Breaking the First Law of Politics

Aimai reminds us of what we've forgotten since Molly died: You've Got To Dance With the Ones That Brung You.

Or, the political consequences of cutting your base out of participating in your signature bill, then blaming them for not supporting you on it:

The people who are now being excoriated for not supporting the bill, such as it is, were not part of the strategy to get the bill in the first place. Obama's actual supporters were not polled about what they wanted in the bill. The Left, whoever she be, wasn't asked what should be in the bill. And the actual progressives in the House and the Senate were, at every turn, told to sit down and shut up and take a back seat to negotiations with the all important moderates and reactionaries.

SNIP

That attitude towards your voters works fine if you can deliver, in the end, what they want--and if they can see that you delivered. It won't work if you deliver something whose benefits are far less than you promised, if the benefits aren't evident, if the benefits are too long delayed, or if you look like you didn't fight.

SNIP

This attitude towards your voters works less well when you fail to give them some respect: you don't include them in your discussions, you don't ask them for their help with the parts of the bill they care about, you strip out the parts of the bill you promised, you act like its no big deal to sacrifice key constituents (women) to placate obviously deranged and dishonest Senators (no links, anyone who's been watching knows who I mean, and why). That's ok too--you didn't think you needed your voters during the run up to the bill and you think you won't need them again until 2010. Perhaps they'll come back around by then.

SNIP

To get people to invest in the bill you have to either write the bill they want to see, pass a pretty good bill, or have a really good fall guy when the bill fails. Obama's people, if not Obama (of course), have decided that the fall guy is going to be "the left" or the "voters" for failing to appreciate all that was going to be done for them. But just as we were not involved in the writing or the negotiating for this bill we are not to blame. Frankly, I think the concept of blame is absurd.

Obama and his team wanted to pursue the bill a certain way, and they did exactly what they wanted to do. They refused all offers of outside help, or criticism, or suggestion. They own this bill and they own the mechanisms that allowed Lieberman, Nelson, and Snowe to hold it up and, perhaps, to kill it. Just as they chose to exclude the base from the construction of this bill, however, they now seem determined to conclude that somehow its the base's lack of faith that is preventing the bill from being passed. Nothing could be further from the truth, and nothing could be more dangerous for the Democratic party. If this bill goes down I hope Obama and the Dems wise up and grasp that the fall guy had better not be "the base" for its lack of faith--the fall guy has to be Lieberman, Nelson, Snowe and the entire Republican party. Because you can't run against your own voters in 2010 and hope to win.

Read the whole thing.