Pelosi somehow still wants the top dog seat for the democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Personally I think reaffirming her position might be a bad move for the Democratic Party, but we’ll see how that pans out in the future. I want to speak a little bit about what this actually is pointing to though. Sticking with someone you know for the job is something the democratic leadership has been about lately…and not just lately but for a while now, and not just the democrats come to think of it.
Look at who is the current House Minority Leader. Is this a new face? Hell no, he’s been a representative since 1991. The point I’m trying to make is that congressional leadership isn’t as slap and dash as our Presidential leadership, where you can get elected even though you have no executive branch experience. No, congressional leadership has to be gained from a majority of your party’s members in whatever house of congress you happen to be in. In the Senate that will be 48 people and in the House it’s gonna be over 200 (For the Republicans). That’s a bunch of people you have to convince that you are the right man or woman to lead the party in congress and in order to do that you have to make promises to those people that help their constituencies so that they can get re-elected. This is especially true of the House, where the next election is literally right around the corner.
What this means is that only powerful and long term members of congress tend to become leaders of the party, which can massively slow this whole Change thing down. Which is what you have going on now. Two years ago Obama and other democrats got elected on a mandate of Change. The only thing he’s done significantly different from Bush has been health care, something the democrats have been shouting for since the 80’s, and abortion, which is the typical move (Republics ban federal funding for abortions, Democrats allow it). It’s not because he hasn’t wanted to though. It’s because the congressional leadership knows they can only push things so far in any one direction. They only have so many favors and they want to make sure they spend those favors for the maximum benefit. And each party has it’s liberals and conservatives and so each leader is stuck with only a certain amount of change they can enact before burning through their favors and becoming an ineffective leader.
The bottom line, in 2 years, when not much has changed it’s going to be the Republicans up on the chopping block, because the same thing is going to happen. There will be one big push and that will color the entirety of both the Presidential election and the Congressional Elections. I’m hoping the leadership the Republicans get is good enough to choose the right push. I think the democrats not only shot themselves in the foot but blew off half their leg with the Health Care Debacle. So the other bottom line, don’t expect much to change in the next two years. The way our government runs, not much can change in a fast manner.
