Posted on 12/01/2014 4:59:07 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Majorities disapprove of Obama’s immigration move and still see Democrats as being against them. And most Democrats still don’t get it.
The Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition is fraying. Just ask Sen. Chuck Schumer; he’ll tell you. Last week, Schumer announced that the Democrats had lost touch with Middle America, and that Barack Obama’s agenda was out of sync with middle-class needs and expectations. For Schumer—the third-ranking Senate Democrat and his caucus’s chief message-crafter—to go on the record like that, things must really be bad. Apparently, 2016 is not shaping up as a Democratic slam dunk.
At the moment, the public’s discontent is palpable. The numbers show an America disdainful of the President’s signature achievements. Absolute majorities disapprove of Obama’s unilateral move on immigration, as well as the Affordable Care Act.
And Obama’s slide is having repercussions. Hillary Clinton now polls under 50 percent when pitted against all prospective Republican challengers, including firebrand Sen. Ted Cruz, and is tied in head-to-head matchups with Mitt Romney and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
On one level, Schumer’s analysis was granular. He argued that Obama wrongly rammed Obamacare through Congress, despite the fact that most Americans cared more about jobs and wages than about healthcare in the midst of the Great Recession. According to Schumer, Obama and his administration had misinterpreted their 2008 electoral mandate. New York’s senior senator also pegged the ACA as the political equivalent of a fool’s errand, noting that “only a third of the uninsured are even registered to vote . . . only 5% of the electorate.”
On another level Schumer went large, and drew a critical distinction between the two parties. He owned up to the fact that the Democrats were the Government Party. Yet, this may prove to be the Democrats’ bigger problem as they attempt to get out from under November’s wreckage. For the Democrats to win as the Government Party, activist government must demonstrate that it both works and is trustworthy.
Right now, however, government is perceived as failing on both scores. The rollout of Obamacare was a disaster, and the President’s promise that if you liked your insurance you could keep it was false from the start. To top it off, it now turns out Jonathan Gruber, an Obamacare architect, was busy deriding Americans as stupid, even while pushing for cuts to healthcare for the elderly and glomming millions of dollars from government contracts.
But these days, government doesn’t just seem untrustworthy; it looks downright malevolent to many. Remember Lois Lerner? The missing and presumed destroyed Internal Revenue Service emails have finally been recovered—about 30,000 emails to be exact—no thanks to the IRS. Even worse for fans of activist government, taxpayer information may have been shared by the taxman with the White House. Not surprisingly, Schumer, who also sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which has direct jurisdiction over the IRS, has had little to say about the IRS having gone rogue, other than to have earlier goaded the IRS to go after the Tea Party.
The reality is that federal civil servants act like Democratic Party adjuncts, and so trust in government won’t come easy anytime soon. Department of Justice and IRS employees collectively donated nearly $140,000 to Obama’s presidential campaigns. On the other hand, Mitt Romney netted approximately $28,000 from both DOJ and IRS employees, and McCain cobbled together little more than a paltry $5,200. By contrast, in 2012, the military vote split down the middle between Obama and Romney, according to exit polls.
If the Democrats are to get to past the Republican takeover of the Senate, they will need to again start talking about jobs, wages, and upward mobility; get beyond the politics of grievance and identity, and reach out to middle-income voters who are not public employees. That task, however, is easier said than done, with the culture gap underlying both parties’ strategies of capturing an electoral majority.
For the Democrats, George McGovern’s Coalition of the Ascendant has supplanted FDR’s New Deal Coalition. The Democrats have gone from a party of Southern whites, urban ethnics, and minorities to a high-end-low-end amalgam of coastal and cultural elites sitting atop of a minority base, with the former providing the cash that drives campaigns and the latter bloc providing the votes. In the process, the Democrats have become more diverse, but also less tied to middle-income voters. Indeed, a majority of Democratic voters will be minority voters shortly after the next census is taken.
As the 2010 and 2014 midterms showed, the Democrats’ strategy has is limits. Young voters, single women, and minorities may be enough to get a Democrat elected and re-elected as president, but they are an insufficient by themselves to act as an effective governing bloc. The rest of America matters, particularly when the rest of America is expected to pick up the tab for the Democrats’ wish-list.
For the moment, Schumer is being treated as a truth-teller. One thing he’s not, though, is a profile in courage or another Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York’s late senator and former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Back in the day, Moynihan was a candid critic of the Health Security Act or Hillarycare, the brainchild of the then-First Lady and 2016 Democratic frontrunner.
