President Obama appeared before a joint session of Congress to push his health care reforms this week. But the most memorable remark was not uttered by the president, but by a backbench congressman. Joe Wilson (R-SC) made the headlines for shouting “You Lie!” when Obama declared his proposal would not extend benefits to people in this country illegally. Barack accepted Wilson’s apology saying “We all make mistakes.” Nancy Pelosi’s House isn’t quite as forgiving and there are demands to censure Wilson.
I believe Wilson should be censured. If this becomes the norm, no president will be able to address a joint session without it turning into a shouting match. How might the GOP have reacted if someone like Maxine Waters (D-CA), a wild-eyed radical from California, started shouting when former President Bush appeared in the halls of the legislative chamber? Wilson’s offense is hardly the most serious we’ve seen in politics. But nor is the punishment. Censure is basically an empty gesture saying “We don’t like this.” It would be meant to provide some peer pressure to stop this sort of thing from happening in the future.
Of course Pelosi and her minions are hardly as pure as the driven snow and their sudden concern for civility is a matter of political convenience. This is the crowd that invited the classless Cindy Sheehan, a war protestor who allowed the death of her son to be manipulated by the anti-war crowd, to sit in the chamber when Bush was speaking. And Pelosi’s people stood by silently while Bush was regularly reviled as a Nazi and did nothing to speak up for civility. But their hypocrisy doesn’t make Wilson’s actions right. Nor does a belief that Wilson spoke the truth. If he did, there are better ways to go about it. Censure is a mild punishment that fits this mild crime.
Whatever one thinks of Wilson, Obama’s supporters must at least acknowledge this—putting the focus on the Congressman is convenient because the president just doesn’t say anything really worth talking about and he doesn’t show any real leadership on this issue. His own supporters in the Congress have been begging for him to provide real specifics. Obama’s early resistance to doing so could be understood from a political standpoint—why bog yourself in details before the negotiations even start and before public reaction has had a chance to be gauged? But this bill is now at a critical point and cards have to go on the table. Barack is either unwilling or unable to take himself beyond syrupy rhetoric. It gives rise to a belief that he just doesn’t have a lot to add to the dialogue. If that’s the case, his proposals will fail. Which is fine with me, but it seems hard to believe that he would take defeat without a real fight. Let’s see what happens the rest of the fall.
Nothing spells political trouble for health care reform in particular and the Democratic Party in general then the decline of support among elderly voters. This column from political analyst Dick Morris (who worked for Clinton and supported Bush, so he’s as close to bipartisan as one can get in a profession dominated by hyper-partisanship) spells out the details. Party ID among the elderly is now a dead heat. This has much greater consequences than any other voting demographic, and that demographic matters more in midterm elections. The 2010 elections, like any other midterm year, is going to be dominated by the voting groups who take their civic duty seriously, even without a presidential race at the top. And no vote turns out like the elderly vote does. Democrats have always been able to rely on this group—hence their use of scare tactics every time a Republican president proposes changes to Medicare or Social Security. Turn the clock back to the 1980s. Ronald Reagan started the decade by sweeping in a GOP Senate and a coalition of conservative Dems and Republicans in the House that had de facto control. But buttressed by the elderly vote, liberal Democrats retook working control of the House in ’82. And they took the Senate in the next midterm in ’86. If they lose this group, they will not only fail to pass major health care reforms this year, but they will be in serious trouble next year.
As long as we’re on the subject of politicians who insult presidents and Democrats who are headed for trouble in 2010, this column details why Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) leads the list of Senate Democrats facing rocky waters next November. One recalls former House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous adage that all politics is local. The political graveyards are indeed filled with members who rose to prominence in Washington and lost their support back home as their fortunes became locked into the fate of their national party rather than the locals. Reid, who once called President Bush a liar, has a lot of repair work to do if he is to avoid following his predecessor, Tom Daschle, into electoral defeat at home, even as he scales the heights in D.C.
Comments