Dems Blame White House for Loss
Politico reports:
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.
Bayh spoke for a wing of the party that had been, before the election, reluctant to criticize Obama’s management of the government, but which on Wednesday spoke loudly.
“Fundamentally, Democrats lost the middle,” the president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Ed Gresser, said Wednesday.
“The party's apparent lack of interest in a long-term path away from emergency stimulus toward fiscal balance revived a pre-Clinton reputation for carefree attitudes toward public money.”
And Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a proponent of bipartisanship if not always a policy centrist, lamented “missed opportunities in the last two years” in terms of bipartisan initiatives from the White House, particularly on tax policy.
