A move on moment from House Dems
“Just say no! Just say no!” Seriously? That’s the best House Democrats can do these days – is mirror House Republicans?
Any semblance of sanity on the Dem side is now officially history, which means, for all intents and purposes, there isn’t any semblance of sanity in D.C. anymore. Not that there was much even in semblance before House Democrats jumped the shark.
Their reaction to President Obama’s reachout to Republicans to offer support for a two-year extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the superwealthy in exchange for GOP support for an extension in benefits for the long-term unemployed is beyond the pale. The message sent to the American people: As a matter of principle we’re going to raise your taxes and cut off the long-term unemployed, the meager job market be damned.
The principle they’re trying to advance doesn’t make much sense. OK, so Republicans have for the past two years been the “just say no” party on the Hill, got it. But they weren’t successful in the midterms just because they always say no. How about – they were successful because the voters gave Democrats the White House and big majorities in the House and the Senate, and Democrats couldn’t get anything done?
More columns by Chris Graham at TheWorldAccordingToChrisGraham.com.
I’m not even sure that i count health-care reform as something done, if only because what finally passed was so pedestrian, and pushed down the road key provisions from taking effect. Meanwhile, nothing gets done on climate change, nothing substantive is done to public education, nothing is done on the tax cuts until the lame-duck session, et cetera.
The president has been shouldering the blame for what hasn’t happened, but I think we’re starting to see what’s been gumming up the gears. It wasn’t so much Republicans as it was Democrats who worked themselves up to a point of giddiness over what they’d do once they got big majorities back in Congress and subsequently imploded in in-fighting that put the in-fighting that had crippled Republicans in the Bush years to shame. I say that because it took into the first two years of George W. Bush’s second term before we saw the ideological purging that led to the loss of Karl Rove’s permanent majority in 2006 and solidified itself with the election of Obama and the big wins by House and Senate Democrats in ’08.
Democrats, for their part, began bringing out the sharp knives and aiming them at each other even before they’d won that November. The so-called Blue Dogs, the fiscally moderate Democrats whose victories in a number of swing districts fueled the House majority, were never Democratic enough, and to them the liberal stalwarts might as well have been space aliens than members of their own party.
The internecine battles that ensued amplified the Republican “just say no” approach – in line with the old axiom about how when your opponent is going down in flames you should get out of the way and let him roast.
Me, I give President Obama credit, much like I gave credit to Bill Clinton in 1995 for pivoting after the GOP won the House and the Senate in the ’94 midterms. Clinton, unlike Obama, couldn’t even get a milquetoast health-care reform passed, so Obama has already done the Democratic legend one better in that respect. He still has a ways to go to match what Clinton was able to do in the wake of his midterm losses.
The reachout on taxes and unemployment benefits is a huge step in that direction. You ask me, the best thing House Democrats could have done for Obama heading into the 2012 election cycle is what they’ve been doing this week. By “just say(ing) no,” they’re giving the president the break from their failure to get anything of substance done that he will need to recast his image.
Column by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Obama offshore drilling ban draws bipartisan criticism
A bipartisan group of Virginia leaders will work to get the Obama administration to reverse its move to block drilling off the coast of Virginia until at least 2017.
“As a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we learned a number of lessons, most importantly that we need to proceed with caution and focus on creating a more stringent regulatory regime. As that regime continues to be developed and implemented, we have revised our initial March leasing strategy to focus and expend our critical resources on areas with leases that are currently active. Our revised strategy lays out a careful, responsible path for meeting our nation’s energy needs while protecting our oceans and coastal communities,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said Wednesday in a statement announcing the shift in administration policy.
The administration had said in March that it would move to open up areas in the Atlantic, including off the coast of Virginia, to oil and natural gas exploration. That announcement came less than a month before the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that pushed a re-examination of the earlier policy direction.
Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell and Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Warner both indicated today that they will push back.
“Advances in technology continue to make offshore energy production more cost effective and safe. Instead of using that technology to produce more energy in a responsible manner here at home, this administration apparently prefers that we continue to depend more and more on oil from other nations and foreign cartels with far-less stringent environmental regulations and policies,” McDonnell said in a statement today.
Warner spokesman Kevin Hall told The Washington Post that the senator “sees no reason to delay this process” even given what we have learned since the March announcement.
“Sen. Warner will continue to work with Governor McDonnell and other state and local officials, as well as the bipartisan Virginia delegation, to explore ways to re-examine this decision,” Hall told the Post.
The Obama admnistration did get one note of support from an elected Virginia leader. Eighth District Democratic Congressman Jim Moran offered praise for the move to delay future drilling in a statement today.
“It clearly reflects the lessons learned from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster and recognizes the inherent risks of drilling in environmentally restricted areas and where economic and national security interests are in conflict,” said Moran, who has long opposed offshore drilling not just off the coast of Virginia but also elsewhere given the potential long-term environmental hazards.
“We will never achieve energy independence by drilling for more oil on land or at sea – even if we open up every restricted area to drilling,” Moran said. “To pursue such a reckless policy only advances the day we exhaust our limited reserves and undermines our effort to transition to cleaner and more sustainable alternative sources of energy.”
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Who is DeFundIt.org?
A 21-year-old named Alex Cortes has inserted himself into the thick of the Fifth District congressional race, with his advocacy group DeFundIt.org targeting Democratic incumbent Tom Perriello for his vote in favor of the health-care reform.
