The view from a veteran political observer
Charlie Cook, a political analyst who once worked for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said this about the Obama administration:
I…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. While Bush went, “We’re going to go after Afghanistan as a reaction to 9/11,” and then just pretty soon got distracted and obsessed with going into Iraq with varying rationalizations that sort of evolved over time.
This was a case where I think the White House people could see, look at the president, the White House and congressional Democrats as sort of checking the box on stimulus, but found that kind of boring, and moved on to health care and cap-and-trade. And the thing is, Democrats piled all this cotton candy and pork and junk and pet projects into it, so it discredited the stimulus package in the minds of a lot of voters and at the same time, it wasn’t big enough. It was totally insufficient, yet they wanted to keep it under a trillion dollars because they didn’t want to spend a lot of political capital on a really big stimulus package because they wanted to save it for cap-and-trade and health care. And so we start off with the original sin of a very imperfect and inadequate economic stimulus package and then moving off the economy almost entirely going into cap-and-trade and health care…
then when unemployment numbers started proving to be much, much tougher and it started becoming more clear that the stimulus package hadn’t worked properly, they just kept plowing ahead on health care. And this isn’t a communications problem. This is a reality problem. And I think they just made some grave miscalculations and as it became more clear that they had screwed up, they just kept doubling down their bet. And so I think, no, this is one of the biggest miscalculations that we’ve seen in modern political history.
This just in: “on a conference call with reporters this morning, White House advisers made it clearer than ever before: If the GOP filibusters health reform, Dems will move forward on their own and pass it via reconciliation.” We certainly live in interesting times. (HT: JOM)
February 23rd, 2010 at 8:29 am
It’s a little difficult to build a political philosophy about “Stickin’ it to the man” and then expecting the “man” to pay for everything?
Why does the left always look in the mirror and wonder how dumb the “man” is?
February 23rd, 2010 at 9:41 am
At this point, the Democrat leadership may be correct; it’s possible they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by passing the health-care bill through reconciliation. The sheer numbers of patronage jobs created by the bill may be enough to guarantee another 60 years of political domination by the Democrat party, and it may very well be their last chance to remain the majority party.
Then again, it’s possible the public may decide to remove the health care bureaucracy, root and branch, at the first chance. If I were in the Democrat leadership, I think I’d take that bet.
February 24th, 2010 at 3:22 am
There won’t be enough of the Democrat leadership left after the November elections to stop the de-funding of this turkey. The only issue is jobs, and these idiots want to talk about health care.