Sloppy analysis here by Chris Cillizza from The Washington Post. Entitled "As the Fiscal Cliff Looms, Republicans Have No Political Incentive to Make a Deal With Obama". His evidence?
"Of the 234 Republicans elected to the House on Nov. 6, just 15 (!) sit
in congressional districts that Obama also won that day, according to
calculations made by the Cook Political Report’s ace analyst David
Wasserman. That’s an infinitesimally small number, particularly when
compared with the 63 House Republicans who held seats where Obama had
won following the 2010 midterm elections. "
First off, note the (!) exclamation point...."just 15". Ok, if I do my math, I divide by 234 to get a percentage of Republican House Members who sit in districts won by the President. I come up with 6.4%. Which means that 93.6% of Republicans in the House sit in districts that were carried by Mitt Romney. Well, what percentage of House Democrats sit in districts carried by the President? Cillizza tries to finesse this one later in the piece by switching from numbers to percentages (presumably he figured his readers wouldn't do the math for him). "The picture on the Democratic side is less clear. Although 96 percent of
House Democrats in the 113th Congress will hold seats Obama won in
November". So there we have it. The percentage of Democrats sitting in Romney carried districts is EVEN SMALLER than the exclamation point earning figure above. HOW DOES THIS NOT IMPACT THEIR WILLINGNESS TO COMPROMISE? This is of course, left unsaid.
Trying to pull his weak chestnuts out of the fire, Cillizza then shifts his emphasis to the Senate."fully one-third of the 21 Senate Democrats who will stand for reelection in 2014 represent states that Romney won." And then, "First, with the exception of a dozen or so Republicans in the House
and Maine’s Susan Collins in the Senate, the number of GOP members of
the 113th Congress who see cutting a deal with the president — in the
fiscal cliff or, frankly, anything else — as politically advantageous is
close to zero. Second, while House Democrats are equally
de-incentivized to working across the aisle, there is a large-ish group
of Senate Democrats who must find ways of showing their bipartisan
spirit if they want to win reelection in states that didn’t favor their
party — or even come close to doing so — in the 2012 election. "
Which might be important if Democrats didn't control the Senate, and if anyone really considered Senate votes to be where the action is on the fiscal cliff. It seems pretty obvious that if Boehner and Obama had a deal, Reid could get the votes needed. But Boehner and Obama couldn't get a deal because BOTH the Republican and the Democratic caucuses did not see any profit in making a deal.
You wouldn't know that from the headline, or the exclamation points.
Unfortunately, this goes completely unnoticed by a significant portion of the voting public.
ReplyDeleteI'd rather have the in-your-face liberalism of MS NBC and their ilk than the pabulum-covered liberalism of the Washington Post and major networks. They sneak their liberal agenda in on the unsuspecting like I sneak a pill my dog would never take into a tasty treat. He never knows he ate it but it's inside him, spreading throughout every part of him.