Republicans made clear on Sunday that higher taxes on the wealthy were not acceptable to them. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said:
It’s a bad thing to do in the middle of an economic downturn …”
(Laughter!) No, no, Mitch-you-stitch! Definitely not in a downturn. And certainly not in an upturn. And never, ever even in a “no turn.”
All the evidence you need to dismiss self-serving Democratic “centrist” gas bags saying Massachusetts means Ds have to abandon the “left,” is this poll in Daily Kos. It shows that 45 percent of Democrat voters do not now expect that they’ll bother to vote in the November congressional elections. Forty-five percent!
Move closer to the Republicans–as Lieberman, Bayh and Baucus want to do? Oh, sure! The same poll–which documents disillusionment with congressional Ds (40% approve; 55% disapprove) also shows that they loathe congressional Rs (16% approve, 66% disapprove).
The first thing they teach you in practical politics is to remember your base. Flirt with the other side, and they’ll abandon you. Politics 101. Reagan understood. I fought him all the way, but his strength was he meant what he said and said what he meant. As Tip O’Neill used to say, politics ain’t bean bag. So stop already wooing Republican senators and congressmen. They want to destroy you and your party, Mr. President. Time to be the man and party that inspired the nation just a year ago but, incredibly, are now turning off that nation.
Pennsylvania Seventeen Hundred–what did you learn Tuesday?
Update: 1/20/09, 7:25 pm: The Mahablog says health care is probably dead, an observation with which I can’t disagree, especially since Obama has declared that Ds won’t work on health car until Republican Brown is seated and will not “jam” (jam!?) a bill through Congress. Just as importantly, the blog punctures the conservative hot air balloons who (predictably) are claim the “Left” is to blame for Massachusetts and that Ds must now move to the “center.” Excuse me? If “centrists” like Baucus and Nelson hadn’t ground the bandwagon to a stop and emasculated the bill, “doofus Democrats” would not have been the subject of the Massachusetts referendum.
- – -
When I blogged that the Democratic defeats in this year’s New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections were an omen boding ill for the Ds, most Blue Oregon.com readers ridiculed me. They pointed to a blue pick-up in a historic Republican congressional district in upstate New York.
All I’ll say about the unfolding massacre in Massachusetts is, “Can you hear me now?”
Why Obama ever thought he could stop being the candidate for change after he was elected, I’ll leave to historians. Or a two-bit shrink.
(If you believe in prayer, say one for your country tonight. Hell, say one even if you don’t …)
Take this test of current events prepared by the Pew Research Center, one of the premier survey organizations in the U.S. (Click on this link). At the end, it will tell you how your countrymen fared. I offer no comment.
