California Conservative

That’s the verdict of this SF Gate article. I couldn’t agree more. It’s just further proof that good policies will win whether you’re a supposedly lame duck president or the greenest freshman.

Just a year after Democrats charged into power on Capitol Hill against a Republican president with bottom-scraping poll numbers and a soured war, it’s the Democrats who are crying uncle in the biggest budget confrontation since the 1995 government shutdown.

Democrats do not want a repeat of that fight, which crippled the GOP revolution and revived Democrat Bill Clinton’s presidency. Yet they seem astonished to find themselves on the defensive in a budget confrontation where Bush is asking for $200 billion to pay for the Iraq war, but promises to veto domestic spending bills that are $23 billion more than he wanted.

Democrats are struggling even to pass a middle-class tax cut under the banner of fiscal responsibility. A House plan to shield 21 million mainly Democratic households from the alternative minimum tax, and offset the lost revenue with higher taxes on Wall Street, appears to be unraveling. If it does, so does the vaunted “pay as you go” rule that Pelosi pledged would re-establish fiscal responsibility in Washington after years of rampant Republican borrowing.

This reporter isn’t a happy camper. They expected President Bush and the House and Senate GOP to roll over. When they didn’t, they didn’t know how to react. Now they’re looking dazed and confused, not to mention clueless and inept. That’s what happens when you’re ‘led’ by incompetents like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

History will record them as the most inept pair of party leaders of the last half century. Reid in particular is so inept that he makes Trent Lott look like a solid majority leader.

Pelosi and Reid have already begun backing down. The Democratic speaker from San Francisco and the Senate leader from Nevada wrote the White House this month asking for negotiations. Last week, Reid offered to “split the difference” with Bush on the spending bills. The White House refused.

A budget office spokesman said the Democratic leadership “should concern itself less with capturing political news cycles and more on their fundamental responsibility to
fund the federal government.”

I’ve been predicting that Reid and Pelosi would get rolled, especially on the Iraq supplemental. It isn’t a matter of if. It’s a matter of inevitability. If Democrats keep insisting on putting troop withdrawal deadlines while we’re winning, they’ll soon find themselves in the minority in the House.

The truth is that Reid and Pelosi chose to start with confrontation instead of accumulating a few achievements first. In choosing that path, they told everyone that their primary coal was to play to their base instead of addressing the people’s business. Voters will tolerate the partisanship because that’s part of the puzzle. What they won’t tolerate is blind partisanship that doesn’t get anything done.

As long as Democrats keep choosing confrontation over accomplishment, they’ll be incurring We The People’s wrath. They’re free to choose that option. We’re also free to choose the option of dropping them like a hot potato.

It isn’t just Pelosi and Reid that President Bush is frustrating:

Nowhere is the antagonism more pronounced than on funding for the war, where Bush has managed to put Democrats on the defensive on their biggest issue. Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, insisted that
Bush will only get a $50 billion “bridge fund” to pay for the war over the next few months on the condition the president comes up with a plan for a withdrawal by the end of next year.

Obey called Bush’s claim last fall that he would be drawing down troops “a study in calculated public deception … as far as I’m concerned, that was the last straw.”

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said that without new funds for the war, “the Pentagon will soon be forced to send furlough notices for as many as 100,000 Army and Marine Corps civilian employees at bases around the country.”

Openly frustrated, Obey said the public sent two messages to Washington in the last election - one calling for a new policy in Iraq, the other for a new set of budget priorities at home.

The president’s “return message to the American people is, ‘I don’t care what message you thought you were delivering last November, I’m the Great Decider. We’re going to decide things my way, and it’s my way or the highway.’ And he’s behaved that way on the federal budget at home, and he’s behaved that way on Iraq. And the American public is not happy with either stance, and they expect us to try to do something besides sit like potted palms.”

That’s what Democratic frustration sounds like. Frankly, it’s music to my ears.

Technorati Tags: Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, David Obey, Appropriations, Iraq Supplemental, President Bush, Taxes, Partisanship, Election 2008

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 9:16 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Domestic Policies, Economy, Election 2008, Iraq, Military, Pelosi, Taxes, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.