Read His Lips

---

Echoing the words of the 41st president, Republican George H.W. Bush, [Boehner] added, 'When we say we're going to cut spending, read my lips: We're going to cut spending.'

Washington Post

---

Why do politicians insist on recycling phrases that have been discredited — in fact, have been ridiculed — over the years?

Just last fall, Barack Obama appeared on The Daily Show and said his economic adviser had done a "heckuva job."

That, of course, reminded everyone of Obama's predecessor's enthusiastic endorsement of his FEMA director in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — but even George W. Bush couldn't make that one fly and "Brownie," as Bush called him, was out the door a few days later.

Eventually, when the stories of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are written, the Bushes may be remembered as foremost among the presidents for originating the kinds of phrases that future politicians would be advised to avoid if they wish to be taken seriously.

"Heckuva job" is certainly one of those phrases.

And so, too, is "Read my lips," originally a line from a Clint Eastwood movie that George H.W. Bush used, presumably because he wanted to project more of a macho image.

The elder Bush, as I'm sure many still recall, used "read my lips" as part of his promise to stand firm against tax increases — but that was a pledge he ultimately broke and for which he paid a political price.

(I always thought he was trying to emulate Ronald Reagan, who co–opted another Eastwood line — "go ahead, make my day" — in his promise to veto any tax increases.)

So I have to wonder about the judgment displayed by House Speaker John Boehner yesterday when he said, "When we say we're going to cut spending, read my lips: We're going to cut spending."

There's no doubt the stakes are high. As Kathleen Hennessey observes in the Los Angeles Times, "The prospect of a government shutdown loomed larger ... when Republican leaders ruled out the easiest path around a budget impasse and Democrats accused them of playing a dangerous game of chicken."

It seems to me that the language in this debate should reflect the seriousness of its high–stakes nature, but the speaker of the House chose to use a phrase that can only be linked to defiance, manipulation and broken promises on, essentially, the same issue. That's no way to build a consensus.

Those folks who remember when Bush said "read my lips" during his acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican convention are bound to remember that, ultimately, his bravado meant nothing without sincere efforts to reach a compromise with the other side.

In Congress, Democrats held the upper hand when the elder Bush was in the White House. Today, power is divided on Capitol Hill, but the challenge is the same.

Then, as now, the situation called for leadership.

Not macho catch phrases.

Read More

Holding Him To It

---

"I think the overwhelming message that I hear from the voters is that we want everybody to act responsibly in Washington. We want you to work harder to arrive at consensus. We want you to focus completely on jobs and the economy and growing it so that we're ensuring a better future for our children and our grandchildren."

Barack Obama
Nov. 3, 2010

---

It has been nearly a month since Barack Obama uttered those words.

It was the day after the midterm election that resulted in the largest shift in House seats since Pearl Harbor, and the president seemed humbled by the experience ("some election nights are more fun than others. Some are exhilarating; some are humbling. But every election ... is a reminder that ... power rests not with those of us in elected office but with the people we have the privilege to serve").

But, while he acknowledged that Americans "expect Washington to work for them, not against them" and said the message was that the people wanted their leaders to find common ground, he was almost defiant in his insistence on focusing on areas where he and the members of his party have shown the least inclination to compromise.

In yesterday's Washington Post, House Speaker–to–be John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell assured readers that, when they met with Obama, "all of us will have an opportunity to show the American people that we got [that] message."

And, before Tuesday's meeting with congressional leaders, Obama, too, sounded more conciliatory, pledging to reach out more to the opposition.

But, while they all talked the talk about seeking common ground, no one walked the walk — yet.

And Republicans continued to be the Party of No, defeating an extension of jobless benefits. I really do not think that is what the voters were voting for, and I think it will be interesting to see what happens when millions of Americans suddenly lose those benefits.

There's an old saying that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. By the same token, I think, all that is necessary for the triumph of desperation is for politicians to take away the safety net that keeps good people going while they're trying to survive until the job market gets better.

Anyone who has been out there knows it has been horrific for the last couple of years.

Without that safety net, good people will be more likely to resort to things they ordinarily wouldn't consider if they weren't hungry or afraid of losing the roof over their heads. I'm not sure either the economy or the judicial system is ready for the kind of short–sighted lawmaking this seems to have spawned.

Midterm elections can be mysterious in their implications. I have read many analyses of the results. Some of them make sense to me. Some strike me as just plain looney.

Having said that, here are my thoughts on where we're going, a month after the midterms and only a day after the president's conference with congressional leaders.

It is unwise, it seems to me, to conclude that the American people, as a group, came to some sort of conclusion of any kind on Election Day. There are many people — myself included — who could have been persuaded to vote for the candidates for another party in the contests that were on their ballots if those nominees had been viewed as acceptable.

