I am feeling confident that we will have a Democratic president and Democratic congress next year. The conventional thinking is that the party in power has two years to score big accomplishments, and consolidate it's hold on power for the next congressional elections.
What are the most important things for us to get done in those two years? Anyone have their own priority list?
I'm gonna try to put down some stray thoughts and guess as to the next two years, when the ball is in our hands and we have a chance to score.
I have been sort of watching the list of congressional retirements and have come up with a running list to date -
27 GOP House
4 DEM House
5 GOP Senate
0 DEM Senate
Of course that will be 1 DEM we lose as both Clinton and Obama are senators.
I expect the GOP list to grow but I'm not sure we will reach filibuster prove majorities in either house. The Republicans that are left will be in safe districts. Of course we will have redistricting from the 2010 census but off hand I don't know when that takes effect.
I fully expect that the GOP will be in fierce obstruction mode next year. We can already see what they are planning from the weird talk going on among their punditocrisy and their blogs. They are rooting for Clinton to win because they think they can beat her, but if she wins the presidency or if Obama wins, they plan to turn to total war. That's a pretty easy position for them, they work better as an opposition party since so much of their agenda is based on fear and anger.
But the people will give our party a big headwind after the election, at least in the first 6 months or so. I'm not sure what the media will do, most likely if it's Clinton our honeymoon will be short and tepid, if it's Obama there will lots of mojo and promotion. Either way it's important that we think about what we want to pass in legislation.
CNN had a great show the other day on Anderson Cooper about the extreme challenges for the next 4 years. Here's a link to the video-
The Next 4 Years
Obviously the first on the agenda is the troup drawdown in Iraq but the panel mentioned the danger of Iraq exploding again as we leave. If this happens the meme for the day is the the DEMs lost the war. So we need to have a way to doing it so that the situation doesn't spiral out of control. Of course this ties into the larger picture of global Jihadism, and the long standing controversies of our relationships to the oil states, Israel, and the Middle East.
The next issue is health care. My feeling is that this is an issue that is so huge it will swallow up all the oxygen in the room. If we tackle this we will do nothing else. This is my first priority because of my own personal circumstances. But I remember Clinton saying that his biggest mistake was tackling it in his first two years, and he and his party paid for it dearly. It cost him his entire agenda, save for deficit reduction. So do we do this immediately or do we wait until we have credibility as a ruling party?
Then there is the energy policy and tied with that, global warming. These are also huge issues, international in scope. How do we deal with these items, when much of the players in both of these items are beyond our borders? I have my own policy points but I'm pretty sure they are extremely hard to get through congress. So what do we do? The CNN documentary mentioned that much of global warming is predicted to become devastating and irrevocable unless the next president takes counter measure in the next 4 years.
The other huge issue is the economy. Jobs, trade, deficits, the dollar, all these issues have been chronic wounds without real treatment, except for superficial bandaids. We are in a recession and there are fears that this one may be deep and long. Internationally we are going from an economic superpower to an also-ran as nations bypass us, delinking from our economy and making treaties and contracts that leave us out of the picture. How do we change this emerging paradigm? No easy solutions here.
Many of these issues are interconnected. I believe that solutions in one area will create synergies that will lead to solutions in other areas, if we find the right solutions. But usually the right solutions are not the political feasible ones.
I don't have any answers but I just wanted to give a headsup for the day after the elections. I know we are going to win pretty big and since Obama and Clinton share 90% of their agendas, I want us to get busy thinking about our priorities and our strategy for an successful agenda.