Liberal Democrats don’t have to worry about the president making nice with Republicans for long.

Nov 30, 2010
WSJ
By WILLIAM MCGURN

John Boehner knows that today’s White House get- together with Barack Obama is a distraction.

Yes, the Democratic president will exchange much-photographed smiles and handshakes with the Republican House speaker-to-be. Yes, each side will talk about how the American people want them to come together to find “common ground.” Mr. Boehner also knows, however, that the Beltway’s obsession with this kind of high-profile sit-down will only distract people from the real story in today’s Washington.

That story is this: Democrats remain in charge for the next few weeks, they have some big decisions to make and, at least for now, Mr. Boehner’s relations with Mr. Obama are of far less moment than the president’s relations with his own party.

How different this post-election landscape is than the one after the 2008 election. Back then, a demoralized Republican leadership made the trek up Pennsylvania Avenue to meet with Mr. Obama. At that meeting, a young president, flush with his own triumphs (and a commanding Democratic majority in both houses of Congress), dismissed a Republican senator’s query about taxes by telling him, in part: “I won.”

This time, Mr. Obama comes to the meeting as the Democratic president who has helped give Republicans their largest House majority since 1946. Even more than the sheer numbers, this month’s elections marked a repudiation of the president’s signature issue: health care. The midterm elections also included high-profile embarrassments such as the loss of his own Senate seat in Illinois, a year after Massachusetts sent a Republican to fill Teddy Kennedy’s seat.

Four years ago, Democrats made the decision to regain the majority by opening up their party to more conservative candidates, especially in Republican-leaning districts. That worked, at least until the voters figured out that these more conservative Democrats could not, or would not, moderate the party’s liberal priorities.

Now Democrats have to make another decision: Will their party acknowledge this month’s election returns or not?

At the moment, the two most pressing things on the legislative agenda relate directly to the concerns over taxes and spending that dominated the elections: the fate of the Bush tax cuts, which expire in January, and the continuing resolution that is funding the federal government, which expires Friday. The outcome will depend on the debate now going on inside the Democratic Party.

President Obama is too smart not to appreciate that he has to change his tune. So early on, his aides made noises about a “compromise” on taxes, though the substance has yet to take shape. On Monday, moreover, he stole an agenda point from Mr. Boehner’s Pledge to America by calling for a two-year freeze on non-military federal pay (though not Mr. Boehner’s call for a hiring freeze as well).

Democrats, however, haven’t made it any easier for him. The official party wish list for the next month—repealing the law prohibiting gays from serving openly in the military, ratifying a nuclear treaty with Russia, passing an immigration bill—are all big-ticket items. They would be hard enough to get through a regular session.

To try to get these through in a lame-duck session risks solidifying one of the chief indictments against Mr. Obama and his allies in Congress. That is their arrogance in riding roughshod over public opinion and standard legislative procedure in Congress to get what they wanted.

You’d have to be on Mars—or inside the Democratic caucus—not to understand this past election as a national holler for politicians to stop spending so much money. Most Democrats who still have control over their senses understand that. These include the nearly two dozen senators who will be up for re-election in 2012, as well as congressmen who may face new pressure when their seats are redistricted by Republican state legislatures.

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