Besides, House races tend to be very local in nature. In large cities, some districts only cover a handful of neighborhoods. The issues are not national or international.

Only in states with the smallest populations are representatives elected on a statewide basis. The rest represent only portions of the states in which they live. Consequently, the issues that decide most House races may not be significant even in the rest of that state.

I have lived in congressional districts that were intensely partisan, and I have lived in congressional districts that were evenly balanced. Even in years when supposedly historic transitions were occurring, I can't remember anyone saying that they were voting for or against a certain House candidate because of the president.

Both sides have rationalized and will continue to rationalize the results, but they ultimately will have to come to terms with the unpleasant truths about themselves that this election revealed for all to see:

• Democrats squandered a golden opportunity that was handed to them in 2008 — the greatest economic crisis this country has faced in more than three–quarters of a century.
  
  In those days, Obama was being compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt, mentioned among presidents who entered office at times of great national distress and guided the country safely through them. But he resisted the voters' message to focus on the economy and jobs, and, thanks to the ongoing decline in his popularity, he was being compared to Jimmy Carter even before the midterms.
  
  While I disagree, as I always have, with the negative assessment that many insisted on giving to Carter's presidency (and continue to insist on giving it today), the comparisons of Obama to FDR and Obama to Carter are intriguing, to me, because they seem to represent polar opposites of presidential success.
  
  Roosevelt, of course, was elected president four times — in the days before the 22nd Amendment limited presidents to two terms. Carter was denied a second term.
  
  Regardless of how you may feel about those two presidencies, FDR and Carter both had something Obama does not — previous executive experience. And that would come in quite handy in the radically different political environment in which the president will find himself in little more than a month.
  
  Those two Democrats had to build compromises on smaller (and, arguably, less diverse) scales than they had to as president, and perhaps those presidencies serve as the ultimate arguments for and against gubernatorial experience when choosing a president.
  
  But Obama had no such experience when he became president. Can wielding the veto make up for not being able to pass any legislation in the second half of his term? Or can he learn a skill that he desperately needs to make him an effective leader?
  
  As Democrats look ahead to 2012, when not only Obama but nearly two dozen Democrat–held Senate seats will be on the ballot, the party's future may depend upon it.
  
  In case you haven't heard, the prevailing wisdom of the day is that Obama won't be denied a second term because the only sitting presidents since the Depression who have been defeated when they sought re–election were those who were challenged for their party's nomination — Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. Another — Lyndon Johnson — withdrew from the race rather than take on the insurgent Gene McCarthy.
  
  Democrats have been reassuring themselves that Obama will not face such a challenge — and, therefore, will win a second term.
  
  That's a dangerous assumption to make.


• It is tempting, when one is flush with victory, to make assumptions about the voters' intent.
  
  But Republicans would be wise not to get carried away. This election was not an endorsement of Republican government. Exit poll after exit poll suggested that the voters still blame the Republicans for, as Obama likes to say, driving the economy into a ditch, and it will be incumbent upon them to prove themselves worthy of the temporary reprieve they have been given.
  
  Voters were, essentially, trying to get their leaders' attention. They've been trying to do that, for different reasons, for the last three elections, but there always seems to be, as Strother Martin said in "Cool Hand Luke," a failure to communicate.
  
  In 2006, voters began restoring Democrats to power in Washington by giving them modest control of the House and Senate. This, I have always believed, was a response to the shameful Terri Schiavo episode and Hurricane Katrina. Those were the events that began driving many voters away from the GOP.
  
  Two years later, Democrats were rewarded at the polls by voters who held Republicans responsible for the economic implosion. I guess the party's congressional margins were deceiving. Many Democrats seemed to believe the pendulum had swung in their direction permanently. Polls kept showing that people were overwhelmingly concerned about the economy and jobs, but Democrats insisted on scattershooting.
  
  The voters were in their back pockets, they assumed. And the voters figured the Democrats needed a good dose of reality so they went with the only option they had. At least, that is how I see it.
  
  Sometimes the option wasn't palatable. Most Tea Party candidates, for instance, were not readily embraced by the electorate, but a few were. And they may prove to be loose cannons for the Republican Party as it goes through what is, essentially, a probationary period.

Here's how I see the next couple of years playing out.

There are enough Democrats in the Senate that they can vote down anything the House Republicans approve. And House Republicans are sure to vote down anything Senate Democrats manage to squeeze through.

Stalemate, right? Which side will that favor two years from now?

The only way either side can claim to have accomplished much of anything in the next two years, it seems to me, is to reach out to the other side. Obama may have the most to lose. Unlike Bill Clinton, he won't be able to run against a completely obstructionist Congress since the Senate remained in Democratic hands.

Besides, the onus is on the president to bring the two sides together.

So, it all comes back to that compromise thing, that skill that successful governors — especially those who go on to become successful presidents — learn.

