DID THE DEMOCRATS LEARN ANYTHING from the midterm elections? It
didn’t take long for the party’s congressional wing, at least, to
reveal that the answer is “no.” House Democrats didn’t just retain
ousted Speaker Nancy Pelosi as minority leader rather than turn to
the more centrist Steny Hoyer. In the lame-duck session, the
defeated Democrats also went on a political kamikaze mission with
high-profile liberal votes on economic, social, and foreign policy
issues.
To be sure, the lame-duck Democrats weren’t as ambitious as many
conservatives had feared during the summer months. There were no
votes on a comprehensive immigration amnesty, card check for union
organizing, or cap and trade. But there were miniature versions of
some of this legislation: the House passed the limited DREAM Act
amnesty only to watch it stall in the Senate. Congress repealed the
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” compromise on gays in the military that
sucked up so much political oxygen in the early Clinton
administration. The Senate ratified the New START treaty over
conservative objections.
But the most reckless position the Democratic majority took on
the way out the door concerned taxes. It was very clear that many
Democrats, particularly in the House, were willing to let taxes go
up across the board, hitting the middle class while the economy
teetered on the verge of a double-dip recession, rather than extend
the Bush tax cuts for upper-income earners. Only President Barack
Obama, no centrist he, prevented his congressional colleagues from
engaging in this dangerous game of chicken. Liberals made it clear
they were not grateful for this particular favor.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) fumed to reporters, “I’ve had a
good business career and I don’t give a damn about tax cuts.” House
Democrats were in an even more profane mood. “F—k the president,”
an unidentified Democratic lawmaker was quoted as saying during a
closed-door caucus meeting. Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) told
fellow Democrats “we can’t trust [Obama] not to cave” to the
Republicans on taxes. Only as the polling data became clear — the
public favored the president’s tax deal with the Republicans — did
House Democrats less than overwhelmingly approve a tax hike
prevention measure.
If you think the Democrats are going to get better in the
minority, think again. The Democrats from safe liberal districts
survived the election. It was mostly the centrists, who made
passage of the health care bill and cap and trade as painful as
possible, who lost their seats in the “shellacking.” The Blue Dog
Coalition — which wasn’t terribly effective at moderating the
Pelosi machine at full strength — was basically cut in half. Only
25 of its 54 members won reelection. Two of the group’s leaders,
Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota and Rep. Baron Hill
of Indiana, were unseated by Republican challengers.
“That’s why Pelosi was able to hang on to the top leadership
spot,” says a Capitol Hill staffer. “Steny Hoyer’s base got crushed
in the election.” Blue Dogs will only represent about 13 percent of
the new House Democratic conference. The Congressional Progressive
Caucus, which thought the final health care bill was too
conservative, holds nearly 80 seats. Nearly all of its members will
be overwhelming favorites for reelection in 2012, no matter what
the political conditions are.
Progressive Caucus co-chair Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) believes the
Democrats lost their House majority because “we weren’t bold
enough.” (She said this in an interview with Radio Pacifica, of
course.) The Nation’s Ari Berman — who had written a
pre-election New York Times op-ed titled “Boot the Blue
Dogs” — quoted former Democratic National Committee chairman
Howard Dean as saying of the Democratic majority, “If you don’t use
it, you lose it.”
In other words, most of the remaining Democrats in the House and
many of their allies in the broader progressive movement believe
they are in the minority because the stimulus was too small, the
health care bill too tolerant of private enterprise, and the
president wanted to keep taxes too low. And while it is implausible
that the country as a whole would be receptive to that message, it
is certainly what many of the surviving Democrats are hearing back
home in their liberal districts.
THE PICTURE IN THE SENATE is somewhat different. Because of the
six-year terms, a number of relative moderates — many of them
elected in red states during the 2006 elections — remain in the
Democratic caucus. They will not be rewarded by their constituents
for compiling the most liberal voting records imaginable. In fact,
many of these Democrats have to fear they have already done enough
damage to their reelection prospects by voting with their party
over the last two years.
Yet liberals are not in the mood to let these Democratic
senators do what it takes to win re-election. Politico
reported on the rebellion on the left against Sen. Jon Tester
(D-MT), a darling of the netroots during the 2006 campaign, for his
vote against the DREAM Act. “Not only will I do absolutely nothing
to help his reelection bid, but I will take every opportunity I get
to remind people that he is so morally bankrupt that he’ll try to
score political points off the backs of innocent kids who want to
go to college or serve their country in the military,” wrote Daily
Kos founder Markos Moulitsas.
