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Much of the frenzied activity took place this week behind closed doors (and most decidedly not on C-SPAN), as healthcare reform entered its final negotiating phase. President Obama even decided to get involved, meaning we must be almost at the end of the fight. Ahem.
Let's be blunt -- this coming year may be Obama's last, best chance to have a successful presidency. Or, at the very least, make any progress at all on his agenda. Because, no matter what happens in the House of Representatives, all it is going to take is Democrats losing one or two seats in the Senate for massive legislative gridlock to descend upon the Nation's Capital until 2012.
So here is my suggestion for a survey to send out to that multimillion-name email list. A quick quiz for OFA supporters, as it were. Actually, to save time, I would suggest just choosing 1,000 names off the list at random, and send the quiz out to them. Because I would bet that even a random sampling of their supporters right now would be cause for deep concern at the White House. At the very least, it would tend to give Gibbs (and his boss) some sort of idea why they have lost so much support so quickly.
To be blunt, Obama needs to pick a few fights. Healthcare reform is winding up, but this particular fight has been so long and hard-fought that even proponents of the reform bill are exhausted and would really prefer not to hear or talk about it much longer. This is telling, because Democrats (all the way up to Obama) have simply not done a good job on the communications front during this battle. Who would have thought, a year ago, that Obama's main problems would be a lack of communication skills, and a perceived lack of passion in fighting for what he said he believed in?
So please don't read the rest of this article as a defense of Harry Reid, for sheer political reasons. Reid has a few political options now, none of which have much to do with what he said to a reporter during the 2008 presidential campaign: he can stick it out, hoping for an upset victory which would allow him to remain Majority Leader; he can step down from the leadership position, campaign as just another senator in the midterms; or he can announce he will not be running this year, and give another Democrat a shot at his Senate seat. My preference would actually be for that last one, but my political instincts tell me that he'll run and not step down from his leadership spot, choosing instead to "tough it out," and hoping that he can spend enough during the campaign to convince Silver State voters to send him back to Washington.
UPDATE: [15:30 Pacific]
OK, everything is uploaded, so all old links should be working. Site seems stable for now. There are still bugs and things not working exactly right, but I'm still working on them, so hopefully they'll get better.
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Which is why I'm actually feeling pretty good about Democrats' chances in the upcoming election. We think we can energize our base, and convince swing voters that we are the ones offering good ideas for moving the country forward. And, with Republicans offering nothing more than a vision of moving this country backwards, we think our chances are actually pretty good this year -- especially since it looks like Republicans will be defending more open seats than Democrats.
[Note: Since we spent much of the week either looking back at 2009 or looking forward to what 2010 has in store, I thought my New Year's column from the beginning of 2009 was worth looking at again, to see how my suggestions for New Year's resoultions from last year stacked up against reality.
This column [...]
First off, I'd like to thank all my readers for their continued patience. If all goes well, today will be the final "re-run" column in a long time. Because this weekend is going to be Upgrade Weekend here at ChrisWeigant.com. So allow me to present an Upgrade Weekend FAQ for you here.
What [...]
President Barack Obama has the potential of having a pretty good second year in office. Conventional inside-the-Beltway wisdom is that "nothing much gets done in a congressional election year," but this ignores the fact that life itself does not halt for electioneering, but rather keeps right on happening. And there are quite a few positive things either explicitly scheduled for 2010, or at least very likely to happen. This doesn't automatically mean the president is guaranteed to have a great year, but it certainly sets the scene for Obama managing to have a fairly good year.