As Democrats go charging into a hostile electoral landscape, one thing they count in their favor is the foreknowledge of the resistance they face.
But foreknowledge does not ensure wise choices, especially if you only have a partial picture of the terrain.
Remember, Gen. Custer knew there were Indians in the valley. He just didn’t know how many.
The strategic consensus on the Left holds that while voters may be more hostile to the party and Washington in general than when Democrats lost 54 seats in the House in 1994, incumbents have been given the gift of early detection.
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who was doing surveys for Bill Clinton in 1994, has been trying to give heart to Democrats who worry about another Republican Revolution.
Writing in the New Republic, Greenberg points out that while Obama has suffered badly in his approval ratings and voter anger at Congress is at an all time high, 1994 was worse because the climate didn’t start to turn nasty until the summer.
Early in that year, Clinton was still above water in his approval ratings and had gotten Congress to pass a great deal of legislation.
But spring brought Whitewater subpoenas and Paula Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit. Summer saw the Democratic revolt on the president’s assault weapons ban before eventually passing the plan. And fall brought the final defeat of the first couple’s health care proposal after months of falling polls on the plan.
Now, Greenberg says, Democrats can see it all coming. With the humiliation of losing the Kennedy family’s Senate seat still stinging their cheeks, Democrats have months to adjust and prepare a counterattack against Republicans.
“Democrats have already lived through their legislative nightmare. We have already had the benefit of Massachusetts to concentrate the mind,” he wrote.
The argument from Geenberg and many others is that after spending a year convincing Americans that Democrats can’t govern, the time has come for the party to tighten up its ranks and start moving boldly forward.
If only it were so easy.
The first item on every to-do list is the passage of a health care bill.
Many pollsters struggle to comprehend why politicians won’t do rational things.
Voters may hate the health plan, but all the Democratic members of the Senate and all but 38 members of the party in the House have already voted for a version of it.
If you are going to take a beating for something, why not at least get the benefit of rallying your base by actually passing the plan?
Even so, House Democrats may still rebel and fail to deliver the president’s coveted victory. At best, they will take many more quarrelsome weeks to give him a win that voters think is a loss.
Obama’s original health strategy was meant to be a rejection of Hillary Clinton’s approach of issuing policy by diktat. Obama’s disdain for the Clintons led to an overcorrection and a failed first year in office.
Now, in order to avoid Bill Clinton’s political mistakes of 1994, Obama is promising to force Democrats to pass his plan instead of Clinton’s eventual acceptance of defeat.
The president believes that the party’s universal health care plan of 16 years ago lost favor with voters because of the sales pitch or the diminishing popularity of Bill Clinton.
As the president is said to have told retiring Rep. Marion Berry of Arkansas and a group of restive congressmen unhappy with the idea of being cannon fodder in the health care war: “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.”
Obama’s ego continues to blind him to political reality.
Voter disdain for Obamacare isn’t a symptom of other problems, but is rather a cause of the president’s prolonged political ailment. Voters don’t like the plan and particularly don’t like having it shoved down their throats.
The plan reinforces the idea that Democrats are big-government junkies and that Obama is an imperious professor who wants to tell Americans what’s good for them.
At any point in the past year, Obama could have agreed to a more modest health plan, won bipartisan support and begun to govern in earnest. But instead, he refuses to budge until he gets his way.
Because of this hubris, Democrats aren’t benefiting from the early warning of electoral catastrophe.
They just get more time to dread Election Day.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