Whether he likes it or not, Obama needs to learn about the art of compromise.

That is, if he really does aspire to a second term.

Read More

Predicting the House

I was never a mathematician.

I mean, when I was a child, I did all right on my multiplication tables. And I managed to keep up with my classmates — sort of — when we moved on to more advanced types of math, like algebra and geometry.

But I must confess that, when we got into numerical constructions that involved figures that went into five or six digits or more, that was about the point where I got off the bus.

I do understand enough about math to know that the Democrats are about to get pummeled. I don't know how badly, but I suspect that it will be impressive, much like the 1994 midterms — and with about the same outcome, too.

Anyway, today my attention is on the battle for the House. In the next couple of days, I will write about the battle for the Senate.

As I say, I am not a mathematician. But I know the numbers are crumbling for the Democrats.

And many of them seem to be caught by surprise, like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. How could that be possible? The signs have been all around them for more than a year.

First, there were all those polls showing slippage for both Barack Obama and the Democrats after the euphoria of the spring of 2009 wore off.

But many Democrats chose to ignore the signals the polls were sending to them. I distinctly remember one of my friends admonishing me that polls aren't accurate, that no matter what the polls were saying, the voters would stick with Obama and the Democrats because the Republicans were clearly to blame for all the nation's ills.

And they went forward, full speed ahead, with an increasingly unpopular health care proposal while ignoring the very issue that had made Obama the first Democrat in more than 30 years to receive a clear majority of the vote — job creation.

It got a little harder to ignore the gathering storm when Republican Scott Brown captured Ted Kennedy's Senate seat back in January. Many Democrats were understandably stunned by that development.

But Jeff Jacoby suggested, in the Boston Globe, that the Democrats had been handed a "blessing in disguise."

His only condition? "[I]f only they are wise enough to recognize it." And the Democrats were assuaged.

Well, I guess we'll find out if they were that wise in a little more than a week. But I never felt that they were, and their last–minute attempts to breathe life into an employment picture that is half again as bad as it was the day Obama took office have been transparent, at best.

In their hearts, Democrats seem to know what is coming; the recriminations have already begun.

I'll give Obama credit for realizing that he failed to give adequate attention to the political side of issues in the first half of his term and for placing the blame for it squarely on his own shoulders — well, sort of.

---

"I think that one of the challenges we had two years ago was we had to move so fast, we were in such emergency mode, that it was very difficult for us to spend a lot of time doing victory laps and advertising exactly what we were doing, because we had to move on to the next thing," Obama said. "And I take some responsibility for that."

The attitude was to get the policy right, "and we did not always think about making sure we were advertising properly what was going on," Obama continued.

CNN wire staff

---

Well, as Mario Cuomo observed a quarter of a century ago, "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose." And this president, while gifted at the poetry part, has never been able to master the prose.

Much like his predecessor, he just can't seem to take the blame for anything.

And that, I suspect, is at the heart of the disconnect between Obama and the voters. Obama feels compelled to remind the voters that he inherited the bad economy. But that isn't the problem.

The problem is that the voters already understand that. Their disenchantment is not due to origin. It is due to the absence of evidence of improvement.

Obama may think all sorts of grand things about himself and his historically inevitable role, but the thing that broke open his race with John McCain was the economic implosion and the massive hemorrhaging of jobs that continued through his first year as president.

He has never been enough of a politician to recognize the one thing that the voters expected from him above all else — leadership through harrowing economic times. Even if a president can't produce jobs, he should be enough of a politician to know how to take credit for his efforts to promote job creation by those who can do it.

That is called reassuring the voters. And this president, as intelligent as he is, couldn't grasp the national need for that. Even if you have limited knowledge or understanding of history or human psychology, you know that Americans respond favorably to — and remember with fondness — presidents who feel their pain.

Presidents who appear aloof or distant in trying times usually do not remain president very long.

Many were expecting some sort of solidarity from the coalition of irregular and first–time voters who fueled Obama's election two years ago.

But, one by one, the groups that helped Obama by actually coming out and voting for him in unprecedented numbers on Election Day 2008 have been slipping away from the president's party (lately, Helene Cooper and Monica Davey indulged in some hand–wringing in the New York Times about the defection of women voters — who usually vote for Democrats but appear to be pulling away from them this year; so, too, did Liz Sidoti and Darlene Superville with the Associated Press).

They aren't necessarily switching parties. They're just resuming their usual pattern — and not voting at all. Some may be disappointed — as idealists often are — and some may feel permanently alienated from the system, but there are always some of those.

It's just more pronounced this time, with so many first–time and seldom–participated voters who showed up to vote for Obama last time — and now appear to be living down to expectations in the midterm.