Moulitsas continued: “To me he is the Blanche Lincoln of 2012 —
the Democrat I will most be happy to see go down in defeat. And he
will. Nothing guarantees a Republican victory more than trying to
pretend to be one of them.” Remember that Tester, a near-perfect
candidate running against a deeply flawed Republican incumbent in a
landslide year for the Democrats, won his first term by just 3,500
votes. David Frum, a critic of purism among conservatives,
acknowledges that it is sometimes “rational to prefer to lose a
campaign — even a congressional majority — to score a big and
enduring gain,” citing health care as an example. “But the DREAM
Act?”
Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) is in a situation similar to Tester.
Beloved by liberal bloggers in 2006 because he was a combative Iraq
war opponent who could win in a red state, progressives tolerated
his deviationism on the Second Amendment (he’s for it) and other
issues. Webb still barely won and likely would have lost were it
not for the effect of the Washington Post’s daily “Macaca”
headlines in Northern Virginia. He nevertheless proceeded to vote
with the Democrats on nearly all their biggest policy initiatives
of the last four years. Facing reelection in a state that has swung
back to the right, Webb is starting to sound once again like the
Republican he used to be.
Webb told the Real Clear Politics website that he always knew
the health care bill he voted for would be a “disaster” for
Democrats, something he now says he warned Obama about. He has
started criticizing the White House from the right for its
treatment of detained terrorism suspects. Webb penned a Wall
Street Journal op-ed arguing that affirmative action programs
discriminate against working-class whites and should be confined to
the descendants of slaves.
Webb’s voting record has yet to catch up with his evolving
rhetoric (Tester’s conservative votes remain few and far between as
well). But even this has been enough to garner some liberal
criticism. The head of the Virginia NAACP sent Webb a letter asking
the senator if he was “pandering to the divisive, conservative, Tea
Bagger types.” Former governor Douglas Wilder also blasted Webb.
“If it’s not for the civil rights movement and diversity programs,
he would not be a United States senator today,” Wilder told the
Associated Press. “Things are tough enough without having people
you thought were friends do things like this.” [On
February 9, weeks after this issue had gone to press,
Webb
announced he won’t run for
reelection.—Ed.]
A certain degree of moonbattery can be tolerated in the House,
where Democrats have a smaller minority than they did after the
1994 elections. Republicans have the votes to overcome a Democratic
conference dominated by the Progressive Caucus. But in the Senate,
Democrats still have a majority. Republicans will need Democratic
defections to pass legislation and advance health care repeal for
the next two years. A lot will depend on whether embattled
Democratic incumbents fear swing voters in their home states more
than they do liberals in their own party.
From the Club for Growth to the Tea Party, conservatives have
enjoyed increasing success mounting primary challenges within the
GOP. Last year, conservatives were even willing to risk losing the
general election to defeat moderate to liberal primary candidates
anointed by the party establishment. Angry progressives have not
been as successful. Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Michael Bennet
(D-CO) and Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) all survived liberal primary
challenges. The biggest scalp on the netroots’ wall belongs to Sen.
Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who bounced back from his 2006
primary loss to defeat Ned Lamont that November.
Democrats like Lincoln ended up losing to more conservative
Republicans rather than insurgent progressives. Rep. Gene Taylor
(D-MS), easily the most conservative Democrat in Congress, lost his
House seat based simply on his vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker.
That’s why Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC), one of the Blue Dogs who held
on last year, made a show of running against Pelosi for minority
leader. So swing-state Democrats may decide to buck the liberal
tide. No less a liberal than Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) flip-flopped
and ultimately voted for an extension of the tax cuts.
THE LIBERAL TEMPER TANTRUM could end up helping one Democrat:
President Obama. In his presentation of the tax deal with
Republicans, Obama demonstrated his visceral distaste for
triangulation. The Obama who once mocked Bill Clinton’s school
uniforms proposal had to trot out Clinton to make public case for
the deal, since he was personally unable to do so without rebuking
the Republicans. But House Democrats tried to push so far to the
left on the issue that Obama couldn’t help but be to their
right.
Then again, liberal dyspepsia could also complicate
triangulation by denying Obama any meaningful Democratic support
for future deal-cutting with Republicans. Obama-backed policies
that become law only through the votes of Republicans and Blue Dogs
will deflate his liberal base ahead of the 2012 presidential
campaign. The reason Clinton could afford to triangulate was that
liberals felt they couldn’t do any better after three straight
election losses to Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Today’s liberals
are in a much different mood.
If liberals keep pushing Democrats to the left of Obama, people
will no longer ask if the party has learned anything from electoral
defeat. Instead they will have to ask another question: Do the
Democrats have a death wish?
