Monday, December 15, 2008

In (Partial) Defense of Harry Reid

An alternative title to this post might be "Mitch McConnell is perhaps the greatest douchebag in the history of the Senate." And pardon me for questioning the leader of the Democratic quants, Nate Silver: "If Reid can't get [the Senate GOP] to pay a greater public price, then the Democrats ought to find somebody else who can. " Would anyone care to remind Mr. Silver how many Senate seats Republicans lost in this most recent election? Is Silver seriously arguing that Democrats ought to have won races in Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi on the basis of excessive filibustering? And if he is, can I have some of what he's smoking?

4 comments:

Neil Sinhababu said...

In general, I'm inclined to not be too hard on the current House and Senate leadership, with our excellent electoral performance from their rise in 2005 to the present.

Anonymous said...

The douchebags are just doing what the douchebags sent them to Washington to do. We need smarter citizens who understand that Senators should do something other than obstruct democrats.

Anonymous said...

Effectiveness should be measured by what the Congress actually accomplishes, not by electoral success. What's the point of having a majority if they can't actually do anything with it?

Anonymous said...

MikeJ is right.

That doesn't mean Reid's been ineffective - it's hardly like the legislation that would have passed would not have been vetoed by the president. And as Nick points out, it's hardly like the Republicans didn't pay a harsh political price for their obstruction of the central items of the Democratic platform.

Now the question is what the next Senate will get done, and we won't know until it actually gets underway.

People on the Internet seem obsessed with finding ways of evaluating the new administration before it does any administrating, and I find that rather silly.