"If I only had a brain!"
Posted on 10/25/2006 9:51:57 AM PDT by listenhillary
Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers, Barney Frank and Charlie Rangel may be the Democrats that Republicans are trying to get voters to hate. But if the House goes Democratic this fall, the agenda to watch may belong to John Dingell, the Michigan Democrat in line to return as chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Sane Democrats understand, after all, that Conyers' rantings about the need to repeal the Patriot Act or hold impeachment hearings would be a non-starter with the public. There is little chance Rangel will be able to persuade Congress to repeal the Bush tax cuts. Even if she wanted to, San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi wouldn't get very far with the social agenda favored by San Francisco Democrats.
But the House Energy and Commerce Committee has its fingers in nearly every nook and cranny of the American economy. And for those who complain that the Democrats lack a serious domestic agenda, Dingell, can be expected to single-handedly make up for the gap. Dingell, who has spent slightly more than 50 of his 80 years in Congress, has never been a shrinking violet when it came to the exercise of power - but neither is he a raving ideologue.
Thus in a recent interview he resisted the temptation to gloat over the current polls (or that Republicans in Michigan were unable to come up with a candidate to run against him). "There's an old saying that before you sell a bear hide you've got to shoot the bear," as he puts it. "The voters usually have their own ideas about these things."
(Keep reading)
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
Oh, they've got ideas all right. And virtually every one of them will take money from me and give it to deadbeats to buy their continued votes.
Oh of course they have ideas, but they're all bad or inconsequential.
Bit more from the article.
Of course, as humorist P.J. O'Rourke once pointed out, if you think health care is expensive now, wait until it's "free." And in even daring to raise the possibility of what Republicans like to term "socialized medicine," Dingell risks reminding Republicans why they should get to the polls. But Dingell makes one thing clear: while there may not be many new ideas on the Democratic side of the aisle, as many Democrats themselves have complained, there are plenty of old -- arguably bad -- ideas awaiting resurrection.
The Dems basically have just one idea: "More, more, more, more. Give me more!"
"If I only had a brain!"
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