Congressional Members fear their jobs are next
Of all the numbers swirling around this week Capitol Hill this week – health care whip counts, CBO estimates, winning and losing margins in Virginia, New York and New Jersey – one stands out from the rest: 10.2 percent.
That’s the national unemployment rate. And lawmakers from both parties know that, if it doesn’t go down dramatically before next November, they could be adding to it themselves.
“I think anytime unemployment is high and people are concerned about their jobs, the economy, incumbents on both sides of the aisle need to be concerned,” Republican Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker said Friday. “What people care most about is food, clothing and shelter. Period. .... When food, clothing and shelter are sort of impacted, their base lives are impacted, it definitely sours the public as it should. Usually the party in power takes the brunt of that, but it affects all incumbents."
With control of the White House and Congress, Democrats have the most to lose if jobless numbers remain high. But like Corker, Democrats insist that incumbents in both parties will feel the pain.
“I think it’s bad for incumbents in general. You’d have to be a fool not to realize that,” said Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley, whose home state of Nevada has a jobless rate in excess of 14 percent. “The way our fellow citizens register their concern is at the ballot box … if the unemployment numbers don’t go down, if there’s no relief, they will express their frustration in November 2010.”
Between Friday’s numbers and the election results earlier in the week, Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) said it’s “pretty evident” now that there’s “an anti-incumbent mood out there.”
“We all need to know that, and just work hard to try the best that we can here in Washington,” he said.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat from the hard-hit state from Michigan, said Friday she's "certainly open" to a second economic stimulus package to reverse the staggering unemployment rate.
"I think we all have to very much pay attention to what's happening to real families," Stabenow said when asked about the political impact of the unemployment numbers. "Everything we're doing is aimed at middle class families, helping families, turning around main street."
But Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan, who faces reelection in the red state of North Dakota, said Friday that a second economic stimulus package isn't the way to go, criticizing the first package for placing a "small" emphasis on transportation and infrastructure projects that could have created more jobs.
"I think health care is important, climate change is important, I think by far the most important issue for this country is lifting the economy and putting people to work," Dorgan said. "This is not about a stimulus, it's about the right kind of policies to incentivize small and medium sized businesses to create jobs."
Republicans argue that an unemployment rate higher than it has been in more than a quarter of a century is evidence that the Democratic agenda isn’t putting Americans back to work. They say the situation will be made worse if Congress and President Obama enact a health care overhaul that will require $1 trillion in tax hikes and entitlement cuts to expand insurance coverage.
“Ten-point-two now makes it hard for the majority to sell their agenda,” said Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.
“All I know is that Speaker Pelosi is trying to force her members to vote for a bill that the American people have soundly rejected,” added House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).
Democrats counter that their agenda has kick-started a recovery n Wall Street, even if it hasn’t trickled down to the job market yet, and that Republicans are putting what they’ve begun at risk.
Still, they’re anxious to show they are working on new solutions to help Americans who are out of work.
“With the unemployment rate at 10.2 percent, the highest since the early 1980s, Congress should consider a range of job-creation policies including a jobs tax credit bill I plan to introduce,” Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) said. “While a jobs tax credit wouldn’t fix all the challenges businesses face, it would be an effective tool in helping some firms hire more workers. Job creation must be a top priority for Congress and I will continue to look for ways to help get Americans back to work.”
For Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), who has a safe seat, the answer is to get more stimulus dollars flowing.
“We’ve got to push getting those stimulus dollars out that are clogged in the system,” she said.
Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-Mo.) said a new highway bill would help immediately with job creation.
Democrats will focus even more on job creation once Congress finishes the debate on health care, said Sen. Mark Begich, a freshman Democrat elected from deeply Republican Alaska in 2008.
If at this time next year the public doesn’t think Congress is doing enough on the economy and jobs, he said, Democrats will be in trouble.
"If we are working hard, showing we're trying to move the economy in the right direction, working on creating long-term jobs and rebuilding this economy, I think the American people will recognize that," Begich said. "If we are not doing anything or we're limiting what we're doing and the rate is maybe inching a little bit, that becomes problematic."
Democrats see lessons in defeat of Creigh Deeds
Faced with the choice of running as an unapologetic Democrat in a state trending toward his party or keeping his distance from Washington in the fashion of a generation of Southern Democrats, Creigh Deeds tried to do both.
The result: the worst drubbing a Virginia gubernatorial candidate has received since 1961.
As Democrats try to glean lessons from Tuesday’s election losses, Deeds’s case offers a vivid example of the difficulties that their candidates from Republican-leaning or swing states will face heading into the midterm elections.
The quandary is how to motivate the so-called surge voters who flocked to the polls, often for the first time, to elect President Barack Obama while also not angering the independent voters who are increasingly wary of the policies coming out of the capital and, according to exit polls, moved sharply to the GOP in both the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial contests.
It was a challenge — energizing the base without losing swing voters — that paralyzed Deeds, sparked internal debates within his campaign and ultimately haunted his candidacy.
Running in a rapidly changing state that has seen a Democratic ascendancy capped by Obama’s victory there last year, Deeds was urged, immediately after he won the nomination in June, by Democratic National Committee Chairman and Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine to link himself to the president, according to a senior Democratic official.
