Democrats throw public punches at their president

Congressional Democrats have not been shy in publicly ripping President Obama during his first two months in office.

The Democrats’ willingness to take on the new leader of their party stands in stark contrast to how GOP lawmakers dealt with President George W. Bush.

While the Bush White House clashed with Capitol Hill Republicans, they mostly did so behind closed doors.

{mosads}Democrats prefer to have their fights with the White House out in the open.

Many Democrats in Congress, ranging from leadership lawmakers to rank-and-file members, have criticized Obama in major newspapers and on cable TV shows.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) didn’t give the president’s $3.6 billion budget proposal much time to get legs, swiftly calling Obama’s plan to raise revenue by cutting farm subsidies “dead on arrival.”

“This is a very stupid idea,” Peterson said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on MSNBC in late February that Obama’s plan to leave 50,000 troops in Iraq was too much, asserting she did not “know what the justification” was. Pelosi noted she thought about 20,000 troops would be sufficient.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) threw the equivalent of a brush-back pitch at Obama earlier this month, after the White House started talking tough on reining in the use of earmarks.

Hoyer, who chooses his words carefully when dealing with the media, told reporters, “I don’t think the White House has the ability to tell us what to do. I hope all of you got that down.”

And this week Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), one of Obama’s most enthusiastic surrogates throughout the presidential campaign, sent out a press release boasting that she was challenging her party’s standard-bearer to reform earmark spending.

The White House declined to comment for this article.

Democrats have, in large numbers, backed the president this year with their votes on a children’s healthcare bill, the economic stimulus bill and various other measures.

Yet the way they deal with Obama highlights a major difference in how Democrats and Republicans deal with a friend in the White House.

Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University, said Democrats’ public criticisms of Obama are rooted in the cultural differences between the parties.

“Republicans seem much more likely to defer to leadership. Democrats tend to be the party of free spirits,” Baker said. “It’s a much more complicated family.

“It’s a reflection of the uniformity of the Republican caucuses and the diversity of the Democratic caucuses,” he said.

Democrats on Capitol Hill also have made a point to stress that they will not just rubberstamp Obama’s policies, claiming Republicans embraced nearly everything President Bush proposed. That GOP unity, Democrats say, led the executive branch to usurp power from Congress. Ultimately, they say, it also helped Democrats regain power of both Congress and the White House.

In an interview with The Hill two weeks before Obama was sworn in, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) stressed that the Democratic-led Congress would break with the president at times.

“I don’t work for Obama,” Reid said at the time.

{mospagebreak}{mosads}Congressional Democrats say that a healthy amount of tension with the White House is a good thing. But with Republicans now being more aggressive in excoriating Obama’s policies, the lack of a unified Democratic front could weaken the president’s standing and hamper his agenda.

Some former congressional Republicans are chuckling at what they see as a lack of respect their Democratic counterparts are showing the president.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said that Republicans fought hard with the Bush White House, but did so in private.

“I didn’t want to embarrass the president, and I knew I wanted to work with the president,” DeLay told The Hill. “I didn’t want to isolate myself from the White House right from the get-go. The Democrats don’t seem to care about that.”

DeLay said that at Republican retreats he and Bush senior adviser Karl Rove would have “knockdown, drag-out fights,” but they always walked out as a team with plans to outwit their political enemies.

For example, DeLay said, he, the Senate leadership and the White House would agree on a spending ceiling for appropriations bills before the process started. The House, under DeLay’s leadership, would pass a bare-bones bill, setting up a fight with the Senate. The whole time, Republicans on both sides of the Capitol, as well as the White House, knew what the limit was.

“A lot of that stuff took place behind closed doors, and nobody found out, the media never got it and, frankly, the media has yet to get [it],” he said.

Some believe that the cause of some of the friction between the White House and congressional Democrats stems from Obama’s lack of legislative details. Yet President Clinton provided the Democratic-controlled Congress in 1993 and 1994 with specific plans, which rubbed some Democratic lawmakers the wrong way.

Regardless, DeLay said the off-the-reservation remarks are detrimental to the White House: “If it’s your president, you just don’t do that.”

Former Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Texas) said he thinks the administration has failed to understand the importance of laying the groundwork for a cooperative relationship with congressional leaders.

“I think it’s probably a lack of understanding of how things work in Washington,” Bonilla said. “Campaigning is one thing, but implementing is a whole different world.”
Pelosi’s office scoffed at GOP criticisms, labeling those who uttered them lackeys of the Bush administration.

“These claims are laughable coming from Republicans who enjoy pointing fingers at others while refusing to take any responsibility for the years of economic damage caused by the Bush administration’s misguided policies,” Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said. “These are the same Republicans who were the rubberstamps for President Bush, so they fail to understand what it means to work together with the White House instead of taking orders.”

During Bush’s first term, some conservatives bit their tongues as the president shepherded the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and the Medicare prescription drug measure through Congress.

And after Bush won reelection, few Republicans publicly criticized Bush’s unpopular Social Security reform plan.

After the Social Security proposal crashed and burned in 2005, Republicans became more vocal in assessing their commander in chief.