Trumka To Dems: 2010 Is On The Line If We Don't Like Your Health Care Bill

from his statement earlier today:

Let me be even blunter. In 1992, workers voted for Democrats who promised action on jobs, who talked about reining in corporate greed and who promised health care reform. Instead, we got NAFTA, an emboldened Wall Street - and not much more. We swallowed our disappointment and worked to preserve a Democratic majority in 1994 because we knew what the alternative was. But there was no way to persuade enough working Americans to go to the polls when they couldn't tell the difference between the two parties. Politicians who think that working people have it too good - too much health care, too much Social Security and Medicare, too much power on the job - are inviting a repeat of 1994.

Our country cannot afford such a repeat.

Dems and independents are not happy with Obama and his colleagues being weak on their OWN promises. That is what's killing them. They need to show some backbone and the average folks who put them in office will come to their aid in November.

If they choose the politics as usual route, its over.

If unions had real power anymore, they'd primary the blue dogs and get a more progressive congress. As it is, all they can do is stay at home or vote for Rethugs and fuck it up worse than it is.

People say Obama was powerless to sway the direction of health care legislation in a more progressive direction. But the greatest source of power available to any President, along with veto power, is the bully pulpit. He can take his message directly to the American people, can educate them and draw on a brain trust of experts and policymakers to generate legislation that addresses a need and move it forward; he is guaranteed MSM coverage whenever he wants it. He is not captive to any particular industry or interest group (unless he wants to be), and can frame the national discussion. Obama has shown little appetite for taking a courageous stand on health care reform or bringing his message directly to the electorate. His preconditions were all small bore (or misguided): you can keep your insurance if you want it, the bill must be deficit neutral (when we should be looking at total cost to American society), must fall within a fairly arbitrary budgetary limit, must cover more people (why not everybody?). Governing isn't all about vote counts, but unless the President is willing to take a stand in the long term interest of the people, the party that cares least about the outcome of an issue for whatever short term or venal reason, has an inherent advantage. It's just a question of whether Obama deliberately ceded his natural advantage to get the Senate bill, which, in all its essentials, is the Baucus bill. Why would he want legislation that isn't more cost effective? That doesn't cover every last citizen with comprehensive insurance? Campaign contributions for 2010 and 2012 is my guess.

From PBS

In his first year in office, President Obama did better even than legendary arm-twister Lyndon Johnson in winning congressional votes on issues where he took a position, a Congressional Quarterly study finds.

The new CQ study gives Obama a higher mark than any other president since it began scoring presidential success rates in Congress more than five decades ago. And that was in a year where Obama tackled how to deal with Afghanistan, Iraq, an expanding terrorist threat, the economic crisis and battles over health care.

Unprecedented Success Rate

Obama has been no different from his predecessors in that he's always ready to send a firm message to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue as he "urges members of Congress" to come together and act. All presidents demand specific action by Congress — or at least they ask for it. But when you look at the votes of 2009 in which Obama made his preference clear, his success rate was unprecedented, according to John Cranford of Congressional Quarterly.

"His success was 96.7 percent on all the votes where we said he had a clear position in both the House and the Senate. That's an extraordinary number," Cranford says.

The previous high scores were held by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, with 93 percent, and Dwight Eisenhower, who scored 89 percent in 1953. Cranford notes that George W. Bush's score hit the high 80s in 2001, the year of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. But Obama surpassed them all, Cranford says.

Presidential Success

On roll-call votes where the president had a clear position, what percentage of the time did Congress support the president's position?
On roll-call votes where the president had a clear position, the percent that Congress supported him

Source: Congressional Quarterly

Credit: Nelson Hsu/NPR

He Picked His Battles

A major reason for Obama's record high score this year: Democrats took away a significant number of seats from Republicans in the 2006 and 2008 elections, resulting in big majorities in the House and Senate for the president's party.
Part Two: Party Unity
CQ: 2009 Was The Most Partisan Year Ever Jan. 11, 2010

But Sarah Binder, a congressional analyst at the Brookings Institution, says there's another key reason he scored so well. She says he only took an official position on issues that were really important to him — those that he knew he had a very good chance of winning. He picked his battles carefully.

"He can do that because he's been in the Senate, his staff has been in the House and he understands the process here. They are consummate congressional insiders in understanding how this works," Binder says.

Binder says the intense partisanship in Congress these days, a condition underlined in a separate CQ vote study, meant that Democrats were more likely to rally around the president each and every time he asked them to — if only to deny the Republicans a victory.

The Downside Of Compromise

But another contributing factor here may prove more controversial for the president and his party. That's his willingness to negotiate and to compromise. For example, as much as the president said he wanted a public option as part of a health care bill, the final legislation won't have one. But that's not counted as a loss for the president under the scoring of this survey.

Such compromises have brought strong criticism from the liberal wing of the president's own party. But White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a veteran of Congress, says compromise has a long, long history — one that makes it a great part of the democratic process.

"The question is: Are you compromising a set of principles, or are you making adjustment in strategies, roads, that can still achieve the same objectives? And not every compromise is the same in weight," Emanuel says.

On health care, for example, the White House insists that compromise was the only way to get the necessary 60 votes in the U.S. Senate.

Emanuel also cautions that having the president score so high on votes where he took a stand is not at all the same thing as having the White House get everything it wanted.

It will get tougher for the president in Congress this year, as more and more members of Congress look to their own re-election. Many are running in districts that voted for Republican John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. And even other districts are far from safe for the Democratic Party.