The prospect of the November elections becoming a replay of 1994 has Democrats running scared everywhere except, apparently, the White House, where the famous Obama cool keeps everyone's emotions in check. Sure, losses are expected in the first midterm of a new president, but let's not lose too much sleep over it. Indeed, some of the president's allies think all the attention on the Democrats is misplaced, that the real replay of '94 is happening on the Republican side, with a new generation of self-described young guns maneuvering to topple the old guard.
In this scenario, Republican whip Eric Cantor is the new Newt: substantive, focused, and with a plan, although the intervening years haven't been kind to the GOP gene pool. Cantor can't hold a candle to Newt Gingrich when it comes to brain power and the ability to sway an audience with grand political theorems, and I'm not even a fan of Gingrich. Still, everything is relative, and in today's dumbed-down GOP, Cantor is what passes for an intellectual.
Republican leader John Boehner, the Dean Martin of the GOP, tanned and ready for a game of golf, is today's version of former GOP leader Bob Michel, a congenial moderate from Illinois who was pushed aside and retired to make room for Gingrich and his band of conservative revolutionaries. Boehner messed up when he said the Democrats' plan to rein in Wall Street was "killing an ant with a nuclear weapon." Highlighting the GOP love-in with big business is not in the Republican playbook for this fall when the party wants to portray itself as fighting for the little guy against the excesses of big-bad-government Obama.
Boehner has been in Congress for 20 years, and while he's quick with a canned quip, he has no discernible intellectual interest in engaging in the great policy debates of our time. He's there to block Democratic initiatives, and the thought of him as the next speaker should the Republicans win the majority is horrifying not only to Democrats but for many Republicans as well.
A shadow battle for control of the GOP in the House is underway, and when former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, with his current platform as host of MSNBC's Morning Joe, slammed Boehner for not working hard, even though he did it good-naturedly, lawmakers saw it as the first shot in exposing the rift between Boehner, 60, the guy who never breaks a sweat, and Cantor, 46, who bills himself as the leader of a new generation of Republicans eager to take control of a newly empowered GOP majority.
Boehner has to show some inside chops blunting Cantor's challenge, or he won't be speaker when the votes are counted within the GOP caucus in November or December, after the dust settles from the election. The GOP's internal feuding could help the Democrats on the road to November if it interferes with the party's ability to deliver a consistent message that Obama has overpromised and underdelivered, and to avoid getting sidetracked by some of the more outlandish things today's GOP revolutionaries like to blurt out. (My favorite is GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle in Nevada, who maintains that separation of church and state is not in the Constitution, and that Thomas Jefferson was misquoted.)
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is reportedly furious that the White House doesn't seem to see retaining Democratic control of the House as the highest priority. Pelosi has been more effective than the president at getting his agenda through, and a Democratic lobbyist who works closely with the speaker, says, "She's so frustrated with the president she could spit." Pelosi is the designated bearer of bad news to a White House that too often turns a deaf ear to Congress, viewing lawmakers' complaints as the inevitable whining that emerges in an election year when a president has to balance competing interests. "She's the go-to person to kick him in the shins," says the lobbyist.
If the Democrats lose their majority, Pelosi will be gone as leader, a victim of her own success and likely succeeded by her lieutenant, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. If the Democrats hold the House but with a much diminished majority, Pelosi could still be vulnerable. With just four months left before voters go to the polls, there is little Obama can do legislatively to create jobs and ease the economic pain of a suffering nation when the Republicans have effectively shut down the Senate.
He can frame issues in such a way that Republicans pay a political price for blocking the extension of unemployment benefits, and he can follow the almost certain confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court with a high-visibility August appointment of Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren to head the new consumer-protection agency that will be created as part of financial reform. Warren will attract a type of opposition from the Republicans and the business community that is a perfect prism for Democrats in the fall. Unsparing in her criticism of Wall Street, Warren will draw fire from the GOP young guns and old guard alike, and that's a fight Democrats would like to have.
Eleanor Clift is also the author of Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics and Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
