Congressional Democrats Attempting to Avert Disaster
“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
This quote is from, as we all know, Benjamin Franklin. He wrote it in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy in November of 1789 referring to the new Constitution of the United States. If Mr. Franklin were with us today, not only would he probably still look younger than Abe Vigoda, there is a distinct possibility he might amend the quote to include that voter discontent is also certain when our leaders choose to blatantly ignore the will of the people.
This point was expressed quite well, perhaps better than I have seen in a long time, by fellow Technorati writer Scott Gulbransen on Friday. His headline alone very fittingly compared the dilemma in which the Obama administration currently finds itself to the sinking of the Titanic. The president is seemingly oblivious to the factors that have been driving the U.S. economy recently, particularly the news that the Bureau of Labor Statistics unleashed Friday that unemployment was up a tick to 9.6 percent in August.
Not surprisingly, the increasing number of Americans that aren’t so fond of the president these days, with 57 percent disapproval of his job performance according to the most recent Daily Presidential Tracking Poll from Rasmussen Reports, find the majority party in Congress even less appealing. To give you an idea, voters seem to dislike Congress more than Yankees fans dislike Red Sox fans, more than Al Sharpton dislikes Glenn Beck, or more than Lindsay Lohan dislikes sobriety. Depending on which poll you believe, Congressional job approval has run as low as 13 percent in recent months.
So with less than two months before the midterm elections, what are the Democrats planning to do about this situation?
According to a joint New York Times and MSNBC.com report, they’re ”preparing a brutal triage of their own members in hopes of saving enough seats to keep a slim grip on the majority.” Many in the inner circle of Democratic leadership are apparently planning on losing several seats in both the House and Senate, or even worse for them, perhaps even losing their control of one or both chambers.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in what might be a crisis mode, is appealing to Democrats who have a lock on their races to throw a few bucks from their own campaign war chests to their party colleagues that aren’t looking so hot right now. Pelosi sent out a letter to her fellow Democrats last week insisting on knowing where their commitments lie in this campaign season, and she said, “The day after the election, we do not want to have any regrets.”
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