Why Didn't The Democrats See The Bailout Failure Coming?
There is an unstated rule in negotiation. It is that on the day of reckoning you do not give the opposition a reason to walk away. The Republicans were looking for an out and Nancy Pelosi inadvertently gave them one.
Even if they were going to vote against the bailout anyway, today's outcome should be a lesson to the Democratic leadership. Aside from the destructive aftermath, the Republicans were able to make them look bad. They let the Democrats take the lead in this bailout then pulled the rug out from under them.
Why didn't the Democrats see this coming? Why weren't they skeptical of the bizarre position they found themselves in - agreeing with George W. Bush? Why did Pelosi speak at all today? Why didn't she just let the vote happen? And most of all, why did she frame the success she expected as a failing of the other party and their president and a victory for Democrats?
Whenever the Democrats approached the microphones over the last week trying to take credit for saving the U.S. from a failure created by leaders of the other party, they were placing themselves in a precarious position. The Republicans were giving them the rope to hang themselves.
The Republicans made this mess and they should fix it. That's a negotiation stance Pelosi and her well-meaning colleagues don't seem to understand. The Republicans play rough. They see you want credit, so they let you have it to your own detriment. It's an old but effective negotiation strategy -- find out what they want that will hurt them and let them have it.
At this point the Democrats should put the mess back into the hands of those who made it. Stop walking up to television microphones juggling for position and credit. Step back. In negotiations often the less said publicly the better. American voters are losing their livelihoods. They don't care if you get a cameo appearance out of it.
It's time to tell the gloating Republicans that you gave it your best shot and they rejected it. Let them come up with something better. Shrug your shoulders and throw up your hands. Stop being desperate. It only makes them uncooperative. Let them look into the abyss and imagine their own deserved downfall. That's the point at which they'll talk, because the only thing the current crop of Republican leaders understand is power. The thing they despise and effectively use to their benefit is its perceived absence.
Dr. Reardon also blogs at bardscove.
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"The Republicans were looking for an out and Nancy Pelosi inadvertently gave them one."
That's a complete crock. She gave them no excuse, and the GOP even backtracked on their whining. If she hadn't made those statements, they would have found some other flimsy excuse.
They voted no because they wanted to. Period.
And it sure looks like the GOP are the ones coming out of this looking bad - Bush and McCain and the republican leadership all supported this and said they had the votes for it, then we saw they didn't even know how their own members were going to vote. It was humiliating for the GOP, and they took the blame for Monday's stock market disaster.
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I'm so against this bailout, but I'm proud of the way the party leadership tried their best for the people, in spite of the lousy circumstances. I totally agree with you though. Arianna's article addressed the same issue, and others have even called this bailout the "October Surprise." In Pelosi's defense, I think she suspected that Republicans were not dealing in good faith, so she kept insisting that they also sign onto the proposal. I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I think once the crisis started to unfold that Rovian Republicans decided to use it as a tactic to cause Democrats to lose seats. I don't think the situation is as urgent as Bush claims, and that Democrats need not rush.
The Congress should only give loans to Wall Street with a 10% interest rate (no loan, no help), collateralize everything participating companies own, only give six months for flailing companies to seek assistance, and by all means regulate them heavily until they return ever dime of taxpayer's money. No perks. No tax write offs. the Treasury needs every dime it can get. When are Americans going to accept that the government cannot operate on fumes, it has to generate revenue, money, mulah, green.
This whole thing should expose the Republicans, and finally put to rest their phony claims of "Country First."
To me it's rather obvious why Pelosi and the Democrats did what they did: They are so consumed by greed that all they saw was the vast fortunes that the bailout bill would have made for the mutimillionaires that have taken over the party. (Pelosi is married to a multimillionaire investment banker, she would have made many millions off of this bill.) I doubt very much whether the good of the country or the economy ever occurred to him. As a progressive and Democrat since the 60s it's hard to face up to it, but the Democrats are now the party of the rich and the lawyers. It began when they elected the elitist son of a multimillionaire president in 1960 and has gone downhill ever since. I'll never vote for the Republicans, but I definitely consider the Democrats/liberals to be the greater danger now.
