When President Obama was first elected in 2008, I had a great conservative fear that, by reaching out to the opposition, the new young president might realize the wild hope of John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira in “The Emerging Democratic Majority.”
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The idea in “Majority” was that Democrats would own the future with women, minorities, young people and educated people.
I hated the idea because it was based on tempting the new majority with big government handouts, but I knew that it had a good chance of working out politically for the Dems in the medium term even if big government was bound to fail in the long term.
I was relieved when, right out of the box, Obama decided to govern against the Republicans rather than by co-opting them. I had faith that his divisive strategy would end in tears for the Dems. It violated a fundamental rule of society, that the tribal leader needs to work every day to unify his tribe and soften arguments and feuds.
The wise leader creates an atmosphere of unity. That’s why Democratic saint Pat Moynihan said that, to pass a big program like Social Security or civil rights, you needed a 70-30 bipartisan vote in the US Senate. Here is David Frum’s version:
In 1993, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned President Clinton against trying to ram his healthcare proposals through Congress on a party-line vote. “Anything that big and important,” Moynihan predicted, “will pass the Senate 70-30–or not at all.”
Notice what is left unsaid. Moynihan assumes that the president already has the country behind him, and that the need is to buy off a few more votes from the other party. Yet Obama and Reid and Pelosi decided to push Obamacare through without 70-30 in the Senate, without a single Republican vote in the House, and without majority support from the American people.
Now we learn that the president plans to bull ahead with his agenda as far as his personal and institutional power can take him.
“We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” Obama said Tuesday as he convened his first Cabinet meeting of the year.
This is madness, and the truly terrifying thing is that nobody in his party has told him to stop it.
The reason we have laws – and a legislature, and separation of powers, and limited government — has nothing to do with getting people the “help they need.” The lesson of history is that the man who governs with a pen and a phone drives everyone except his immediate supporters into the arms of the opposition.
And that goes double when the president has visited misery on his party’s “emerging majority”: women with the Obamacare meltdown, minorities with a dreadful economy, the young with everything: Obamacare, economy, and student loans.
If the great Democratic minds had bought off a few small Republican minds and produced a more privatized Obamacare, a more free-market economic policy, a reform of higher education, then they might now be sitting in an emerging cat-bird seat.
But they didn’t compromise; they knew better. And now they have earned their second mid-term meltdown in a row.