In early 1994, Moynihan observed, “We don’t have a health care crisis in America. We have a welfare crisis.” Moynihan also noted that “anyone who thinks [the Clinton health care plan] can work in the real world as presently written isn’t living in it.” The Clintons paid little mind to Moynihan’s take on things. By the end of that year, Hillarycare was history, and the Republicans had recaptured the Congress. Schumer should have spoken up much sooner.
I see this as nothing but damage control. Does ANYONE believe the Dems will act any differently the next time they have more control again???
A good year for speculation..
A bad year for America!
All this is malignant BS and yet further dishonesty by the DIMs/LIBs to obfiscate their true selves. They are proven chronic liars. Liars have a personality fault...they will never change. DIMs are the Pants-On-Fire party.
LOL. Hillary Clinton is the George McClellan of the Democratic Party. She has all the resources, she has all the battle plans, she is well rested and ready to do battle, but she screws it up because, just like McClellan, she brings herself to the battle. The article is right, if Hillary is the nominee, it definitely is no slam dunk.
Obama?
Blacks are getting more racist. I don’t think they’ll turn out for a white Democrat nominee. But there’s no black Dem candidate with national standing.
Now, I’d believe it if the MSM was fair and balanced, but I won’t believe it until I hear PRESIDENT ELECT TED CRUZ...
I suspect Team Hillary sent Chucky out there to begin their campaign to disassociate her and the Democratic Party from the president. They are clearly worried that the president’s continuing political meltdown will drag them all down in 2016. There will be other Hillary backers sent out there to do the same thing but they’re all joined at the hip and I think Hillary, like Willard on our side, will be a two time loser for the presidency. Also, watch to see the Obama wing of the party launch their own salvos on Hillary and Elizabeth Warren getting more face time in the media.
I’ve often said that the democrat party is a coalition of the wealthy and the poor against the middle class. The party works hard not to let poor people become middle class and middle class people become wealthy.
“Absolute majorities disapprove of Obama’s unilateral move on immigration, as well as the Affordable Care Act.”
Apparently that news has not penetrated the Establishment Republican “leadership” team. They’re afraid to back up the absolute majorities on this because they’re afraid Barry will say “boo.”
The Dems have gone from ascendant and dominant to near dead in such a short time span. Pelosi was majority leader not so long ago, but now leads the smallest contingent from either party in nearly a century.
The Senate may only be Republican for 2 years, as the election of 2016 puts many more Republicans than Democrats at risk. But the flip side of this is that if the Dems don’t make serious headway in 2016 they are up a creek for a long time.
If the Dems screw things up as badly as I think they will in the next two years, it will take them a generation or longer to dig out.
This explains why the Southern Democrats are speaking out. Their party is in complete control of wealthy, white elite progressives on the coasts and in the beltway. The Southern Democrats have been wiped out because the party isn’t representing blue-collar and poor whites anymore.
Blacks are against bringing in another 5 million people to compete against them for jobs and depress wages.
GOP ought to realize that plummeting wages under Obama and high Black adult UE and Youth UE make it possible to convince blacks that the Dems have taken them for granted and now Illegals are more important to Dems than blacks are in their base.
For Schumer to say what he did means either he has had a moment of honest sanity (it ain’t gonna happen) or as another poster (originalbuckeye)said, it is a coverup/damage control effort to save the ass of the Democrat Party from another voter pounding.
Schumer gives “slime” a good name and was voted “Snake Oil Salesman” of the century, by me.
Always be aware of any snake, esp. one that leads the Democrat Party.
Chuckie is a capo of the Clinton Crime Family.
The lib comments in the bottom are unconscionable, their heads must live in a blender!
I went to the local Social Security office today after becoming frustrated trying to deal with them via phone (hours on hold) or mail. Aside from having armed Federal officers in the waiting room (why I have no idea) the place looked like the bar room scene from Star Wars. It even spilled out into the hallway with people literally sleeping on the floor in the hall. Most people were no where near retirement age. I can only assume they are all playing the disability scam.
The guard advised me that the best time to get there was very early morning without having to sit through that.
What does the nation do when that many people are looking for handouts?
They aren't that much different than the Establishment Democrat leadership team.
We need to understand that both 'establishment teams' are there to serve the 'Establishment Washington Bureaucracy' not the people of the United States. They may have a couple billion dollar differences in spending priorities, but overall they are both in favor of more government, more bureaucracy.
It is not the political parties fighting against each other anymore. They are pretty much united on the side of the permanent government bureaucracy.
I fear we do not have much time left. The question is if we as a nation have the guts to fight back against them and this oppressive self serving bureaucracy which is really calling all the shots and shredding the Constitution step by step.
Obama=Democrat Party=Obama=Democrat Party
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.