CT Blue

Why do I not find this surprising?

Democrats probably didn’t expect to find themselves in this position: On the cusp of moving a big Wall Street reform bill to the Senate floor, with Republicans, as if immune from political pressure, banding together to block them. But they knew it could happen. Some even would have preferred this, relishing the optics of allowing the GOP to side with big, unpopular financial institutions.

So surely Democrats and their allies in key pressure groups have rehearsed a bold, unified response, in the event that the GOP follows through on their threat to block debate. Ads are in the can, talking points are drafted, and everyone’s been prepped to argue before the world that the Republicans have allied themselves with the firms that wrecked the economy. Right?

As you might expect, it appears the Democrats are flat footed once again. Were the shoes switched, the Republicans would be eating the Democrats lunch, to such an extent that, were there a Republican president, they could get their own bill through even if they had less than 40 senators to work with.

It almost makes one think that the Democrats want to fail, which may not be far from the truth:

Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee Kent Conrad (D-ND) evidently won his battle and is hoping to begin budget markup onWednesday or Thursday. But there are no plans to include reconciliation instructions — which means every bill in the Senate for the next year will require 60 votes to pass.

…

Reconciliation instructions could be included by the House, too. If they don’t, it will be a powerful affirmative statement by Congressional Democrats to their base that they have zero intention of trying to deliver on any of their many policy promise unless it is something Republicans want to do. It also makes a mockery of the notion that Democrats are actually angry with Republican obstructionism and abuse of the filibuster, because when they had the chance to get rid of the 60 vote barrier on important issues they didn’t use it.

The above is from Firedoglake, where they seem to have descended into a reflexive distaste (from the left) for all things Obama, but the point appears to be well taken.

It truly is hard to believe that Obama, or the Democrats, can be so deluded as to actually believe that the Republicans are willing to work with them on anything. No thinking person in the rest of the country believes it. On this issue, they have known for months that the Republicans would lie about the bill (the Luntz memo leaked in early February and the Republicans have been running ads based on it since then). Their basic overall political strategy-oppose everything, always, has been open, notorious, and explicitly acknowledged.

But wait, there’s at least some indication that the Democrats will triumph, if delivering a weakened bill represents a triumph. Well, it did with health care, didn’t it? While probably a policy failure, it might be a political triumph, if the Democrats could frame the outcome by, for instance, claiming that the Republicans had backed down. But it would never occur to them to try to take political advantage of the opposition. That would be unfair.