CNN did a story tonight on the looming battle between Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi on the control of the U.S. political agenda.
Obama and his team have come across over the last few weeks as pragmatists who don’t want to repeat the same mistakes Bill and Hillary made in 1993, when they immediately lurched to the left after the inauguration and helped get the Democrats thrown out of power in 1994. They might still want to get where Nancy’s going, but at the very least have a longer-term strategy to getting there that’s not going to immediately outrage the American public.
Pelosi, on the other hand, has been waiting since ’94 to pass all those programs the Clintons tried to get through in their first two years and apparently expects Obama to follow her agenda, not the other way around. She’s the one pushing for tax hikes in the middle of a recession, oblivious to what happened to Congress when Clinton did the same thing in 1993.
Obama’s scheduled to meet with House Republicans on Thursday. It would be ironic (and pretty damn funny) if Barack ends up relying on Blue Dog Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress to keep control of the agenda and keep Pelosi (with Harry Reid’s help) from driving the Democratic Party off the same cliff they crashed on 16 years ago.
