Dems Heavy Handed Tactics Losing Them Bipartisan Support

The Dems insistence on running the Congress with a heavy handed "our way or the highway" attitude is actually costing them GOP votes that might have sided with them on some of their key issues:

In a closed-door meeting before the last vote on the children’s health care bill, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer appealed for the support of about 30 wavering Republican lawmakers. What he got instead was a tongue-lashing, participants said.

The GOP lawmakers, all of whom had expressed interest in a bipartisan deal on the SCHIP legislation, were furious that the Democratic leader from Maryland had not reached out to them in a more serious way early on. They also criticized him and Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois for failing to stop his allies outside Congress from running attack ads in their districts, while they were discussing a bipartisan deal.

The result was a predictable one for this bitterly divided Congress. The House vote for a second SCHIP bill was a healthy majority, but not the two-thirds needed to override another veto vowed by President Bush. Only one Republican switched his vote — to oppose the measure.

Democrats accused Republicans of hurting kids. Republicans howled about a heavy-handed, uncompromising Democratic majority. And another chance at bipartisan consensus slipped away.

“They spent $1.5 million through their various shill outreach groups attacking me and a handful of my colleagues,” Rep. Ric Keller (R-Fla.) said before the Hoyer meeting, “but they did not spend five minutes to approach me to ask for my vote.”

This us-against-them mentality has been an ongoing storyline of the new Democratic­-controlled Congress. On the big items — Iraq, health care and spending — party leaders have shunned compromise.

The Dems get their surrogate organizations like MoveOn to run ads against Republicans who they think they can pressure into voting with them, while at the same time trying to play nice on the Hill. It's not working - this last effort to ram another SCHIP bill through actually lost at least one GOP vote that had supported the previous version of the bill.

The Dem leadership had promised a new era of bipartisanship in the new Congress, but as always, bipartisanship is defined by Dems as GOP members voting for Dem proposals. GOP priorities are never considered, and when the GOP refuses to go along, the attack dog organizations are turned loose to run their demagoguery in the media.

The GOP doesn't have to take that treatment and fortunately a few of them are willing to tell the Dem leadership what they think. Given the nearly complete lack of progress on anything significant in this year's Congress, Pelosi and Reid are going to have to learn a new approach to both the GOP in Congress and the White House if they hope to actually get anything done.