Democrats pick the wrong time for partisanship
By: Chris Stirewalt
Political Editor
November 23, 2009
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| (AP file photo) |
A dangerous mythology has gripped the Democratic Party.
It holds that the reason Democrats took a shellacking in the midterm elections of 1994 was that their members failed to pass Bill Clinton's health care overhaul.
The logic goes that if Congress had gone along with Clinton's $331 billion plan (who would have guessed it would end up seeming like a bargain?), Democrats wouldn't have lost 54 seats in the House. The Republicans could have won as many as 41 seats that year and remained in the minority, where they had been mired for 40 years.
Democrats have developed an alternate history for the past 15 years -- one in which New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Moynihan did not call the funding mechanism for the bill "a fantasy" and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell did not opt to scuttle the plan rather than risk a humiliating defeat.
This alternate reality helps liberals forget that Clinton accomplished more than any Republican president to reform entitlements and balance the budget, two enduring goals of the conservative movement.
Never mind that Clinton's presidency was an id-driven voyage to the center of himself. In the revisionist history, it was the Senate Democrats' fault that not a single memorable liberal initiative grew out of the Clinton presidency. Once his serve was broken on health care, Republicans were emboldened and liberals were dispirited.
That's the message Clinton has been sending all year, and it was the purpose of a pep talk for Senate Democrats earlier this month: Don't be a party pooper like Moynihan or Mitchell. Get hip like Harry Reid and do what President Obama wants.
Clinton and Obama are tacitly telling the Senate that a dishonest, jerry-built piece of legislation can be fixed anytime, but that political momentum takes years, and maybe decades, to regain. The important thing is to just win, baby.
Yet for all the talk about 1994, Democrats seem to forget the national atmosphere at the time. They certainly don't seem to notice the similarities to the current climate.
It was not Republicanism that was on the rise in 1994. It was an anti-incumbent, anti-Washington attitude.
This was the decade of Ross Perot and Jesse Ventura, of term limits and third parties.
There's every reason to think that the narrow victory by George W. Bush in 2000 would have been another step in the continuing disintegration of the political status quo we saw starting in 1992.
But the national consciousness was reset by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Americans rallied to their president after the attacks and the next three elections were referenda on the conduct of the war -- first in the favor of the GOP and then decidedly against it.
In 2008, Obama and his party won on the grounds of lingering dissatisfaction with the way President Bush waged the war, but mostly because of an economic panic that occurred on the Republican's watch.
Obama's actions show he believes the war against radical Islam is over. We are treating terrorists as criminals and Afghanistan as a peacekeeping and nation-building exercise.
Americans may worry about Obama's resolve in foreign affairs, but barring another attack, they will continue to be consumed by fiscal matters.
In this era of domestic focus, Obama has made the same mistake as Clinton did in his first term, the last time Americans were so fed up with Washington and angry at incumbents: He's introduced a flatly partisan, big-government health care plan.
With each day, worries grow over a stagnant economy, a spiraling deficit and a government that does many things but few of them well.
Obama's health plan offends on all of those fronts.
Americans know the plan will be an administrative nightmare that is far more expensive than advertised.
At a time when people are looking for thrift, humility and accountability in Washington, Obama and the Democrats propose a partisan plan that would leave Americans more frustrated with an unresponsive, unaffordable government.
In a recent AP poll, 61 percent of Americans advised Democrats to keep working on the legislation for as long as it took to get a bipartisan plan.
Obama evidently believes that Democrats should ditch bipartisanship, ignore public opinion and try to retain control by impressing voters by their willingness to use power.
Lawrence O'Donnell, a former aide to Moynihan who now squawks on MSNBC, told author Sally Bedell Smith that Clinton found his greatest success as "the editor of the Gingrich revolution."
If Democrats ignore public concerns on health care, they could end up with a reprise of 1994 in 2010 -- and Obama might find himself editing Republicans instead of writing his own grand narrative.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at cstirewalt@dcexaminer.com.
