Already Written Off

Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is quite literally already writing the epitaph for the Democrats as the Journal's John Fund gets the dirt from retiring Rep. Brian Baird to shovel onto Nancy Pelosi's political corpse.

When President Obama was elected in 2008, Mr. Baird was again optimistic that Democrats could bring real reform. But fierce Republican partisanship and the White House decision not to focus on job creation as its "number one, two and three" priority dashed that hope.

"Obama decided we weren't going to have a highway transportation bill because it might have required a gas tax increase," he recalls. After passing a misdirected stimulus bill, Mr. Obama made the fatal error of pushing forward with other priorities: cap and trade, financial services reform, ObamaCare. Each became compromised quickly.

"You don't get real reform by pandering to every special interest. With cap and trade we wound up with a bill that didn't accomplish much, was enormously complicated and expensive." Mr. Baird is especially upset that "good solid members will lose this fall because they took a tough vote for a cap-and-trade bill that never made it through the Senate." He has told environmental groups that they lost sight of the goal of reducing carbon emissions by focusing on the minutia of regulation to achieve it.

For some of the shortcomings of financial regulatory reform, Mr. Baird blames the disillusioning battle over ObamaCare. "When the House had to pass the Senate version of health care unchanged, some members asked why should they invest the mental effort in mastering the details" of financial reform. Mr. Baird found parts of the bill mind-numbing.

Although he voted for it, he says he was troubled that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the entities at the heart of the housing meltdown, weren't addressed. They have clearly exercised undue influence on Capitol Hill, he notes. "When I was first elected I was puzzled why they were holding events in my honor as a mere freshman. I asked myself, why is a federal entity so involved in political activity?"

Fun stuff. Baird goes on at length to do what every politician does in a situation like this: "If only the leadership had listened to me, we wouldn't be in this mess."

The reality is that the Republicans made such a terrible mess that there was no conceivable way that Obama and the Dems could fix the problem in two years.  The Dems did what they had to do:  unpopular triage work to stop the bleeding.  Of course, every inch of that was opposed by Republicans.  They'll make a hash of things over the next two years, blame Obama, and expect to be rewarded with one-party control again.

Who knows where our economy will be by then.  But anyone who thinks they'll be better off two years from now with the GOP in charge clearly hasn't been paying attention.

We always get the government we deserve, I guess.