Voter Malaise -- Whose Fault Is It, Anyway?

Bob Herbert writes that "voters do not feel that the administration and Congress have delivered the fundamental change they were seeking when they swept President Obama and huge Democratic majorities into office nearly two years ago." He argues that "The Democrats are facing an election debacle because they did not respond adequately to their constituents’ most dire needs."

The Times Troll-ops buried my response again, so here it is:

While I am in fundamental agreement with you, the fact is that the Democratic leadership in the Senate was always working from a position of weakness. When they were trying to push through the stimulus bill, Norm Coleman was still holding Al Franken hostage & Arlen Specter was still a Republican. The President hit on that theme in his press conference today. As Ezra Klein pointed out the other day, the shape of the stimulus bill would have been much different if the Party of No had not been almost universally united against it. (In the end, no Republican House member & only three Republican Senators voted for it.) Not only were the Ladies from Maine busily watering down the bill, so did every Democrat with "an agenda."

So it isn't as if Barack Obama & Harry Reid could have waved magic wands & put together a package that would have saved substantially more jobs. The amazing Nancy Pelosi, who had a healthy majority in the House, did of course hold her cats together. We should all be grateful to her.

It was also Pelosi who salvaged what was left of healthcare legislation (according to published reports). And more to your point, it was she (among the leadership) who first heeded the warnings of columnists like you that the Democrats had better get on the jobs, jobs, jobs bandwagon.

Unfortunately, they're still just barely hanging onto the side of the wagon. So many Democrats are willing to sacrifice both jobs & entitlement programs in the name of cutting the deficit, while expressing a willingness to vote instead to increase it by extending tax cuts to the wealthy. Instead of cleaving to these Republican chimera, which will not win them a single vote, Democrats MUST return to the party's basic principles.

The country depends on the Democrats. That, by itself, is a frightening thing. The alternative, of course, would be a disaster.