Dems find common ground: It's the White House's fault
Ben Smith
November 3, 2010 06:21 PM EDT

The bodies aren’t even cold yet in the House, but the Democratic Party has already opened up a bitter debate over who’s to blame.

The party’s bloodied moderates Wednesday released two years of pent-up anger at a party leadership they viewed as blind to their needs and deaf to the messages of voters who never asked for President Barack Obama’s ambitious first-term agenda.

Liberals pushed back hard: The problem, they say, was those undisciplined moderates, who won delays, unsightly compromises and a muddled message from a too-accommodating administration.

Yet a third group of Democratic politicians and operatives blamed not policy but a failed sales job for the party’s woes.

One thing all sides agree on: The White House blew it.

“It is clear that Democrats over-interpreted our mandate. Talk of a ‘political realignment’ and a ‘new progressive era’ proved wishful thinking,” the retiring Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh wrote in a New York Times op-ed posted online as the scope of last night’s losses became clear.

Bayh called the decision to focus on health care in a bad economy “overreach."

“We were too deferential to our most zealous supporters,” he wrote.

Bayh spoke for a wing of the party that had been, before the election, reluctant to criticize Obama’s management of the government, but which on Wednesday spoke loudly.

“Fundamentally, Democrats lost the middle,” the president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Ed Gresser, said Wednesday.

“The party's apparent lack of interest in a long-term path away from emergency stimulus toward fiscal balance revived a pre-Clinton reputation for carefree attitudes toward public money.”

And Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a proponent of bipartisanship if not always a policy centrist, lamented “missed opportunities in the last two years” in terms of bipartisan initiatives from the White House, particularly on tax policy.

But if the center is speaking loudly, it speaks from a narrower platform. The nature of a wave is to shear off moderate members in swing districts, and the House lost half of its Blue Dog Caucus. And liberals were quick to note that Bayh could have chosen to stay in the Senate, rather than offering advice from the sidelines.

“Evan Bayh for the sake of being a patriot and for the sake of being a Democrat should have stayed in – he would have protected us,” Gerry McEntee, the president of the giant public workers union AFSCME – a key backer of Democrats this year – told POLITICO.

McEntee said he blamed both the White House and congressional Republicans for failing to act more aggressively to create jobs.

“I don’t think that there was enough effort – and may be there just wasn’t enough knowledge, or maybe there wasn’t enough support in the Congress to really truly attack this problem of jobs,” he said. “You can talk about the tea party, you can talk about the coffee party, you can talk about all kinds of things, but you’ve got to talk about jobs.”

Others said Obama had allowed moderates to distract and muddle his message.

“What killed us was the conservative [Democrats] dragging health care out too long,” said another labor leader Wednesday.

“Democrats who decided to play ball with corporate interests found themselves friendless,” said a spokeswoman for MoveOn.org, Ilyse Hogue, citing Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and other defeated moderates while making the case for a purer, more confrontational party. “Claiming to support Democratic principles while quietly pandering to corporate interests is no longer a winning political strategy,” she said.

The criticism from within the Democratic Party may make some of Obama's goals all the harder. House members who walked the plank on a "cap and trade" energy bill vote and barely survived are all the less likely to take hard votes now. Legislators of all stripes may be more eager to show their distance from the White House, and legislative leaders less likely to cooperate.

Some internal critics are calling on Obama to reach out to Republicans, but any threat of factionalism inside his own party will likely push the president in the opposite direction. Democrats' best home, many believe, is uniting around a common enemy in congressional Republicans, and Obama's best bet for rallying both a restive base and skeptical moderates is pointing to a common enemy.

In his news conference Wednesday, Obama gave few firm clues as to which way he thinks he must turn – to the left or toward the middle. On the one hand, he acknowledged his "shellacking" at the hands of voters and offered to try to work with Republicans, but on the other, he said finding any common ground with the GOP would be difficult. And he defended his moves that inspired the most voter anger, his health care package and stimulus spending.

It’s a sign of Obama’s weakened position coming out of Tuesday that partisans on both ends of the party’s ideological spectrum felt free to take potshots – hoping they could still sway him as he tries to settle on a course for the last two years of his term.

Indeed, the broad Democratic defeat gave fodder to any number of arguments. Conservative Democrats lost – but they were tarred with Obama’s ambitious policy agenda.

And members’ attempts to maneuver away from the wave largely failed: Twenty of the 39 members who voted against the health care legislation the first time it came up in the House lost their seats anyway Tuesday.

The breadth of Obama’s defeat left some Democrats arguing that the White House’s real problem wasn’t policy and ideology but strategy and tactics.

“If you look at the stuff that we did, it was on an issue-by-issue level popular – but we have to do something different in the way we talk about the challenges we face and the way we deal with them,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York.

“We clearly need much better air cover from the president,” he said, expressing skepticism of “this accepted wisdom that if you get things accomplished and explain them, you’ll win people over.”

To the degree Democrats had a bright spot Tuesday, it was their retention of the Senate, and one Democratic strategist argued that Senate campaigns kept their eyes on the ball when the White House wandered in the campaign’s final months.

“For a while there, they were focused on the oil spill, the Middle East peace process, Afghanistan, the anniversary of Katrina, the Ground Zero mosque, and redecorating the Oval Office,” said the Democrat.

And White House critics across the spectrum said the new focus would have to be almost entirely on core economic issues.

“Stop calling it ‘stimulus’ or ‘infrastructure’ or ‘R&E,’” former Clinton aide Paul Begala wrote Wednesday. “Call it jobs. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.”

Neera Tanden, chief operating officer of the Center for American Progress, said: “Yesterday's elections were a vote of no confidence on Democratic stewardship of the economy. The President needs to both propose new policy proposals that will help foster economic growth and create new jobs and communicate every day that that issue is his priority. So that the American people understand that he knows their jobs are as important as his. "