A Google search of the name produces as the top item a link to a column about an op-ed written by an Alex Cortes in 2007 defending the author’s right to chant “not gay” during the recitation of the “Good Old Song” at University of Virginia football games.
That Alex Cortes and the Alex Cortes behind DeFundIt.org are one and the same.
“It was completely misguided. I apologized for it at the time, I’ll apologize for it today. It was ignorant, arrogant, and I wish it wouldn’t have happened,” Cortes told AugustaFreePress.com.
The issue with the ’07 Cortes column published in the UVa. student-run Cavalier Daily briefly became an issue in the Fifth District GOP primary. Cortes served as the campaign manager for primary candidate Laurence Verga when a brief flurry of media reports put an uncomfortable spotlight on what he had written two and a half years earlier.
“Some call it a drunken joke while others refer to its adherents as homophobes. Unfortunately, in doing so, this University has completely disregarded the religiously and politically-minded like myself who say the chant out of disgust for the gay lifestyle and support for our natural heterosexuality given to us by God,” Cortes wrote.
A contrite Cortes emphasized in our interview today that he has moved on from “past mistakes.”
“I’ve repudiated it ever since,” Cortes said. “This is still America, the place where you make mistakes, you learn from them, you apologize, you move on.”
Cortes in 2008 launched a 527 organization called BornAliveTruth.org to raise issue with votes cast by Barack Obama as an Illinois state senator on abortion issues, then worked on the 2009 gubernatorial campaign of Bob McDonnell. As a 501-c4 organization, DeFundIt.org, which calls on candidates to sign a pledge to defund the health-care reform passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama earlier this year, cannot endorse candidates in elections. Robert Hurt, the Republican nominee in the Fifth District, has signed the DeFundIt.org pledge, and while declining comment to AugustaFreePress.com last month when we first wrote about DeFundIt.org, the Hurt campaign has benefited from news coverage of the pledge and from recent moves by DeFundIt.org to make abortion rights a central issue in the health-care debate in the Fifth District race.
“It’s an interesting case with Tom because of his abortion pledge. We wanted to call him out on that. Last August, he told his constituents that he would not vote for the ObamaCare bill with federal funding for abortion, and he does just that,” Cortes said.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Poll: Obama approval at 50 percent
Edited by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
A new Public Policy Polling survey has Barack Obama’s job-approval ratings back at the 50 percent mark for the first time since October. Read more
AFPBusiness.com: Obama on clean-energy jobs
Edited by Chris Graham
AFPBusiness.com
Read a transcript of remarks by President Barack Obama on Friday, March 5, in Arlington on clean-energy jobs.
The transcript is available on AFPBusiness.com.
I Love The ’90s, Part Two
Are we about to reprise the pendulum swings of the Gingrich-Clinton era?
Report by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Might we see a repeat of 1994 in 2010? The short answer: yes. Next question: Might we then see a repeat of 1996 in 2012? Well, maybe.
“For all the trouble Barack Obama’s had lately voters still prefer him to any of the top Republican contenders for 2012,” said Dean Debnam, president of Public Policy Polling, which polled 743 registered voters in February and found the Democrat Obama leading all of the top potential 2012 Republican Party hopefuls at this very, very early stage more than two and a half years out from the November 2012 presidential election.
An Obama win might have to come after a November 2010 switch in majority-party status in at least the House of Representatives, which would mirror the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 that was followed by the re-election of Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1996.
An analysis from the University of Virginia Center for Politics released last week suggests that Republicans could be poised to gain 37 seats in the ’10 midterms, which would put the GOP within hailing distance of taking majority control of the legislative chamber. A switch of 40 seats from the D column to the R column would give the Republicans the majority in the House. Read more
Chris Graham: The forest for the trees
Posted by afp on February 16, 2011 · 1 Comment
“This problem cannot be solved simply by focusing on cuts to non-defense discretionary spending, which is only 12 percent of the budget. Increased revenues and economic growth by themselves will not get us there, either. That’s why we must have a grown-up discussion about spending cuts, tax reform, and necessary changes to entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare,” Warner said in a statement that his office forwarded to me this week on the subject of President Obama’s proposed fiscal-year 2012 budget.
Lost in the back-and-forth chatter on how socialist or how ultraconservative the budget is in the eyes of the various beholders is, well, the grown-up discussion that Warner talks about, the forest for the trees, I’ll call it.
Political types can posture all they want on ending earmarks and making cuts in social programs – as even Obama is doing, to the dismay of his increasingly more vocal critics on the left. The simple fact of the matter is that as Warner points out our burgeoning federal budget is where it is because of spending that Congress and a line of presidents have decided they don’t want to control.
And there are political reasons for doing so. Curbing spending on Social Security and Medicare hits seniors, in particular, and guess who votes by far in the greatest numbers? Oh, yeah.
Defense spending, too, has become untouchable, despite the fact that the United States spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. But just try proposing a cut in defense spending. You’ll get run out of Washington faster than a second-term congressman posting a picture on Craigslist.
And so they work around the edges, which by definition isn’t going to work. So much time is spent debating miniscule cuts to one-eighth of the budget. And this passes as leadership in this day and age.
“Every day that we delay making these tough choices, we add an average of $4 billion to the national debt,” Warner said this week.
The only way this works is if Republicans and Democrats put down their spears and make it a bipartisan priority.
I wish I could be optimistic that this spirit will overtake Capitol Hill anytime soon.
“This is the only way we will put our nation back on a responsible fiscal path that allows us to be competitive as we move forward,” Warner said.
I hear you, Senator.
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