How could anyone watch what happen last week in the election and get up & say the things they said to the press??? Or maybe power-hungry and just as nutty as a bag of squirrels....That sounds like a likely explanation too
It Isn't about me
By MEREDITH SHINER 11/12/10 12:32 PM EST Updated: 11/12/10 12:37 PM EST - Politico.com
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claims to have the “overwhelming support” of the Democratic Caucus in her bid to be minority leader in the new Congress.
Her support is not unanimous, she says, but most members believe she’s not the cause of her party’s historic losses in the midterm elections.
In an interview with National Public Radio that aired Friday, Pelosi pointed to the high levels of unemployment as the driving factor behind the Democratic losses. By continuing as her party’s top leader in the House in the wake of the new Republican majority, she asserted, she can put it in the “strongest possible position” to create jobs and generally boost the nation’s still faltering economy.
“We didn’t lose the election because of me,” Pelosi said. “Under any circumstance, when you have 9.5 percent unemployment, any party that cannot turn that into political gain, should hang up the gloves. I said that before the election.”
Pelosi also blasted Republican intentions to roll back the new health care law, privatize Social Security and resist some of the major initiatives she pushed through the House. The new session beginning in January could paint an even starker difference between the two parties, she said. With Republicans controlling the House, she added, they might prove themselves to be a less satisfactory choice and better position Democrats for the 2012 elections.
“It isn’t about me. Maybe the Republicans will take a course of action that will solve problems — God bless them if they do. But, maybe, they will pursue what they have said,” Pelosi said. “The opportunity that is there is to have clarity. Maybe, they will be more eloquent in defining themselves than we could have ever been in defining them.”
The California congresswomen, however, did stand with President Barack Obama in expressing a willingness to re-examine some aspects of the health care law, citing the 1099 provision that deals with small businesses and taxation as a point of possible compromise. The president had mentioned the provision as open to debate in his White House press conference the day after the elections.
Still, Pelosi broke with the recent White House message on the Bush-era tax cuts, declaring her position has always been – and remains – that additional tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are fiscally irresponsible.
“Our position in the House is that we support the tax cut for everyone – but not an additional tax cut at the high end. It’s too costly,” Pelosi said. “Those tax cuts have been in effect for a very long time. They did not create jobs.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45040.html#ixzz155sBXfGl
Clueless on a shellacking
RUTH MARCUS - Washington Post
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
The day after his shellacking, the bruised president offered a sober, tripartite analysis of voters' message. First, he said, voters are fed up with Washington partisanship and special-interest politics. Second, they feel insecure and uncertain, about their economic circumstances above all.
Sounds familiar so far, right? Except here's the next part, "The third thing they were saying . . . is, 'There are things we expect government to do, but we don't think government can solve all the problems. And we don't want the Democrats telling us from Washington that they know what is right about everything.' "
That last pivot is what distinguishes - you guessed it - Bill Clinton 1994 from Barack Obama 2010. It's what worries me about the response of the shellackee in chief to the election results - and, even more, the response of the soon-to-be-former House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Their instincts have tended more toward blaming the dogs for not understanding how good the food is for them, not accepting that it's time to tweak the recipe.
The president's self-diagnosis in his post-election news conference was dominated by the assessment that voters had simply failed to grasp - and that his failure lay chiefly in explaining clearly enough - why the administration took the steps it did.
"What is absolutely true is that with all that stuff coming at folks fast and furious - a recovery package, what we had to do with respect to the banks, what we had to do with respect to the auto companies - I think people started looking at all this and it felt as if government was getting much more intrusive into people's lives than they were accustomed to," Obama said. "We thought it was necessary, but I'm sympathetic to folks who looked at it and said this is looking like potential overreach."
If only the poor dears had a better grasp.
I write this from a perspective of sympathy with Obama's aims and overall support for his performance over the past two years. But Obama's dismissive analysis omits the non-emergency choices he made - primarily to press for and, in the end, muscle through the passage of health-care reform - and the ensuing discomfort of voters.
Discomfort that is entirely understandable, even to those of us who supported health-care reform.
Clinton campaigned as a different kind of Democrat for whom reinvented, and smaller, government was always part of the agenda. The health-care debate interrupted that narrative, and helped set the stage for his midterm losses, but it was set to the background music of a reinvented, smaller government.
In contrast, Obama campaigned, by his own assessment, as a "Rorschach test" Democrat: People saw in his candidacy what they chose to perceive. This deliberate ambiguity - traditional big-government liberal or post-partisan pragmatist - helped Obama finesse Democratic Party divides and attract independents during the campaign.
When he began to sketch in the ideological blanks, with cap-and-trade, health care, the auto bailout, et al., voters had no reason to distrust their own perceptions of intrusive government. The administration offered no counternarrative to suggest that this new era of big government had any limits.
As the Brookings Institution's William Galston observes in a post-election analysis, "Obama's agenda required a significant expansion of the scope, power, and cost of the federal government" at a time of record-low trust in government. Despite the risk that this mistrust would limit public "tolerance for bold initiatives, he refused to trim his sails, in effect assuming that his personal credibility would outweigh the public's doubts about the competence and integrity of the government he led."
There are reasons to hope that Obama can adjust and reconnect. By the time of his "60 Minutes" interview, he sounded more accepting of the notion that he needed not only to communicate better but also to govern more modestly. "The American people don't want to see some massive expansion of government," he said.
I have less confidence in Pelosi's adaptability. "No regrets," Pelosi told ABC's Diane Sawyer. "Should we have been talking about it more, and working on it less - that's a question." But, she said, "Nine-and-a-half percent unemployment is a very eclipsing event."
Hoo boy. Losing 60-plus seats is a very eclipsing event too. It would be nice to see some recognition that what we have here is not only a failure to communicate. Democrats are making a big mistake if they think their problem was as simple as not enough talking
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D) of California should get a "check-up-from-the-neck-up"
