Taylor Marsh – TaylorMarsh.com – News, Opinion and Weblog on Progressive Politics

First Rahm, now Rangel. Who’ll be the next scapegoat for Obama, Pelosi and Reid’s ineptitude?

As political pictures go, this one is bad, really bad. It could make matter worse for Rep. Charlie Rangel, who has been caught doing some really dumb things. However, for Peter Beinert, it’s the picture that will sack the Democratic majority in November. There have been dumber claims by the insider Beltway crew, but not lately. Peter Beinert’s Daily Beast post today begins “The photo that could doom the Democrats,” with the following irony explaining the problems in a list.

To understand why the Rangel scandals are so dangerous for Democrats, you need to understand something about midterm landslides: They’re usually composed of three parts. First, the other party’s activists are highly motivated. Second, your own activists are highly unmotivated. Third, independents want to burn Washington to the ground.

There’s nothing Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi can do about the first problem. The stimulus, the bank bailouts, the auto-takeover and the health-care push have convinced large numbers of aging white people that Obama is Mao Zedong, and they’re not going to change their mind anytime soon. The best response to the second problem is to pass health-care reform and give Keith Olbermann something to get excited about. But perhaps most crucial of all is responding to problem No. 3.

Peter, babe, wake up and smell the roaring bonfire. Independents don’t need a Rangel scandal to light a blaze already out of control. The GOP isn’t highly motivated because of Charlie Rangel; neither are the Tea Partiers. As for the Dem activists, from my emails, comments and conversations, I’d say they’re pissed off because of Obama and Congress, not simply because Rangel has been revealed to be a little dirty. You know, like a lot of white guys with long term committee power in Congress.

Evidently Mr. Obama’s horrendous lack of leadership isn’t enough to bring the Dems down in November, at least not for Mr. Beinert. Nor is the President’s Wall Street bailouts, cozy relationships with for profit health insurance companies, or his year long malaise on getting anything done when his party holds both houses of Congress.

Perhaps Peter could take a moment to look at the George W. Bush did with less.

Now happily ensconced inside the Beltway myself, yet a permanent outsider, it’s even easier to pick out and pummel the idiotic analysis that passes for intelligent around here, including in favorite think tanks, with the New America Foundation, a group I so respect, pushing Beinert’s post today via email. I wonder if they read it. The more “senior fellows” I read in whatever think tank you list, most of whom are male, the less impressed I am with the Beltway “fellows” program. But I get why they call the program fellows.

Beinert also notes that a “Democratic source” says “party pollsters” are picking up “rumblings” that the Rangel scandal is starting to –wait for it– “register with the public.” Get the smelling salts! People have another congressional failure to add to the list.

It’s truly stunning how bad Peter Beinert’s political analysis is on this one. But he’s got lots of company. Blaming President Rahm, now Charlie Rangel, there is very little honesty going around in Washington about who to blame for what everyone is prognosticating will be an epic loss in November. As I can’t tell the future, I have no idea how bad it will be, but it’s for sure that considering what Democrats began with last year when Obama came into Washington, they not only haven’t acted like winners, but they’ve ruined their credibility on proving they understand and know how to govern.

But if Beinert had chosen to be more honest, using the Rangel photo as metaphor to damn the entire Democratic party leadership, on that he would have been dead on. Just set it in Hawaii instead.

Photo above by Brigitte Stelzer/Splash News, via the Daily Beast.

Tags: 2010, Barack Obama, Democrats, investigations, media, politics of sex, Republicans, women