Obama plays Peter Pan for nervous Democrats
By: Chris Stirewalt
Political Editor
November 9, 2009
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| (DCAB108) |
The grown-up lawmakers in the Democratic caucus must have cringed when some of their colleagues started chanting "Fired up! Ready to go!" when President Obama came to Capitol Hill for another pep talk this weekend.
For Rep. Rick Boucher -- a Virginia Democrat who snuck into Congress in 1982 when Republicans took a pummeling because of high unemployment -- being "Fired up!" means you get fired by your constituents.
For Rep. Chet Edwards -- a Democrat who has represented a hunk of central Texas including a little ranching community called Crawford since 1991 -- "Ready to go!" means get ready to go back to Waco because voters gave you the heave-ho.
Members such as Boucher and Edwards know the difference between a political party and a suicide pact.
Passing a $1.2 trillion bill with only three votes to spare after 11 p.m. on a Saturday would always be risky for any member not from a bright-blue district. When public opinion is running the other direction, it's simply insane.
That's why Rep. Dan Boren, D-Okla., was denouncing the bill for raising taxes on small businesses and for distracting Congress from job creation -- and why other red-state Blue Dogs were putting as much distance between themselves and the plan as party decorum would allow.
All the chanting in all the ashrams wouldn't have changed their votes.
But the pep rally atmosphere and the president's upturned jaw, pregnant pauses and finger-stabbing hand gestures weren't meant for the likes of Boren or Boucher.
Obama was there to talk to the young members -- the folks elected in 2006 and 2008 who have not known political hard times.
The elections in New Jersey and Virginia last week were the first time the 73 freshmen or sophomore Democrats in the House saw their party waning rather than waxing since they got into the big time.
They came into office on a rising tide of dissatisfaction with President George W. Bush and were swept into hyper-majority status as part of the apotheosis of Obama last year.
The group includes members such as Ohio's Mary Jo Kilroy, a plaintiffs' lawyer who squeaked into a suburban Columbus district that split evenly between Bush and John Kerry in 2004 but went 54 percent for Obama in 2008.
Another of the Obama babies was Rep. Tom Perreillo, a 35 year old with a Yale law degree who spent his career working for NGOs on "transitional justice" in Kosovo, Darfur and Afghanistan. Perriello caught a Republican incumbent asleep at the switch and won by 727 votes in a largely rural district that is a quarter black and stretches up from the North Carolina border to include the leafy confines of the University of Virginia.
Their liberal positions suggest that Kilroy and Perreillo wanted very much to vote for Speaker Nancy Pelosi's bill, but seeing Democrats from nearby districts fleeing the plan must have made them nervous. A little of the old Obama stump speech and the revival-meeting chanting were enough to chill them out and keep them in the "yes" column.
Not all the newbies in the House are Obama babies, though.
The strategy that took Democrats into power in the House in 2006 relied on electing new members who often disagree with key points of the party platform.
Democratic members such as Heath Shuler of North Carolina and Michael McMahon of New York are looking to be among the Rick Bouchers and Chet Edwards of the next generation and voted against the bill.
They weren't going to be moved by any chanting. They would rather face the fury of liberal Democrats who will now work to unseat them in primaries than get cashiered by independent voters who really seem to hate this legislation.
The Ipsos-McClatchy poll taken at the end of October showed a 15-point drop in support for the plan among independents over the course of last month. That helped drive down overall support for the health bill to 42 percent versus 52 percent against.
But the president and his increasingly nervous party chairman, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, are making what you might call the Peter Pan plea.
Fans of J.M. Barrie's play will recall that when Tinkerbell is fading, Peter asks the audience to clap if they believe in fairies -- that their belief will make Tinkerbell live.
The message to nervous Democrats is that if they believe Obama's election was a transformational moment for American politics and not just a perfect political storm, then their belief will make it true.
But polls and tea party rallies show that voters aren't in a mood for fairy tales. And that means there will be hell to pay in 2010 for many clapping, chanting members of Congress.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at cstirewalt@dcexaminer.com