Or maybe they just didn't want to see the economy tank?
Here is what I do not get. The democrats do nto need the republicans to get this through the house. So what does that say about Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic Party?
Is Pelosi just ineffective?
Did the dems have any intention of passign this? If, the dems truely belevied that this is doomsday then their party could have passed it all on their own. Why would they not?
Yeah, nice try. Leave the Democrats to take the blame for the whole calamity. Like they just clamored to spend $700 billion dollars on Wall Street, right. Throw the bums out.
This time, I think Republicans have underestimated public's intelligence to their detriment.
Pelosi is a political genius. When the day was done, she had delivered her end of the bargain, the GOP was left holding the bag, and the resulting uncertainty will continue to drive votes from McSame to Obama. What part did she get wrong????
Talking to the people I know who listen to and believe conservative hive-mind radio, the GOP talking point that has been settled upon is to blame the loans to "minorities" for this mess. It's such a perfect idea. You get to be racist and still hold on to the idea of less regulation and tax cuts for the rich. You get to have the Republicans saving the country and the Democrats be the cause.
Pelosi and Reid didn't know there was a problem.
Bush told them what to do.
they did it.
then the other republicans revolted.
Pelosi and Reid were upset at the republicans but apparently not at the over 90 democrats who also bolted from their party.
If Obama is President then we will have a President, Speaker and Majority Leader who have no clue what to do.
60 percent of House Republicans voted against the bill. If it was the fault of the few dems who have held out then why didn't that sixty percent sign on to the bill as written and force the Democrats to hold the bag?
oh, Because the bill is two things. One is a bailout, the other is a repudiation of the deregulation that most of those members stake their lives on.
A few Democrats oppose the bailout, but the far Right wingers don't want to see their whole political careers come tumbling down.
SINCE WHEN IS 95 A FEW???
"Pelosi and Reid were upset at the republicans but apparently not at the over 90 democrats who also bolted from their party."
Well, yeah.
Before the vote Pelosi promised to deliver 140 votes from democrats. She got 141.
The republican leadership promised to deliver enough more to pass. They couldn't make that happen.
And it's silly to say they did what Bush said, they made huge changes to the initial proposal.
The Democrats worst mistake so far was to take a bill proposed by Bush/Cheney/Paulson and use that as a basis from which to work. The screw-ups shouldn't get to decide how their screw up gets fixed. We need a fix. Start from zero, not from a wrong idea and try to fix it.
Except that many dems were part of the initial screw up. This is a bipartisan F'up.
This would be assuming that the Democrats had any balls though (if they did Bush wouldn't be in office right now). Pelosi is just another tool of the Bush administration when it's all said and done. The fact that Obama backed this stupid bill makes me think much less of him as well.
No, that's assuming that a bill created from scratch by democrats wouldn't get vetoed by Bush.
Would you have been happier if the dems made a bill and passed it, then Bush vetoed it? Same result as we have now.
How dare Pelosi speak the truth. It messed everything up.
I've noticed a "pundit blindside" when it comes to the failed bailout vote. Many pundits (Ms. Reardon being a prime example) seem worried about the fact that the Democrats held the votes without enough votes to win.
First of all, most Americans see that the vote failed due to Republicans not voting for it. They don't care whether Democrats PREDICTED that outcome, the PREDICTION is not the big point out in America, the ACTUAL VOTING that the Republicans did to kill the bail out is a bigger deal. But still I see articles about "how can the House leadership not have known the vote was going to fail??".
Secondly, this whole idea that you only have votes that you know the results of is just a recent construct. This is merely an outgrowth of the ReidPelosi chickenshit strategy whereby Republicans have not been forced to filibuster ANYTHING with real value to voters. For Reid and Pelosi, just the idle threat of a Republican filibuster is now somekind of accepted deterence to the will of the majority of Americans.
But most Americans don't really internalize this new "inside baseball" "bizarro world" idea that votes are no longer held until the answer is known, they are still going by the "real world" idea that you hold votes even IF you don't know the results. These articles about why Democratic leadership didn't predict the vote correctly is just a weird pundit world sidetrack to the real issues.
