Author: Jane Hamsher

One thing you find out pretty quickly when dealing with beltway press is that Rahm Emanuel is a source for most of them, and that they’re generally unwilling to criticize him lest they blow up one of their best sources of White House spin. So, it’s rare that a journalist (in this case the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Wallsten, recently arrived from the LA Times) runs a non-lapdog profile.

Most amusing to me was the fact that he finally got the goods about Rahm’s famous Veal Pen tirade, when Rahm showed up at the Common Purpose meeting and lambasted the liberal interest groups because MoveOn was running radio ads against Blue Dogs. Previously it had been reported that Rahm called them “f*#king stupid,” even though the scuttlebut was that Rahm said they were “f*#king retards.” It’s a tight-lipped crowd to penetrate, and nobody wants to get zapped from the meetings for talking to the press. But Wallsten managed to get the story:

The friction was laid bare in August when Mr. Emanuel showed up at a weekly strategy session featuring liberal groups and White House aides. Some attendees said they were planning to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who were balking at Mr. Obama’s health-care overhaul.

“F—ing retarded,” Mr. Emanuel scolded the group, according to several participants. He warned them not to alienate lawmakers whose votes would be needed on health care and other top legislative items.

Yesterday a journalist asked me if I thought Rahm was a “tough guy,” because he’s hearing many people say that he’s actually shallow and weak. I pointed him to this famous story:

[T]he definitive Rahm Emanuel story takes place in Little Rock, Ark., in the heady days after Bill Clinton was first elected President.

It was there that Emanuel, then Clinton’s chief fund-raiser, repaired with George Stephanopoulos, Mandy Grunwald and other aides to Doe’s, the campaign hangout. Revenge was heavy in the air as the group discussed the enemies – Democrats, Republicans, members of the press – who wronged them during the 1992 campaign. Clifford Jackson, the ex-friend of the President and peddler of the Clinton draft-dodging stories, was high on the list. So was William Donald Schaefer, then the Governor of Maryland and a Democrat who endorsed George Bush. Nathan Landow, the fund-raiser who backed the candidacy of Paul Tsongas, made it, too.

Suddenly Emanuel grabbed his steak knife and, as those who were there remeber it, shouted out the name of another enemy, lifted the knife, then brought it down with full force into the table.

”Dead!” he screamed.

That’s not “tough.”

“Tough” is knowing you’re going to take massive shit for standing up to powerful interests and then doing it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do — that’s what Obama told people he would do when he was running for President.

You’re not a tough guy if your first thought upon assuming the power of the Presidency is to use it to punish your enemies. You’re a cowardly, petty, small-minded thug.

I’m sure Rahm spreads the knife story around to promote the myth of himself as a rebel and a fighter, but most people experience “that guy” as a brown nose for power ready to rumble on behalf of the status-quo.

It’s like watching a sixth grader snatch the lunch money from a kindergartner for calling him a bully. The day that becomes “tough” is the day Rahm fits the bill.

 

It’s looking bleak for House Democrats in 2010. Stu Rothenberg says recent polling by FDL and DailyKos “show Democratic incumbents in horrible shape — about where Republicans were in 2006 and 2008.” And this morning, he shifts 28 seats toward the GOP.

The corporate bootlicking of Senate “centrists” and House Blue Dogs has taken a huge toll across the country.

The Blue Dogs are on their own — they did this to themselves, sucking up huge donations from lobbyists and letting them write the health care bill. But our online community can be a big help to progressives.

We want to know which members of Congress you think we should help

We can, of course, raise money. But our online tools and organizing abilities have grown tremendously, and we’re light years ahead of the GOP.

