The bodies
aren’t even cold yet in the House, but the
Democratic Party has already opened up a bitter
debate over who’s to blame.
The party’s bloodied moderates Wednesday
released two years of pent-up anger at a party
leadership they viewed as blind to their needs
and deaf to the messages of voters who never
asked for President
Barack Obama’s ambitious
first-term agenda.
Liberals pushed back hard: The problem, they
say, was those undisciplined moderates, who won
delays, unsightly compromises and a muddled
message from a too-accommodating administration.
Yet a third group of Democratic politicians and
operatives blamed not policy but a failed sales
job for the party’s woes.
One thing all sides agree on: The White
House blew it.
“It is clear that Democrats overinterpreted our
mandate. Talk of a ‘political realignment’ and a
‘new progressive era’ proved wishful thinking,”
retiring Indiana Sen.
Evan Bayh wrote in a New
York Times op-ed posted online as
the scope of Tuesday night’s losses became
clear.
Bayh called the decision to focus on health care
in a bad economy “overreach."
“We were too deferential to our most zealous
supporters,” he wrote.
Bayh spoke for a wing of the party that had
been, before the election, reluctant to
criticize Obama’s management of the government
but on Wednesday spoke loudly.
“Fundamentally, Democrats lost the middle,” the
president of the centrist Democratic Leadership
Council, Ed Gresser, said Wednesday.
“The party's apparent lack of interest in a
long-term path away from emergency stimulus
toward fiscal balance revived a pre-Clinton
reputation for carefree attitudes toward public
money.”
And Oregon Sen.
Ron Wyden, a proponent of
bipartisanship if not always a policy centrist,
lamented the “missed opportunities in the last
two years” in bipartisan initiatives from the
White House, particularly on tax policy.
But if the center is speaking loudly, it speaks
from a narrower platform. The nature of a wave
is to shear off moderate members in swing
districts, and the House lost half of its Blue
Dog Caucus. And liberals were quick to note that
Bayh could have chosen to stay in the Senate,
rather than offering advice from the sidelines.
“Evan Bayh,
for the sake of being a patriot and for the sake
of being a Democrat, should have stayed in — he
would have protected us,” Gerry McEntee,
president of the giant public workers union
AFSCME — a key backer of Democrats this year —
told POLITICO.
McEntee said
he blamed both the White House and congressional
Republicans for failing to act more aggressively
to create jobs.
“I don’t think that there was enough effort, and
maybe there just wasn’t enough knowledge, or
maybe there wasn’t enough support in the
Congress to really. truly attack this problem of
jobs,” he said. “You can talk about the tea
party, you can talk about the coffee party, you
can talk about all kinds of things, but you’ve
got to talk about jobs.”
Others said Obama had allowed moderates to
distract from and muddle his message.
“What killed us was the conservative [Democrats]
dragging health care out too long,” said another
labor leader Wednesday.
“Democrats who decided to play ball with
corporate interests found themselves
friendless,” said a spokeswoman for MoveOn.org,
Ilyse Hogue, citing Sen. Blanche Lincoln
(D-Ark.) and other defeated moderates while
making the case for a purer, more
confrontational party. “Claiming to support
Democratic principles while quietly pandering to
corporate interests is no longer a winning
political strategy,” she said.
The criticism from within the Democratic Party
may make some of Obama's goals all the harder.
House members who walked the plank on a
cap-and-trade energy bill vote and barely
survived are all the less likely to take hard
votes now. Legislators of all stripes may be
more eager to show their distance from the White
House, and legislative leaders may be less
likely to cooperate.
Some internal critics are calling on Obama to
reach out to Republicans, but any threat of
factionalism inside his own party will most
likely push the president in the opposite
direction. Democrats' best home, many believe,
is uniting around a common enemy in
congressional Republicans, and Obama's best bet
for rallying both a restive base and skeptical
moderates is pointing to a common enemy.
In his news conference Wednesday, Obama gave few
firm clues as to which way he thinks he must
turn — to the left or toward the middle. On the
one hand, he acknowledged his "shellacking" at
the hands of voters and offered to try to work
with Republicans, but on the other, he said
finding any common ground with the GOP would be
difficult. And he defended his moves that
inspired the most voter anger — his health care
package and stimulus spending.
It’s a sign of
Obama’s weakened position coming out of Tuesday
that partisans on both ends of the party’s
ideological spectrum felt free to take potshots,
hoping they could still sway him as he tries to
settle on a course for the last two years of his
term.
Indeed, the broad Democratic defeat gave fodder
to any number of arguments. Conservative
Democrats lost — but they were tarred with
Obama’s ambitious policy agenda.
And members’ attempts to maneuver away from the
wave largely failed: Twenty of the 39 members
who voted against the health care legislation
the first time it came up in the House lost
their seats anyway Tuesday.
The breadth of Obama’s defeat left some
Democrats arguing that the White House’s real
problem wasn’t policy and ideology but strategy
and tactics.
“If you look at the stuff that we did, it was on
an issue-by-issue level popular, but we have to
do something different in the way we talk about
the challenges we face and the way we deal with
them,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York.
“We clearly need much better air cover from the
president,” he said, expressing skepticism of
“this accepted wisdom that if you get things
accomplished and explain them, you’ll win people
over.”
To the degree Democrats had a bright spot
Tuesday, it was their retention of the Senate,
and one Democratic strategist argued that Senate
campaigns kept their eyes on the ball when the
White House wandered in the campaign’s final
months.
“For a while there, they were focused on the oil
spill, the Middle East peace process,
Afghanistan, the anniversary of Katrina, the
ground zero mosque and redecorating the Oval
Office,” said the Democrat.
And White House critics across the spectrum said
the new focus would have to be almost entirely
on core economic issues.
“Stop calling it ‘stimulus’ or ‘infrastructure’
or ‘R&E,’” former Clinton aide Paul
Begala wrote Wednesday. “Call
it jobs. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.”
Neera Tanden, chief operating officer of the
Center for American Progress, said: “Yesterday's
elections were a vote of no confidence on
Democratic stewardship of the economy. The
president needs to both propose new policy
proposals that will help foster economic growth
and create new jobs and communicate every day
that that issue is his priority, so that the
American people understand that he knows their
jobs are as important as his. "
