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.
Ed: A lot of what’s seen in these polls just confirms their limited use at this early point, especially when the nomination hinges on something as weird as the Iowa caucuses.
The nuance that Tiparillo talks about emphasizes an oft-repeated point that seems hackneyed but also makes sense: Obama’s voters, recuited by Oprah or not, are not good bets for caucusing in Iowa, and they will likely only turn out in NH if Obama has momentum coming in. Basically Obama has the Bill Bradley voting base, and I haven’t seen much from the Obama campaign that indicates they’ll be much better than the Bradley campaign at targeting them and bringing them out to vote.
Unlike Bradley, however, Obama isn’t so naturally strong in NH that he can use it as a firewall against losing Iowa. If Obama loses Iowa, he has enough money to stay on TV until March, but it would be an ultimately vain Bradley-esque denoument.
These polls say Edwards is doing better in SC. At this stage in the campaign, this can only reflect Edwards’s recent TV buy there. Polls really echo TV buys pretty well (see the inflated Richardson numbers in IA and NH). It’s more likely that Edwards has always had a fairly entrenched but small base there, that his TV buys haven’t moved him much, and that he is buying TV in SC to maintain what he has in case he wins IA and loses NH. Maybe he bought the TV to make people think he’s confident in his internal Iowa numbers. The same dissonance with polls is possible in Nevada, which is a caucus: Even if the only people who show up are HERE members, polls will inevitably reflect a much wider universe. (Maybe most importantly, no one knows who the Nevada caucusgoers are for sure, but there probably won’t be many of them, and it may not matter who wins.) In any case, the poll only tells a small part of the story.
Even if everyone realizes the CW is overreliant on polls, they are such attractive reference points that it’s impossible to put them in realistic perspective.
Iowa has always been decided by field organization and this time will be no different. Obama has always looked like a third-place candidate in Iowa because he just doesn’t have enough precincts and his turnout strategy is oddly Howard Dean-like. Thus he has an outsized place in the narrative of this campaign.
The most crucial narrative is the Edwards vs. Hillary battle on the ground in Iowa. Hillary has the decided edge here.
Once Iowa is over, the campaign finally takes shape in time for open primaries, and polls start meaning a lot more.
Tiparillo:
I was surprised, too, though it may be a good reminder that despite Edwards’ faithful channelling of netroots rhetoric, his actual base of support is among rank-and-file union folk and/or older Democrats who aren’t likely to be that attracted to Obama. From that perspective, it’s also not surprising that Obama supporters who perceive HRC as the ultimate blast from the past would prefer Edwards in a one-to-one with Hillary.
Ed Kilgore
Wow – I have a hard time believing that the Edwards voters will break that dramtically for Clinton.
My impression from a limited sample is that Edwards voters – much like the cnadidate – are not fans of Clinton at all.
But this poll is about New Hampshire in particular so…..