2 posts tagged “congress”
The two candidates have now virtually no time to change the momentum in time for election day: McCain cannot capture enough attention on the national stage and Obama has shown himself remarkably accident proof. Reasonable goals the McCain-Palin ticket can aim for must be to stop an all out rout of the Republican Party, ceding one party control of the White House and the two Houses of Congress. There is also valuable work to be done by the Republicans to try and frame the debate and at least some of the issues that the new Obama Administration will take on. How this is done without surrendering is going to be incredibly difficult for the Republicans.
Obama must seek as big a mandate as possible. Only with a resounding endorsement will he have the power that, he should argue, the current situation necessitates. The Democrats will have the poisoned legacy of a financial system in turmoil and a war to end. The problem for them is that they will be expected to bring an elegant end to them both. This is much easier to suppose than to execute. Unless there is a clear timetable to work to six months passes remarkably quickly and that is about as long a political honeymoon as any person or party in power can expect.
Even with the conclusion of the election beyond doubt – there is much to play for in these last days.
Speaker of the House, Nanacy Pelosi, should have taken the opportunity of the vote yesterday to sound grand-eloquent and all embracing. Instead she ceded both political and strategic ground by taking a side shot at the Administration, the Congressional Republicans and the Republican Party. This was a mistake.
Patently, the Republicans were to blame for the failure of the vote. This is both clear from the breakdown of command of their own party that defied their party lines as well as by the ideological reservation of those that did so. The fact that two thirds of the Democratic Party voted for the bill should have cleared the way for the Democrats to label the Republicans as the ‘wreckers’ of the package.
Instead of this clear cut clarity (that the voters like) Pelosi’s words were enough to muddy the waters. Against charges leveled against the Congressional Republicans, the Republican Party through Rudolf Giuliani and others could point to these very public utterances that it was out of synchronization with at least the spirit of the bill. The worst thing is that her words clearly had no affect i.e. they were not the main driver of the ‘nay’ vote. But it was a pure gift of political capital to the Republicans who can now claim a) to have supported the survival package b) to have rejected unnecessary expense to the tax payer and c) to have attempted to act in a bipartisan manner. The Republicans must be grateful to Nancy Pelosi.
