Michael Barone
Stimulus and Health Care Have Democrats on Defensive
Like many Democrats over the past 40 years, Barack Obama has hoped that his association with unpopular liberal positions on cultural issues would be outweighed by pushing economic policies intended to benefit the ordinary person.
In his campaign in 2008 and as president in 2009 and 2010, he has hoped that those he characterized to a rich San Francisco Bay area audience as bitterly clinging to guns and God would be won over by programs to stimulate the economy and provide guaranteed health insurance.
At least so far, it hasn't worked, as witnessed by recent statements by some of the Democrats' smartest thinkers.
The 2009 stimulus package is so unpopular that Democrats have banned the word from their campaign vocabulary. "I'm not supposed to call it stimulus," Rep. Barney Frank told the "Daily Show's" Jon Stewart. "The message experts in Washington have told us that we're supposed to call it the recovery plan."
"I'm puzzled by that," Frank went on. "Most people would rather be stimulated than recover." The problem is, the economy has neither been stimulated nor has it recovered.
As for the health care bill, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who has been pondering Democrats' standing with working-class voters since his perceptive 1980s studies of Reagan Democrats in Macomb County, Mich., has pretty much thrown in the towel.
In a leaked report for Democratic insiders, Greenberg and fellow pollster Celinda Lake concede that "straightforward 'policy' defenses fail to be moving voters' opinions about the law" and "many don't believe health reform will help the economy."
"Women in particular," they add, "are concerned that (the) health law will mean less provider availability -- scarcity an issue." In other words, people have figured out that government rationing may mean less supply for a product for which there is great demand.
Greenberg and Lake recommend using personal stories to highlight the law's benefits. But "don't overpromise or 'spin' what the law delivers" and don't "say the law will reduce costs and deficit."
Do say: "The law is not perfect, but it does good things and helps many people. Now we'll work to improve it."
This amounts to an abandonment of the claims that the Obama Democrats have been making about the health care bill they jammed through five months ago. It's an admission that they messed up when they had supermajorities and will do better when they have fewer votes. It's a retreat from framing the issue as support versus oppose to revise versus repeal.
So much for the economic issues that were going to provide the underpinnings of what Greenberg's associate James Carville predicted would be 40 years of Democratic Party dominance.
As for cultural clashes, Democrats can claim to have quieted down debates over abortion and other issues that, as Obama said in his 2004 convention speech, unduly divided Blue America and Red America. But others have taken their place, to the Democrats' discomfort this legislative season. The Obama Justice Department stepped in and got an injunction against Arizona's law authorizing law enforcement to ask people stopped for other reasons about their immigration status.
Never mind that other states do this routinely without getting sued. The real problem is that about two-thirds of Americans support the Arizona law. Why couldn't the administration let it go into effect and see if it assisted the efforts they assure us they are making on border and employer enforcement?
Then there was Obama's iftar celebration comments on the mosque proposed for a site two blocks from the World Trade Center ruins -- comments that were taken as an endorsement, until the president proclaimed himself a day later as agnostic on whether it should be built there.
A large majority of Americans, according to a Fox News poll, believe the advocates have a right to place a mosque there, but even more believe they should not do so. Now we have been watching as Democrats from Harry Reid and Howard Dean on down scamper to say they agree with both these views, while Obama endorses only the first.
The Arizona law and the ground zero mosque issues are not likely to be dispositive issues in most congressional races this year. But they are additional baggage for the Obama Democrats who find themselves, as the economy languishes, on the defensive on the issues they thought would win over the bitter clingers.
Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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Robert Byrd's Life -- Good, Bad and All American
About 10,000 men and women have served in the United States Congress. Robert C. Byrd, who died Monday at age 92, served longer than all the rest - -more than 57 years, with six in the House and 51 in the Senate.
In 1917, the year he was born, the United States had 103 million people and the nation had just entered World War I. The year he died, the United States had 310 million people, with military personnel in more than 100 countries around the world.
Byrd's life and career tell us many things about our country — some good things, some bad.
Among the good things is that he was a paragon of upward mobility. Raised in a West Virginia coal camp, he was determined not to go into the mines. Like Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, he believed he was meant for better things. He studied hard and got good grades but was forced to drop out of college.
He was 24 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, already a husband and father. Byrd worked at shipyards in Baltimore and Tampa, Fla., during the war. Then he returned to West Virginia and worked as a butcher.
But then come the bad things. In Raleigh County, W.V., he organized a 150-member klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. That led the young kleagle to politics, and he was elected to the West Virginia legislature in 1946.
That episode did not prevent and may have helped his rise. In 1952, Democratic leaders wanted him to drop out of the race, but he was elected to Congress and served in the last days of Harry Truman's administration.
That gave him a reputation for independence, enhanced when he ran for the Senate in 1958 over the opposition of United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis. He won handily, and the man who worked as a butcher a dozen years before was a U.S. senator at age 41.
As a young senator, he eyed a long career. One way to achieve that goal was to bring federal dollars — a billion dollars — to West Virginia. He pledged allegiance to Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (and at his behest supported Hubert Humphrey over John Kennedy in the 1960 West Virginia presidential primary) in return for a seat on the Appropriations Committee. A good thing or a bad thing? You decide — the voters of West Virginia always thought the former.
The other way Byrd sought to secure his position was clearly bad: to oppose civil rights for black Americans. He attracted attention by attacking welfare programs in Washington, D.C., with its rapidly rising black population. He filibustered for 14 hours against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The interesting thing is that this wasn't politically compulsory in his state. His West Virginia colleague Jennings Randolph voted for the bill.
Byrd's alliance with Southern Democrats led him to seek a leadership post, and in 1971, with deathbed proxy of Georgia's Richard Russell in hand, he ousted Edward Kennedy from the whip position — No. 2 in the leadership. By 1976, when Majority Leader Mike Mansfield retired, Byrd had done enough favors for colleagues that he was elevated to lead the Senate Democrats, and did so for 12 years.
During that time, he continually worked to learn more — a good thing — about the Senate and the Constitution, the Founding Fathers and classical Rome. He delivered a series of speeches about the history of the Senate that, with the help of the Senate historian's office, were reprinted in a handsome book.
He celebrated the traditions of the Senate, including the filibuster, and insisted that the legislative branch was the co-equal of the executive. He justified pork-barrel spending as a prerogative of Congress sanctioned by the Constitution and successfully brought suit against the line-item veto passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Bill Clinton — two stands in which he had the support of his scholarly colleague Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
He relinquished the majority leadership in 1988 for the position he had set about seeking 30 years before, the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee, and was the lead Democrat there until the travails of age prevented him from carrying on.
He leaves the scene when his beloved earmarks are in disfavor with most voters and his long-ago cultivation of racism seems despicable to all. But he embodied many of the good things in America as well — determination to rise, hard work, respect for tradition. Quite an American life.
Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2010 THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