“I always thought the path to victory was to embrace the president and thereby energize the tremendous amount of supporters of the president in Virginia, particularly because it was going to be a low-turnout race,” Kaine said in an interview.
“The campaign strategy was to embrace the president as much as realistically possible,” insisted a top campaign official.
Campaign manager Joe Abbey noted that soon after the primary, the campaign had Obama send an e-mail to his Virginia supporters, welcomed Vice President Joe Biden to the state for a fundraiser and touted their support from the president in radio ads.
But as the summer went on, and support for health care reform foundered in the face of the raucous August town halls, Deeds’s advisers saw a changing political climate. “Independents slid away nationwide,” said Mike Gehrke, the campaign’s communications director.
Inside Deeds’s headquarters, some of his advisers grew nervous.
“As Obama took a summer nose dive in polls, the campaign misread that and freaked out,” said a senior Virginia Democrat close to the campaign. “They decided that on these key issues that were killing us with independents, we had to do everything to distance ourselves.”
Some of his aides argued for a more unapologetic approach, noting that, as Kaine declared after Obama’s win in the state, “Ole Virginny” was no more. With Democrats on the march in Virginia, there was no need to cower in fear of being pegged as a liberal.
On issues such as health care and energy where his Republican opponent Bob McDonnell tied him to Washington, Deeds could have responded by going on the offensive and accusing his rival of wanting to do nothing to expand coverage or find pro-growth solutions to climate change, said strategists in this camp.
“There was a way to keep the base engaged without pissing off independents,” said an adviser.
Kaine was also an advocate for not watering down the message. “I don’t think there’s a problem with just [saying], ‘Hey, gosh I’m a Democrat, and I’m proud of it, and let me tell you why,’” he said. “I don’t think you need to back away from it at all.”
But, seeing swing voters flee the Democratic Party, that’s not what Deeds did.
For years, Virginia Democrats ran in a way that emphasized the “Virginia” over the “Democrat,” always careful to not be identified with the more liberal national party. Hailing from rural Bath County, along the West Virginia border, this was the background from which Deeds came up in local and then state politics.
“For a lot of these guys like him, it’s just in their political DNA [to avoid being depicted as national Democrats],” lamented a senior Deeds official.
So when he was asked at a September debate if Obama was his kind of Democrat, Deeds struggled.
“I’m a Creigh Deeds Democrat,” he replied, even while acknowledging his support for the president on many issues.
At a debate the following month — frustrated by the unrelenting attacks by McDonnell and outside groups that portrayed him as supporting cap and trade — Deeds grew angry, shot back that he did not support the legislation before Congress and accused McDonnell of lying — a violation of Virginia’s decorous campaign rules.
And in the final debate, he hurt himself again by suggesting that he may support Virginia’s opting out of any public health care plan, a statement that drew howls from liberals.
In an interview with POLITICO and ABC 7/WJLA-TV in early October, Deeds voiced the challenge himself: “Frankly, a lot of what’s going on in Washington has made it very tough.”
A Deeds adviser said the notion that the campaign ran from Obama “is just not true.”
But he said the campaign had to carve out some separation from the national party on issues that were showing up in their polling as political losers — like cap and trade.
In August, the campaign conducted a poll of the Obama “surge” voters. They were found to be young, mostly well-educated, largely located in Tidewater and suburban Washington, the two population centers in the state — and disconnected from state issues. They also lacked land lines and watched little local news.
“They don’t acquire political information in ways that average voters do,” said a senior Deeds official. “So we had a content problem and delivery-of-message problem.”
But they were found to be in favor of abortion rights and culturally liberal. So in an effort to appeal to both swing voters and the Obama set, the campaign launched an offensive that focused on a graduate school thesis that McDonnell wrote that was derisive of working women and gays.
“We tested it,” said Abbey, the manager. “And it seemed to be a way to kill two birds with one stone.”
Along with focusing on McDonnell’s opposition to abortion, the idea was to shock both middle-aged, centrist suburbanites and disengaged young liberals out of their political slumber and give them a reason to tune in. They won some support from the effort but were unable to pivot to a broader message. “There just wasn’t a second act,” said an aide.
Part of the problem was that cultural issues were simply not on the minds of an electorate consumed with economic issues and local matters such as roads and schools. And those were precisely the topics McDonnell focused on. “McDonnell ran as the moderate Democrat,” quipped a White House official.
Further, and beyond his own hedging on health care and energy, Deeds did little to inspire the Obama loyalists. “It’s fair to say we didn’t put out enough of a positive message to capture their imagination,” said Kevin Mack, a top Deeds adviser.
Ultimately, Deeds hugged the president, airing a last-gasp ad that featured Obama singing his praises and appearing with him in Norfolk a week before the election. But by then, the race was out of hand.
Virginia is a unique state — Gehrke quipped that it was like “Connecticut and Alabama smashed together” — but the president’s approval ratings there are similar to what they are nationwide.
Other states present similar political terrain — a mix of conservatives and liberals with a majority of moderates. And now other Democrats will grapple with the same challenge of appealing to independents souring on the party and Obama loyalists.
“Deeds handled both poorly,” said a Virginia Democrat close to the campaign.
Asked what advice could be offered to Democrats running in circumstances like that of Deeds, this Democrat said to run to Obama, not from him: “You’re going to own him anyway.”
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Sources: Politico, Google Maps
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