When 65 Democrats voted for Stupak, FDL PAC’s “One Voice for Choice” project bought lists of likely Democratic voters in those districts and then phone banked directly to those households to alert them to what was going on. It was largely conducted below the radar, but we wound up with over 21,000 voters who often didn’t know what was happening, and who added their names to a list opposing the amendment:

District	Member of Congress	Likely Dem 2010 Voters who oppose Stupak	District	Member of Congress	Likely Dem 2010 Voters who oppose Stupak
PA 04	Altmire	1857	OH 09	Kaptur	842
AR 01	Berry	1049	RI 02	Langevin	1443
OH 16	Bocceiri	994	IL 03	Lipinski	1545
TN 05	Cooper	817	NC 07	McIntyre	1689
OH 01	Driehaus	989	AR 04	Ross	1207
NC 02	Ethridge	1397	NC 11	Shuler	1834
TN 06	Gordon	2037	AR 02	Snyder	1371
PA 17	Holden	1038	TN 08	Tanner	1111
Total					21200

Many of these Democratic voters didn’t know where their Reps stood, and we were able to direct them to contact their Reps to oppose Stupak.

In a close race, a thousand or two thousand Democratic voters can make the difference. These members of Congress need these Democrats to show up for them at the polls in 2010. They’re the ones that they lost sight of in their zeal to appeal to the extreme right wing.

“Fascinating New Force in Politics”

Our tools can also be used to identify and turn out voters to support members of Congress who have been willing to fight on the issues we care about. We can recruit volunteers, inform people about campaign events, promote the work of these members and help them to achieve reform that encourages accountability and transparency. Mike Allen called the One Voice for Choice district campaign a “fascinating new force in politics” on Morning Joe, and we want to use it to help progressives to keep their seats.

If you think your member of Congress is someone we should help, please nominate them (your nomination will only count if you’re a resident of the district). The deadline is midnight tomorrow night. We’ll start the voting Wednesday, which will be open to the entire community.

Who should it be? Raul Grijalva, Alan Grayson, Dennis Kucinich? Eric Massa, Carol-Shea Porter, Emanuel Cleaver? Someone else?

Let’s help our friends. You decide who that should be.

Nominate your member of Congress for the FDL 2010 election support program.

 

Marion Berry takes a swipe at Obama on his way out the door:

Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.

“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”

What a crock.

According to the Center for Public Integrity:

So far this year, the Blue Dog Political Action Committee is on track to shatter all its fundraising records; in fact, the total for the first six months of 2009 — more than $1.1 million — is greater than what was raised in the entire 2003-04 fundraising cycle. Furthermore, according to analysis by the Center for Public Integrity of CQ MoneyLine data, the energy, financial services, and health care industries have accounted for nearly 54 percent of the Blue Dog PAC’s 2009 receipts (up from 45 percent in 2004).

Opensecrets ranked the 52 members of the Blue Dog caucus in order of money they had taken from the health sector since 1989. Berry came in 10th at $571,664.

Marion Berry is the Vice Chair of the Blue Dog health care task force.  The Blue Dogs were responsible for jamming every single shitty piece of lobbyist-written legislation into the health care bill.  They decided early on to try to make the House bill more like the Senate bill, because they said that would be more popular.  Take a look at the polling — it isn’t by a long shot.  In swing districts like Berry’s.

If Berry wants to blame anyone, he should look to his Blue Dog bretheren who have been soaking up the lobbyist cash — and delivering.

Did Obama put a gun to his head and make him take it or something?

 

It’s not every day that the head of the DCCC takes on the President, the Senate and the entire Democratic leadership of the House to defy passage of their hand-crafted legislation on their signature issue. But Chris Van Hollen has said that the House will not pass the Senate bill without changes, as the Senate and the White House are demanding.

Why would the man charged with getting House Democrats elected in 2010 do such a thing?

Well, if you look at the polling, provisions that limit the ability of insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions or impose lifetime caps on benefits are popular across the board. What gets people worked up is the pricetag: who pays and where the money goes.

