Eating At Each Other

by digby

You’ve probably heard that everyone believes that if Coakley loses, the House will have to pass the Senate bill as is and the “fix it” in reconciliation. Anthony Weiner said earlier that it’s going to be very hard for the House to do that, no matter what leadership wants (and I’m guessing that it isn’t going to be the liberals who will balk anyway.)

Here’s the Village’s BMOC, Mike Allen on the Ed Shultz show reacting to Weiner’s comments:

There’s a little bit of shadow boxing going on here. You know were having today leaders for the first time saying yes, they maybe could accept the Senate bill if they promise changes in reconciliation. But I think that that may be more laying the groundwork for concessions to Republicans, scaling back the bill. So I think there’s a lot of posturing going on today. I wouldn’t take them as the final answer.

So Allen thinks that not only are they going to have to swallow the Senate bill, but they are going to have to make some concessions to Republicans and scale it back. Awesome. Maybe they can get rid of all those costly subsidies and the Medicaid expansion and just leave the mandate.

Ed Shultz went on to talk about Michael Moore’s promise to back primaries against any Democrat who voted against health care reform:

Shultz: So, Mike Allen, what’s the next move for progressives?

Allen: Well, I would remind you that when Republicans started to eat each other up we talked about how it wasn’t very smart. I think a lot of people will make that point about Democrats as well.

Ok. Eight or nine months ago the villagers were all saying that the Republicans were eating at each other and that it wasn’t very smart. And the Republicans told them to go to hell, Fox News started the tea party movement and the right wing media in general launched what seemed like a lunatic campaign to demonize Barack Obama as a socialist. All that seems to be working pretty well for them at the moment, so Allen’s admonishment doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In fact, the only lesson to be learned is to not listen to anything the village media says. Ever. The Republicans learned that a long time ago. The Democrats need to learn it too.

Here’s another example of the pervasive (and predictable) CW, courtesy of Gloria Borger on CNN:

Borger: I was talking to a bunch of Democrats asking [what the lessons are] and the answer I got resoundingly is that the Democrats have to do a better job of talking to independent voters. Right now a majority of independent voters in this country disapprove of bartack obama, they are unhappy that he has failed to deliver the kind of change that he promised and there’s a belief that he’s misinterpreted his mandate. That the mandate for change was not necessarily a mandate for bigger government because voters just don’t trust government…

The silver lining is, one, that Barack Obama may decide that he needs to talk to republicans, call Republicans’ bluff. now there are lots of folks who say that it is not in any interest of Republicans to see this president succeed so we’ll have to see. Also Wolf, this is early. They have time to recoup.

Blitzer: That’s the silver lining, if they can get their act together between now and November maybe they can salvage the midterm elections.

Borger: If you’re an optimist, yeah.

Update II: And, by the way, this meme about the Independents, (the “values voters” of 2010) has been coming for quite a while now. you watch these people over time and you can see which pre-digested narrative they’re going to pull off the shelf from a mile away.

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