There's no telling, of course, what these folks might do in 2012. But one thing, I think, can be said with some certainty as we approach Election Day 2010: even if the Republicans aren't winning over these folks in the midterm, Obama isn't retaining them. Electorally, they might as well not exist. They might as well be one of George Orwell's "unpersons."

Meanwhile, the GOP base — the composition of which has been fairly consistent for the last two or three decades — is said to be energized and eager to vote.

Whether turnout is low or high, Gallup is saying, Republicans stand to win and win big. Pollster Peter Hart recently said the Democrats face a Category 4 hurricane on Election Day.

The House

And I was reminded of something John Boehner said about six months ago: "at least 100 [House] seats are in play." Many political observers scoffed at such bravado; after all, what Boehner suggested would be truly historic, unprecedented in this nation's history.

(Well, a 100–seat swing might be unprecedented, but we have come close to that at times in the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century.)

No matter what has happened in the last six months, to be honest, it still doesn't seem likely that the Republicans can win 100 House seats from the Democrats.

Of course, Boehner didn't say Republicans would win 100 seats, only that 100 would be in play. And, while each party would like to think it can win all the seats that are in play in a given election (and can devote seemingly endless hours to concocting scenarios in which it is conceivable to do so), such a thing simply never happens in modern America.

But today, some of the foremost political observers in America are suggesting gains that even they might have found impossible to believe only a few months ago.

• Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and perhaps the most spot–on political prognosticator in America today, predicts that Republicans will gain 47 House seats.
  
  To put that into context, let's look at the largest gains experienced by either party in the last half century — Republicans won 54 seats in 1994, 47 seats in 1966 and 34 seats in 1980, and Democrats won 49 seats in 1974, 49 seats in 1958 and 34 seats in 1964.
  
  If Sabato is correct — and last time, he was darn near perfect — it would match the Republicans' gains in 1966.
  
  Oh, and take note, you Boehner defenders — Sabato says 99 Democrat–held House seats are in play.


• Nate Silver of the New York Times predicted something similar.
  
  The GOP, he said, will win 49 seats on Nov. 2.


• Charlie Cook, another accurate political handicapper, projects a 52–seat gain for the Republicans.
  
  Which puts him in roughly the same range as the other two ...


• But Jay Cost's prediction at The Weekly Standard dwarfs them all.
  
  Cost says Republicans will win 61 seats. That would be their biggest gain in more than 70 years.

No matter which one you think is more likely to be correct, the Republicans would take control of the House. They need to win 39.

I, too, think the Republicans will capture control of the House. I think Cost's prediction is too extreme, that it is more likely to be somewhere between Sabato and Cook.

I'm more inclined to favor Sabato — but I think his number, too, is too high — and say that I expect the Republicans to win about 45 House seats.

Read More

That's Ridiculous ... And Yet ...

Whatever else you may say about him — and there certainly are many things one could say about him — House Minority Leader John Boehner is not bashful about expressing himself.

In a conversation with NPR, Boehner said Republicans will seek to repeal the health care reform legislation if they win a majority in Congress in this year's midterm elections.

My immediate reaction was twofold:

• I sort of took it for granted that the Republicans in Congress wanted to repeal the health care bill. I thought they made it quite clear that they were against it.


• They've also been aiming to recapture a majority in Congress. That would allow them to control the agenda for the last two years of Barack Obama's term in office.

At this point, I am inclined to think that the Republicans are poised to narrow the gap between themselves and their Democratic colleagues, but I'm not convinced that either chamber is going to flip — yet.

So, right now, anything Boehner says about what Republicans might do if they pull off a 1994–like reversal in the midterms strikes me as being so much wishful thinking.

And then Boehner came across as just plain looney when he asserted that "at least 100 seats are in play." Never in the history of midterm elections has one party enjoyed that kind of lopsided advantage over the other.

And then ...

Boehner spoke about the special election in Massachusetts, in which Republican Scott Brown won the Senate seat that had been held for nearly half a century by Ted Kennedy. And he said this: "If Scott Brown can win in Massachusetts, there isn't a seat in America the Republicans can't win. What we're seeing every day is the playing field widen, widen beyond anything we've seen around here during my 20 years."

I find that argument harder to refute.

Next Friday, we will get the jobs report for April — and it will answer some important questions, or, at least, it will start to answer them. Will the economy see jobs added for the second straight month? Or will the March numbers turn out to be a mirage brought about by some sort of economic abnormality?

While I would welcome any good economic news, I am skeptical about the likelihood of seeing any kind of noticeable dent in the unemployment problem by the time that voters go to the polls in November. That would require many months of continuous high six–figure gains — in permanent, not temporary, employment — and I have seen no reputable forecasts that predict anything like that.

Common sense tells me the Democrats can't get credit for creating enough jobs to earn them many points with the voters this fall.

They need to be looking for ways to connect with disgruntled voters if they want to retain their majorities in 2011.

Read More