Conclusion #1: People want a public option as a check on the insurance industry

When Anzalone Liszt Research and Lake Research Partners polled likely voters in September 2009 and asked them which they preferred — an individual mandate to buy insurance from a private company, or the the individual mandate with the choice of a public option, here’s what they found:

Senate Bill

National

House Swing

Maine

House Bill

National

House Swing

Maine

Individual mandate

Favor

Oppose

Favor

Oppose

Favor

Oppose

Mandate + PO

Favor

Oppose

Favor

Oppose

Favor

Oppose

“Requiring everyone to buy and be covered by a private health insurance plan”

34%

64%

34%

60%

35%

55%

“Requiring everyone to buy and be covered by a health insurance plan with a choice between a public option and private insurance plans”

60%

37%

50%

46%

55%

40%

In swing districts — the ones we’re supposed to be concerned about protecting, which is apparently why they let the Blue Dogs send women’s reproductive rights back to the stone age — they just don’t like being forced to pay money to private insurance companies. And I actually don’t think this is an adequate snapshot of what people really feel about the individual mandate, because when we polled swing districts we found that what people really objected to was not the mandate but the fine of up to 2% of their annual income for non-compliance. Our numbers had an even bigger swing for Arkansas-02, Ohio 01, New York 01 and Indiana 09.

Still, by every measurement they took, the mandate plus public option in the House bill was overwhelmingly more popular than the Senate bill’s mandate alone, which was never favored by more than 35%. But the idea that removing the public option from the House bill rendered it more popular in swing districts is laughable.

Conclusion #2 People would rather have wealthy people foot the bill than have their existing insurance coverage weakened

Now let’s look at how the Senate and House plans compare with regard to taxes they impose in order to pay for their respective bills. The Lake/Anzalone polls also looked at the popularity of the excise tax in the Senate bill vs. the tax on the wealthy in the House bill:

Senate Bill

National

House Swing

Maine

House Bill

National

House Swing

Maine

“Cadillac”Tax

Favor

Oppose

Favor

Oppose

Favor

Oppose

Tax on wealthy

Favor

Oppose

Favor

Oppose

Favor

Oppose

“Placing a tax on the highest-cost private insurance policies in order to pay for health care reform”

41%

54%

29%

55%

40%

50%

“Raising taxes on households making more than three hundred fifty thousand dollars a year in order to pay for health care reform”

60%

40%

53%

43%

57%

38%

The polling finds that the House surcharge is significantly more popular in swing districts than the Cadillac tax. The Anzalone pollsters also found that “voters are less likely to re-elect their member of Congress or President Obama by margins of 41 points (63% less likely to 22% more likely) and 38 points (61% to 23%), respectively, if they support an excise tax.” Those are numbers that must give House Democrats nightmares.

Okay, are we getting the picture here? Good. Because we’re just getting started. It gets worse.

They also find that Independent voters flee over the issue: “Across each region, opposition to taxing high-cost insurance plans is even higher among Independents, with 74% of these voters overall opposed to such a tax.”

A couple of anomalous polls maybe? Well, doesn’t appear that way. Recent major polling bears this out:

Senate vs. House	WaPo/ABC Oct. 15-18, 2009		USA Today/Gallup Oct. 16-19, 2009		Associated Press Oct.29-Nov.9 2009		Rasmussen Jan. 18-19, 2010
	Favor	Oppose	Favor	Oppose	Favor	Oppose	Favor	Oppose
Cadillac Tax (Senate)	35%	61%	38%	59%	38%	59%	33%	63%
Tax on wealthy (House)	–	–	61%	34%	61%	34%	64%	35%

Per Rasmussen, opposition rises to the excise tax to 70% if unions are exempted from it — which is in part the proposed “fix” negotiated by the White House. I can only imagine what would happen to those numbers they raise taxes to pay for that fix, which is what they’re going to have to do to come through on the deal with the unions. If they don’t pay for it with a Medicare buy-in type public option or blow up the PhRMA deal, that’s what they’re going to have to do. But nobody seems to be contemplating that.

And nobody has even polled Ben Nelson’s “cornhusker kickback,” which is stuck in the Senate bill. It’s probably slightly less popular than a mass outbreak of typhoid.

So what can we conclude from all of this?

