Bring on the Traitor Democratsby Matthew Yglesias
June 18, 2009
12:48pm
Who cares if Obama's electoral coalition is fragile? Democrats need to run against other Democrats to push Congress to the left.With polls showing volatile levels of support for President Obama and his policies, it's important to remember that political upheavals of the past 12 months have left the Democratic Party with a raft of new senators, and a presidential job approval rating in the sixties. Most of them got to where they are the old-fashioned way. Freshman Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina was in the state senate, defeated several other candidates in a primary, then ran and won against Elizabeth Dole in a general election. Others, like Roland Burris (D-IL), Kirsten Gillibrand of New York—a House member chosen by unpopular governor David Paterson to replace Hillary Clinton even though the state featured a bevy of more senior Democratic legislators—and party-switcher Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania got where they are through less orthodox paths. And while those who've taken a traditional route to power are essentially all in good standing with their state-party organizations, the unorthodox senators face some discontent. The official position of the Democratic Party leadership, from the White House on down, is that people should leave well enough alone and support the re-election of incumbents. Nevertheless, both Specter and Gillibrand appear to be drawing strong primary challenges from Reps. Joe Sestak (D-PA) and Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY).
/snip/
...To some, a popular president elected by a strong majority of the voters and backed by a majority in the House and 59 co-partisans in the Senate ought to have his program sailing through. The reality is quite a bit different. The legislative prospects for the kind of strong climate-change bill Obama campaigned on look fairly bleak. The administration recently backed off its original idea of completely overhauling the structure of American financial regulation once it became clear that Congress wouldn't support it. And while the odds of health care reform legislation passing look fairly good, Obama's proposals for paying for it were rejected out of hand on the Hill, and it seems reasonably likely that the administration may not achieve several of its key subsidiary goals. This has led some like Reuter's Felix Salmon to wonder what Obama's doing wrong, but the reality is simply that the situation is not as favorable as it seems.
Getting members of Congress to do what you want is hard. But more primaries on the Democratic side would probably make it easier.
After all, one thing to ask is how did Barack Obama come to possess this progressive agenda in the first place? A big part of the answer is the dynamics of the presidential primary system. Former Sen. John Edwards started out as a sufficiently plausible candidate that if you squinted just the right way, you could imagine him winning, but he was clearly an underdog relative to celebrities like Obama and Clinton. Under the circumstances, it made tactical sense for Edwards to try to boost his appeal by laying out a bold progressive policy vision. One he'd done it, Clinton and Obama had to worry that Democratic loyalists would shift to his standard so they, too, outlined policy programs far more ambitious than what Al Gore or John Kerry had run on.
more at
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-06-18/traitor-democrats/?cid=bsa:featureline
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
