita Dunn had this to say about Fox in October last year:
“Fox News often operates either as the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party,” she said. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is … We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent.”
The war between Fox and the White House became the narrative for a week or so.
The Obama administration made a clear attempt to define conservatism as an extremist force, as exemplified by Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. This of course is a view not unique to the Obama administration. From them to Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats, to liberal pundits and gobshites like Olbermann and Matthews and on to the liberal commentators at blogs like this one (we remember the rather one track commentary of Israel, Morgan and Simon around this time), the need to define conservatives as “wingnuts” is an endemic one.
And as events have transpired, it has been shown to be a wasted effort. Clearly, Obama wanted to separate the conservative base from the middling American voter. Define conservatives as extreme, and watch the non-conservative voter distance them-self from conservatism and push them into the welcoming Democratic Party. Well wasn’t that a damp squib? Instead what we’ve seen is Fox become the most trusted news network, the tea-partiers in poll after poll being shown to be more likely to be well thought of than not, moderate Republicans like Scott Brown and Mark Kirk embracing more conservative positions than they would normally and still gaining votes and a base as energised as they’ve been in the last decade.
As a political tactic, it failed miserably, and may well have back-fired. From the first week of his Presidency, the American voter, who had been promised a new era of post-partisanship, was suddenly witnessing a pre-emptive partisan strike. I get the feeling Obama has learnt from this mistake, there is less of the “I won” rhetoric. But there is one thing I am certain of; his party certainly haven’t learnt that lesson and nor has the base.
Feb
4
Odd?
Filed Under American Politics | 5 Comments
Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, notices a slightly strange statement in Obama’s address to House Democrats:
Obama said he would attempt to convince his party’s left wing to take a less ideological approach to economic challenges.
“We’ve got to make sure that our party understands that, like it or not, we have to have a financial system that is healthy and functioning, so we can’t be demonizing every bank out there,” Obama said. “We’ve got to be the party of business, small business and large business, because they produce jobs.”
Like it or not? Who wouldn’t like a “healthy and functioning” financial system? According to Obama, the answer is . . . Democrats.
An interesting slip of the tongue, evidence of Democrat’s darker anti-capitalist agenda or just an acknowledgement that Democrats and America’s businesses aren’t the best of friends right now? Personally I plump for the latter. Still, nice to see Mr articulate constantly making these slip-ups.
Jan
30
This will be my only post today. Yesterday Obama went to Baltimore to meet with House Republicans in a question and answer session filmed by C-Span. I’ve been watching it all morning.
What a pleasant change after the last year. Whilst I could disagree with Obama on much of what he says here, what a refreshing moment for politics this was. From both sides, I thought Republicans handled it very well too, particularly Paul Ryan who is a real high flyer within the party.
This is the Obama who could win easily in 2012, and the Obama who has been missing throughout 2009. Republicans need to learn how to deal with this Obama because we’ll see much more of him. Having said that, if this is the sign of the Republican party to come too, then they are already learning fast. This is what politics is all about. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Think of it as a lengthy and polite PM’s Question Time.
The first video is of Obama’s introductory speech. (And BTW, how much more real is he reading from notes than from a teleprompter?)
that lasts half an hour. Next is the question and answer session which lasts an hour:
I found the whole thing utterly compelling. Polite without being fake, challenging without being antagonistic. This is politics at it’s best. Maybe I’m over-selling it, please find the time to watch it and make up your own mind.