(Mike Zahara) – How do they regroup without looking like they’re regrouping?
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are both shell-shocked from Tuesday’s losses and can take no solace in picking up a US House seat in NY-23 because although Dem winner Owens took 63,500 votes, 65,300 did not vote for him. That’s not a good sign for 2010.
The 1993 comparisons are scary to contemplate because none of us saw then, the GOP picking up 73 US House seats the following year, but the parallels are amazing between 1993 & 2009.
This time House & Senate members will not be blind-sided and that puts Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid in charge of what’s now a full blown Dem Civil War.
Tuesday’s GOP performance has also made their recruiting so much easier now and ours that much more difficult.
One of the major responsibilities of congressional leadership is to help your own party’s members get re-elected. You are expected to raise the big bucks and to shepherd legislation that your members can take home to their voters to show them they were actually doing something during the term.
To date, Democrats are amazingly empty-handed. A whole year has passed and instead of cobbling together simple, stand alone bills covering a variety of no-brainer issues, leadership chose to only work on these gigantic omnibus-type bills that are very difficult to pass on their best days, and next to impossible to pass the closer the next election gets.
With healthcare for instance, they could have sent up a stand alone bill regarding coverage denial and had substantial GOP support…last spring! They instead chose to work for 10 months on something they should have had ready to go on Inauguration Day, 16 years after the previous failure!
That was/is a tactical and strategic error of Dem House & Senate leadership and again, and again, and again, we are terrible with majorities.
(Mike Zahara publishes the WatchdogWag.com blog)
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