Our president's analysis of why he received a shellacking at the midterms put the blame squarely on us: He may have failed to communicate how wonderful his programs were, but we were too thick-witted to understand that he was leading us to nirvana. Now the Congressional Democrats are offering their own analyses:
Pelosi will lead Democrats "in pulling on the president's shirttails to make sure that he doesn't move from center-right to far-right," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., a co-chair of the liberal Progressive Caucus in the House. "We think if he'd done less compromising in the last two years, there's a good chance we'd have had a jobs bill that would have created real jobs, and then we wouldn't even be worrying about having lost elections."
You read that right: Mr. Obama is now center-right, and the progs are afraid he'll move farther right in order to suck up to the Republicans! Yes, if only he'd have insisted on $2 trillion in stimulus (as I recall, he was compromising not with Republicans but with Democrats). If only he'd pushed for single-payer healthcare. If only, if only ... ay me, what might have been! Now, now the unruly peasants would be docile and content, basking in the glorious summer of this son of Ann! Oh, if only!
Everyone here remembers Mr. Obama telling Republican lawmakers, "I won." And shutting them out from any input to the healthcare fiasco. Yes, it was all that compromise with the Republicans that led the president's party to this sad state.
Rep. Brian Higgins, D-N.Y., said Democrats learned from the last two years and their shellacking at the polls that "we need to be more aggressive with the White House. They were looking for what was acceptable and then moving toward that, instead of what was important, and moving toward that," Higgins said. "We need to be true to our principles."
For the likes of Rep. Higgins, politics is not the art of the possible but the purity of the ideology. And yet the press never tires of telling us that the Tea Partiers insisted on ideological purity in selecting candidates this year.
Henry Percy is the nom de guerre for a technical writer living in Arizona. He may be reached at saler.50d[at sign]gmail.com.
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