David Brooks warns the president:
Obama's challenge was to push his agenda through a Democratic-controlled government while retaining the affection of the 39 percent of Americans in the middle.
The administration hasn't been able to pull it off. From the stimulus to health care, it has joined itself at the hip to the liberal leadership in Congress. The White House has failed to veto measures, like the pork-laden omnibus spending bill, that would have demonstrated independence and fiscal restraint. By force of circumstances and by design, the president has promoted one policy after another that increases spending and centralizes power in Washington.
Brooks talks about the stimulus, health care, the budget, but he doesn't mention cap and trade. It's an odd omission. I've talked to a lot of Republicans and a few Democrats on the Hill, most point to cap and trade as the point at which things really began to fall apart for the left. Clearly Democrats underestimated the toll that the stimulus would take on Obama's agenda. Putting Joe Biden in charge of selling it as a success is proof enough that they didn't understand how important it was for the stimulus to be perceived as something other than a total failure, if not an outright success. But then came cap and trade, and Nancy Pelosi and the Obama administration stood behind the Blue Dogs telling them to advance in the face of withering fire -- and threatening to shoot them in the back if they didn't. Advance they did, but the Senate never picked up the legislation, and it has no serious plans to. The Blue Dogs took a huge risk for nothing.
All of which explains this quote from the Politico today:
And House Democrats appear more than willing to play a game of chicken with the Senate to avoid taking a politically treacherous vote without a guarantee that the upper chamber is going to do something. In fact, the House may wait until a bill is headed to the Senate floor - something that doesn't happen unless the Senate majority leader believes he has the votes to pass it.
"We're not going to make our guys walk off the cliff without seeing what the hell the Senate does," said one House Democratic leadership aide.
Cap and trade was the overreach moment -- that was where Obama really started to lose the middle.
