Shutdown Split Shows the Tightrope Democrats Must Walk to Win the Senate

[DonViejo]

The Democrats have two masters to serve—the true believers, and the people who keep electing the likes of Manchin and Heitkamp and Tester and McCaskill.

MICHAEL TOMASKY
01.23.18 5:09 AM ET

I couldn’t quite place when I’d felt before the way that I did Monday morning, as though my innards were being sucked out with a vacuum cleaner. Eventually it hit me: This was a version of how I felt at the depths of the Hillary-Bernie war.

The vote in the Senate on Monday afternoon to end the government shutdown and the reaction to it revealed the same 2016 fault lines. Twenty-three Democrats voted for the motion (the Hillary position, broadly speaking; responsible or sellout depending on your point of view), and 16 against (the Bernie position; principled or intransigent). No sooner did the clerk bang down the gavel than my inbox started filling up with press releases like the one from the group CREDO calling Chuck Schumer “the worst negotiator in Washington—even worse than Trump.”

I stashed my crystal ball in the attic after November 2016, so I don’t know, maybe time will prove CREDO right. It’s certainly a risk, taking Mitch McConnell’s word for things. Senators keep trying to spin the time machine back 40 or 50 years, to a time when it all worked. I’ll eschew the usual Peanuts metaphor, that Senate Democrats are Charlie Brown believing that this is finally the time that Lucy will finally let him kick the football, for a different one: Maybe they’re Linus sitting in the pumpkin patch, waiting for the ghosts of those Great Pumpkins Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen to appear and guide their Republican colleagues toward the kind of compromise and reason that often prevailed when those men led the Senate.

On the other hand, it may be that Schumer, who is in fact not the worst negotiator in Washington, played ball for a reason, or reasons. One reason might actually be substantive, which is the inclusion of six years of the children’s health program. There are 9 million kids on CHIP, and 800,000 DREAMers. The latter shouldn’t be abandoned, obviously, but getting six years of CHIP out of the Republicans isn’t nothing.

more
https://www.thedailybeast.com/shutdown-split-shows-the-tightrope-democrats-must-walk-to-win-the-senate?ref=home

[Anny61]

1. It seemed more like the 2002 Iraq vote. Those running stayed on one side.

I do not have a problem with it. I get it. Look how people beat up Clinton with Iraq vote ignoring facts. I am good with what Schumer did, and get why some chose not to support it.