Pat Dollard

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Politico:

Moderate Democrats, coping with the electoral fallout of President Barack Obama’s grand and ground-down legislative ambitions, have a message for their leaders: Stop supersizing us.

If the first year of Obama’s term was dominated by the so-called Big Bang push for enormous, politically risky initiatives — the stimulus, cap and trade and health care — Year Two is fast shaping up to be year of small ball, retrenchment and backlash.

“I’ve always maintained that I thought that they were doing too much, too fast,” said Rep. Mike McMahon (D-N.Y.), an endangered freshman who represents a Staten Island district long occupied by Republicans.

“Without question, the biggest complaint I’m hearing from constituents is that there were too many things being tackled all at once, and they didn’t have time to understand and digest all of them,” he added.

The Big Bang, made famous by Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is giving way to a wary brand of incrementalism. It’s not the small-bore, Clintonian agenda of V-chips and school uniforms but an admission that expectations are diminished — not dashed — and a determination to attack the same huge problems in smaller, smarter ways.

Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) believes Obama still has time to adjust, but he says he’s put moderate Democrats “in great jeopardy” because he hasn’t been able to match his aspirations with the same levels of toughness and legislative know-how possessed by Hill veterans like Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

“They were foolish to take all those big votes on cap and trade and the stimulus,” said Lott, now a lobbyist. “One of the lessons that Obama has not learned is that you can’t feed Congress too much at any one time — you can’t feed it more than they can consume, or it becomes engorged.”

The downsizing impulse has seized Democrats at all levels — with the possible exception of the president himself — but it’s strongest among those closest to the ground: endangered Democratic incumbents in conservative districts. Ironically, Emanuel himself recruited many of these members when he was head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Obama has reshuffled his political operation, emphasized his centrism and vowed to focus on jobs and the economy. But he has also refused to abandon his big-ticket aspirations, urging Democrats not to run for the hills and telling his party’s senators to steel themselves by ignoring the blogs and the cable-TV talking heads.

And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) argues that the bigger-is-better strategy wasn’t a choice — that the magnitude of the financial crisis dictated the size of the stimulus and that the complexity of health care reform required a massive bill with many interlocking pieces.

“Many of the things that work when you are doing comprehensive health care reform go hand in glove; you have to have them together,” she said. “All of these things are a heavy lift.”

Yet in the weeks between Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts and his Thursday swearing-in, Hill moderates have been busily shrinking Obama’s agenda, chopping it up into politically digestible, palatable pieces.

A few weeks ago, the White House seemed on the cusp of finally passing comprehensive health care reform through both houses. But by Thursday, Pelosi was speaking with pride about the House’s intention of revoking the insurance industry’s antitrust exemption. That attempt, like almost every other House initiative, seems destined to die in the Senate.

She charted a similar course for a massive jobs bill — the centerpiece of this year’s legislative agenda, saying she was open to an approach that dices the measure into bite-size bills. (exactly the way Socialism has been instructed to be installed in America.)

Pelosi’s determination to protect her incumbents is a welcome development for moderates, who blame the wholesale defection of the white independents from the party on Pelosi and other liberals.

Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a moderate facing a 27 percent home-state approval rating in an election year, took that argument directly to Obama during the Democratic Senate retreat Wednesday, urging the president to challenge the party’s “extremes.”

“Are we willing as Democrats to push back on our own party?” she asked.

“If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression … the result is going to be the same,” Obama shot back.

“I don’t know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us into this fix in the first place.”

That answer rankled many of the Democrats who witnessed the exchange in the Newseum, drawing only moderate applause from a group that greeted him as a rock star a year earlier.

“It was a bit too much,” said one Democratic staffer in attendance. “But we can’t really challenge him publicly too much because we need to get his [approval] numbers up before we can get everybody else’s numbers up.”

Yet for all the frustration of Lincoln and other Senate Democrats, it’s less than that expressed by many House Democrats, who have been forced to take tough votes against the unified opposition of Republicans.

California Rep. Dennis Cardoza, one of the founders of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition, says he’s been counseling a slowdown approach for months, to no avail, in conversations with administration officials, including Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag.

“I don’t think the [Big Bang] strategy was very useful,” said Cardoza. “I told him I thought this schizophrenic thing — it’s like a child with [attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder], every day a new initiative, a new announcement,” Cardoza told POLITICO.

“Everyone was talking about spending capital — now I think we wish we had some of that capital back. You build confidence by passing legislation that people understand and work that way. I still believe in the president, but you can’t be everything to all folks.”