The Dems Are Trying to Find Someone to Blame
They’re a little cranky over on the left today : 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. Mandate? What mandate? Obama won only 53% of the vote and although the Dems had strong majorities in Congress there was no mandate, certainly not for the leftist agenda that Obama wanted to jam down America’s throats. It should have been clear to the Dems that when you have a mandate you don’t have 60%+ of the people yelling STOP! as they did during the Obamacare debate. It was a mandate to quit. This election was a referendum on Obama and on Obamacare. If they hadn’t overreached with nationalized health care they wouldn’t have taken such a beating on Tuesday.
The Dems Are Trying to Find Someone to Blame
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on November 4, 2010. Filed under