Electoral slaughter is being imposed on the House if they are forced to swallow the Senate bill and honor Rahm Emanuel’s back-room deals

Obama and most Senate incumbents don’t really have to worry about the electoral consequences of getting a “win” and passing the Senate bill. The Senate’s “pride of authorship” and desire to pay off their big donors has rendered them recalcitrant even now that the “60 vote” myth has been blown up. To change the bill all they need now is 51 votes through reconciliation, and they can’t even muster those. No, Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson were just an excuse, a public front for what the White House wanted to do all along. The House can get stuffed: it’s the Senate’s way or the highway.

Democratic House members, however, see their own political futures coming to an end in 2010, in a “we are all Martha Coakley” moment that no amount of spin will take away. Districts like AR-02 and OH-01 were listed as “tossup” races, but polling by SurveyUSA showed the incumbents down 17 points against their Republican opponents.

Sorry, Martha Coakley’s limitations as a candidate do not cast a halo that spreads all the way to Arkansas a week before.

So, Democrats in the House are standing there with pitchforks and telling Chris Van Hollen to get the hell out there and protect them. And Van Hollen, who probably doesn’t want to go down in history as the captain of the 2010 Titanic who lost control of the House for the Democrats, is doing it.

 

I’m going over the call reports and I see that staffers for Yvette Clark (NY-11) are saying she is “undecided” as to whether she’ll vote for the Senate bill or not, and that all the calls she’s getting are from people asking her to vote “for” it:

I spoke to someone named Meena, who said that she had fielded a lot of calls over the past few days from people telling Yvette Clarke to vote for the bill as it stands. She said no one had called to say otherwise. She said she would “probably” make a decision one way or the other by Tuesday 1/26.

That’s curious because Clarke is one of 60 Democrats who signed a letter saying she wouldn’t vote for a bill without a public option, and she has said that her constituents very much want one:

 

One of the ways the administration tried to jam its PhRMA deal/Aetna bailout on the country was forcing a series of false choices onto the debate. Those who opposed this corrupt hijacking of the democratic process were told that the reality was, you gotta have 60 votes in the Senate. And Lieberman, Landrieu, Nelson and Lincoln stood firm, so you had to give them what they wanted.

It was that or nothing. What can you do? We hear “If only we didn’t have the filibuster” as frequently as we heard “if only we had 60 votes” when the Democrats didn’t own the war.

And now, we find out something that may surprise many (though probably not anyone who has watched politics for more than 6 months): it was all bullshit.

Part of the negotiations center on whether Reid can provide an ironclad guarantee that the Senate will not leave the House in the lurch, aides said. If the House agrees to pass the Senate bill with a companion measure — or a “cleanup” bill — to make fixes, they want to know that the Senate will indeed pass it, too.

There was some talk among Senate leadership on Thursday of putting together a letter signed by 51 Democratic senators pledging to pass a cleanup bill if the House would pass the Senate bill. But that effort fizzled when support for it didn’t materialize, insiders said.

“The Senate moderates’ viewpoint is, ‘We passed our bill. We’re not going to spend three weeks on some other bill,’” said a Democratic lobbyist who represents clients pushing for reform.

So how many “moderates” are there now?

The 60 vote bar was always crap. Now that it only takes 51 votes to pass a public option (which the OpenLeft whip count says they have), they can’t clear that either. It’s all about kabuki — who gets to feign support for publicly popular legislation vs. who gets to take credit for bashing the hippies and killing it. The White House wants what it wants, and the Senate — largely insulated from the electoral consequences of the bill — is totally willing to sacrifice those in the House who are much more vulnerable in order to give it to them.

Now the apologists are peddling the “it’s this or nothing” false choice about a bill that won’t even kick in for the next four years, as if their “60 vote” myth didn’t just explode. How is it suddenly Raul Grijalva’s fault if he stands firm and won’t accept a hideous bill crafted on the imperative of getting Joe Lieberman’s vote, which isn’t necessary any more?

Meet 51: it’s the new 60.

Tell the House Progressives to stand firm: keep your word and vote “no” on the Senate bill.