What thrills the Left will scare away the center
By: Chris Stirewalt
Political Editor
March 29, 2010
Democrats are counting on this fall's elections to be a battle of the bases -- enthusiastic liberals against inflamed conservatives.
The party may take a beating at the ballot box, but an enthusiastic liberal base will hold losses down and leave the president with a governing majority. Or so the argument goes.
Now that Obamacare is the law of the land, Democrats promise to take on global warming, card check, immigration and a regulatory crackdown on banks.
As Speaker Nancy Pelosi would say, Democrats have kicked through the door. Now they are contemplating what to plunder.
Rep. Henry Waxman, whose tiny heel landed one of the first blows against the door of public opinion and Republican resistance when he introduced the House version of Obamacare, now has his boot pointed at the corporations disclosing upfront costs of the health program he helped create.
Waxman wants AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar, 3M and many other companies to explain why they told shareholders to expect smaller profits and employees to expect changes in benefits.
Waxman, who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wants their internal e-mails to review even before the executives come in to take their whippings.
Chairman Waxman, whose ego is a much larger thing than the law, will not be mollified when he's told that Securities and Exchange Commission accounting rules require the write-downs in the same quarter that a tax change is enacted.
It will be worst for the highly regulated telecommunications companies. They are at the mercy of Waxman's panel, which will soon to decide the fate of new Internet and telephone regulations.
Other employers may fight, but AT&T and Verizon will probably have to submit and beg forgiveness for having followed SEC rules.
While Waxman is re-educating corporate America, President Obama showed what the new Democratic boldness looks like with the recess appointment of union lawyer Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board.
Becker's nomination came up eight votes short of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate because he is known to Hill staffers as "human Card Check" for his opposition to secret ballots in union certification elections. Becker, who works for the Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO, has argued that if the laws pertaining to organizing nonunion workplaces couldn't be changed, the NLRB could simply act as if they were.
Think of it as a "deem and pass" approach to the Employee Free Choice Act.
Democrats howled when President George W. Bush dodged Democratic filibusters of his nominees with recess appointments. When he sent John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called it an "end run around the Constitution." Having recently used budget reconciliation to do some end running of his own, Reid ought to know.
It may take years for Obamacare to fundamentally change America, but it has already done its work on the Democratic Party.
Democrats have long told themselves that past failures to achieve big goals could be attributed to wimpiness. It wasn't that their initiatives were unpopular, but rather that Democrats did not pursue their goals with the kind of ruthlessness that Republicans did.
The myth of the virtuous loser comforted Democrats in the hard years from 1980 to 2006. Why had America moved to the Right? It wasn't backlash against big government and a corroded culture. It was that Republicans had manufactured those concerns and then exploited them.
The drive to enact a new national health program was politically predicated on the argument that it would give the Left a reason to vote.
Democrats had lots of ideological reasons for wanting to enact the plan, or one even more liberal. But it was the belief that somehow passing the unpopular plan would be a political advantage that finally got anxious members of the majority party to start kicking in doors.
Now, Democrats believe that the time has come to be bolder still. They mean to convince the American people that the party so long associated with dithering has become a party of steely resolve. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
This may thrill liberal voters who spent much of Obama's first year in office complaining about his unwillingness to get rough with Republicans. And it may lessen the effect of having the Right fully mobilized against the president's agenda.
But it will also scare the dickens out of regular Americans.
Neglecting the center and taking a "by any means necessary" approach will convince moderates that the Democrats are irresponsible with their new power -- and drive many independent voters away from the party even if the economy improves.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of the Washington Examiner. He can be reached at cstirewalt@dcexaminer.com
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