Yeah, but then it's filibuster-happy time. Assuming they even get that far - you know how some of the Blue Dogs are. If Obama had tried to ramrod it through Congress, I'd wager more than a few of them would vote against it, ostensibly because of their consciences working against it (more likely because they don't want to lose their seats).Elfdart wrote:What the Dems should have done once the Torture Party voted unanimously against the bill (in spite of Obama bending over backwards for them) is to strip out of the bill everything the Republitards wanted. What's the point in giving them anything if they can't be bothered to vote for it? Obama doesn't understand that his "reaching out" is construed as weakness by the Torture Party, who will simply demand more while giving away nothing.Guardsman Bass wrote:It would have helped if Obama had started with a higher figure than the one he presented and is arguing for (like if he had started off arguing for $1.2 trillion in spending instead of $775 billion). He was going to lose the greater aggregate of the Republicans, by and large - most of the moderate Republicans have been booted out and replaced by Blue Dog Democrats - but perhaps he could have made some of the surviving Republican moderates and Blue Dogs happy by letting them carve off chunks of the bigger number (down to, say, "only" $900 billion) so they could show how "fiscally responsible" and "bipartisan" they are.
In any case, this just means they'll have to go through the whole damn process again, probably, in another few weeks or months. In the mean time, he gets to castigate and importune, and hope that the current compromise passes.
Of course, the more staunch Democrats could then do what the Republicans did to knock Arlen Specter back into place when he started getting too far from the Party orthodoxy - threaten to run a primary challenge against him - but I think they're too chicken to do that, assuming they even have to funds to do so.