The Republicans are going after each other, just like I predicted and the worst thing for McTactic right now is that he loses credibility with his base, no matter what he does. Sarah Palin's cultural and religious credibility is with the base, but she's hardly credible at arm-twisting the fellows in the House.
McCain is now back where he was before he picked Palin as far as his conservative base is concerned and by a margin of 2 to 1, the country blames Republicans for the bailout fiasco and the problems that led to the bailout being necessary. If there was ever a period that sapped momentum from a campaign, this is it.
You've got to be kidding that Speaker Pelosi should remain silent. Her speech was a reality check needed to show the American People that America has been governed poorly by the Republicans once again.
No matter how the Dems handled this finacial crisis the Repubs would attack them. It is their modus operandi.
The GOP not only plays hard and mean, they play long. I believe that the Newtster is running for 2012, which means that he's written off McCain, which means that the Repubs are going to "give" the presidency to Obama for one term--a term they will do their very best to make completely and utterly miserable. This poison pill of a bailout was meant as the first millstone around Obama's neck. One thing is clear; Obama can't govern this country if he's out there alone. We need a solid Dem majority in both houses, and we need a majority willing to work with the executive branch, and willing to cut in those Repubs who are able to think of something besides getting the leadership back. We've had our Blue Dogs; time to recruit a few GOP allies as whatever color dogs they want to be. The era of the perpetual campaign, where nothing is done without a political edge, has to be over. I believe we are heading into a much more serious recession than we all want to admit, and right now, the two parties are jockeying for position: who gets to be FDR, who gets stuck being Hoover? Folks, FDR was ours--do not let them paint us as Hoover! And always be aware that the GOP plays long; they'll give up a pawn, maybe even a knight or a bishop, and the next thing you know, your king is face down in the mashed potatoes.
YOU ARE SO WRONG! The democrats played this the only way they could. The trap was set in multiple places- the urgency of acting NOW or the sky would fall, was the immediate election trap. (And note how they conspired with McCain to take Obama out of his debate preparation). then the next trap was to promise to deliver the house republicans with no real intention of doing so. Boehner has been a central player in these traps for years and the dems knew something was afoot. Pelosi told them before that the only way to get it done was to have half dems and half repubs but then Nancy smelled a rat. as the Republican caucus was meeting, the press conference was arranged for the repubs to talk to the press. So Nancy called the Bill to the floor early (long before they knew a deal was struck) and trapped Boehner in his own crap. John McCain had also announced that he had helped broker a deal so they trapped him too when they called the bill to the floor before it was ready. Then, Nancy decided that to be sure the trap was totally obliterated, she needed to give them a superficial reason to bail out and assure that the bill failed. The dems have no intention of passing this turkey. They know that the electorate is watching and they need to make the repubs take the heat. Great politics!
Great politics if your outcome was failure.
If your outcome was success, it was bad politics.
The normal course of negotiation was, if any consideration at all, for the President to submit his bill to Congress, byway of someone in his own party (did you know the President's plan would be dead in the water if no member of Congress introduced the bill.)
The opposition Party would be responsible for its plan or alternative. The one with the most votes wins and presented to the President.
Where was the Democrats plan?
Failure is relative! Go back and look. the republicans have played this tune far too many times. The stock market today is stable at 10,800 and rising a full 15 minutes before the bell. this suggests that perhaps this was all a huge republican Flim-flam. Not I don't doubt for a minute that things are broken on Wall Street, but I know that these republicans have at the bottom of their bag of tricks the Grover Norquist Final Solution which means to reduce the size of government until you can "drown it in a bath tub". So any analysis of political maneuvering has to be done as in a chess game, the victory is quite a long way from the first move and this is the first move in a really dangerous game of chicken. Of course its high stakes poker! but Wall Street and the conservatives believe that's the only way they can succeed. they have NO public support from the electorate. all they can do is Flim Flam! But they are the best of anyone at that game. stay tuned!
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