March 14: Democrats Really Were in Disarray Over Spending Bill
Having spent much of the week watching the runup to a crucial Senate vote on appropriations, I had to express at New York some serious misgivings about Chuck Schumer’s strategy and what it did to his party’s messaging:
For the record, I’m usually disinclined to promote the hoary “Democrats in Disarray” narrative whereby the Democratic Party is to blame for whatever nightmarish actions Republicans generally, or Donald Trump specifically, choose to pursue. That’s particularly true right now when Democrats have so little actual power and Republicans have so little interest in following laws and the Constitution, much less precedents for fair play and bipartisanship. So it really makes no sense to accuse the powerless minority party of “allowing” the assault on the federal government and the separation of powers being undertaken by the president, his OMB director Russ Vought, and his tech-bro sidekick Elon Musk. If congressional Republicans had even a shred of integrity or courage, Senate Democrats would not have been placed in the position this week of deciding whether it’s better to let the government shut down than to let it be gutted by Trump, Vought, and Musk.
Having said all that, Senate Democrats did have a strategic choice to make this week, and based on Chuck Schumer’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining his decision to get out of the way and let the House-passed spending bill come to the floor, he made it some time ago. Nothing in his series of rationalizations was new. If, indeed, “a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda,” while enabling the administration to exert even more unbridled power over federal programs and personnel, that was true a week ago or a month ago as well. So Schumer’s big mistake was leading Senate Democrats right up to the brink of a collision with the administration and the GOP, and then surrendering after drawing enormous attention to his party’s fecklessness.
This doesn’t just look bad and feel bad for Democrats demanding that their leaders do something to stop the Trump locomotive: It also gives the supreme bully in the White House incentive to keep bullying them, as Josh Marshall points out in his postmortem on the debacle:
“[P]eople who get hit and abused and take it tend to get hit and abused again and again. That’s all the more true with Donald Trump, a man who can only see the world through the prism of the dominating and the dominated. It is a great folly to imagine that such an abject acquiescence won’t drive him to up the ante.”
The reality is that this spending measure was the only leverage point congressional Democrats had this year (unless Republicans are stupid enough not to wrap the debt-limit increase the government must soon have in a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered). Everyone has known that since the new administration and the new Congress took office in January. If a government shutdown was intolerable, then Democrats should have taken it off the table long before the House voted on a CR. Punchbowl News got it right:
“Let’s be blunt here: Democrats picked a fight they couldn’t win and caved without getting anything in return. …
“Here’s the lesson from this episode: When you have no cards, fold them early.”
Instead, Democrats have taken a defeat and turned it into a debacle. House and Senate Democrats are divided from each other, and a majority of Senate Democrats are all but shaking their fists at their own leader, who did in fact lead them down a blind alley. While perhaps the federal courts will rein in the reign of terror presently underway in Washington (or perhaps they won’t), congressional Democrats must now become resigned to laying the groundwork for a midterm election that seems a long time away and hoping something is left of the edifice of a beneficent federal government built by their predecessors from the New Deal to the Great Society to Obamacare. There’s a good chance a decisive majority of the general public will eventually recoil from the misrule of the Trump administration and its supine allies in Congress and across the country. But at this point, elected Democrats are going to have to prove they should be trusted to lead the opposition.
Most of the Democratics running for President are calling for the repeal of the “Bush Tax Cut for the rich”. Has everyone forgotten that in 1963 President Kennedy gave a 20% tax cut to the 1% richest Americans? Makes the 3.5% Bush cut seem like small change to me. Besides, in 1963, the richest 1% were only paying 10% of total income taxes and today they are paying 37% of total income taxes. Looks like hipocracy to me!!
Thanks for posting Bush’s approval rating in this poll. It’s not on http://www.pollingreport.com
BTW, Dean trails Bush 51-46, which corresponds exactly with the likely/unlikely numbers. It’s also encouraging to read how Bush isn’t doing so well with independents. That’s a trend that was very pronounced before Saddam’s capture.
Chris Matthews was going on this weekend about popular and unbeatable Bush is. What a clueless fuck.
About the failure to publicize the poll results, democrats.com has encouraged people to send a graph to CNN of the trends in their own poll. This I have done (though I looked up CNN’s procedure for this first; it’s at http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form12.html?1).
I suspect that much of the media bias against Democrats is structural more than it is intended. I have noticed, especially on television, that “journalists” waste almost all of their coverage on the “meta-campaign”. In other words, they talk about the campaign, rather than about the statecraft for which the campaign exists.
A perfect example was the clownish performance of Ted Koppel at the Democratic debate a few weeks back. Koppel asked, for instance, questions about how much money the candidates’ campaigns had, how well or badly they were doing in the polls, etc. More recently, C-SPAN had coverage of a local Iowa political chat show, and the commentators were discussing the same sort of campaign nuts and bolts, with nothing about the actual conduct of government. This is appalling. It is infantile for the primary sources of public information to neglect the topic of statecraft so completely. You could make a “Davey and Goliath” episode out of this: “Davey misses the point of delivering news, but learns from his mistake.”
So how does this work against Democrats? Pretty simply, actually. Watching the way things are going now that the Republicans are mostly in charge, it is evident that Republicans, as a whole, are about as capable of running the country as second and third graders; if you included Lisa Simpson, then the grade schoolers would be vastly superior. If one party is more statesmanly than the other, and the information sources are unable or unwilling to discuss statecraft, then the more idiotic party is going to get better coverage.
It does my heart good to see polls indicating that Bush is not where he wants to be. But I think we make a grave error by gleefully proclaiming them as having much importance, especially at this point in time. If we sit back waiting for Bush to self-destruct, we lose again.
It’s time to start planning on how we can WIN the election. If we wait for Bush to lose it, we’ll be sorely disappointed yet again.
Greg,
Good point, and I have to ride my Dean hobby horse here: Democrats will not win by proclaiming to the world that Bush’s war is a huge success that’s made Americans much, much safer. This is just folly, especially when polls show that between 60 and 78 percent of Americans already believe that Saddam’s capture didn’t make us safer. Dean’s comment was controversial only within the deeply conservative confines of the mainstream commentariat.
Steve,
Yes, I too am frustrated by the relative lack of media coverage of polls that show bad news for Bush. In fact, I am in even more despair lately over the state of the media in our country. I thought perhaps that Gore’s mauling had to do mostly with personality issues — the Beltway Heathers just didn’t like him. But now, we begin to see how the press gangs up on all the Democrats (have you seen the AP coverage of the Sunday debate? covered extensively here in the blogosphere — kos, atrios, calpundit). Just depressing. I continue to write letters to the editor just to make sure somebody gets the message that Democrats are watching.
One of the more interesting aspects of this just released poll is how little publicity it received over the weekend. Any uptick in the Bush numbers is typically headlined in USA Today and the networks while this poll barely received a mention.
One of the more interesting aspects of this just released poll is how little publicity it received over the weekend. Any uptick in the Bush numbers is typically headlined in USA Today and the networks while this poll barely received a mention.
This bears out what I’d always assumed about Saddam’s capture – it would be politically insignificant. What we’re fighting in Iraq is much more complex than just “Baathist holdouts,” and involves Islamists and nationalists as well.
Exposing the deceptions in the case for war has to be part of the Democrats approach, of course, but the bottom line question is, after investing significant blood and vast treasure — has the Iraq War make Americans safer from terrorism? I think we Democrats have a very good shot at convincing people in the center of the political spectrum that the answer is a resounding “no.”
Greg Priddy