POLITICS DAILY

House Liberals Counting on Pelosi to Stop Obama From Giving Away Farm to GOP

Nov. 25, 2010

Are outnumbered House Democrats worried about "triangulation" from a White House forced to work with majority Republicans in the U.S. House?

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), co-chair of the Progressive Caucus in the House, says she and other liberals are counting on Rep. Nancy Pelosi to pull on President Obama's "shirttails to make sure he doesn't move from center-right to far-right," the Associated Press reported Wednesday. Republican leaders may be surprised to hear the president described politically as "center-right," but they are expected to meet with him after Thanksgiving to see if they can reach agreement on any of the legislation before the lame-duck session of Congress.

The term triangulation refers to Democratic President Clinton's successful strategy of working with Republicans after the GOP take-over of the U.S. House and Senate in 1994. The idea was to have a Democratic White House dealing with a Republican Congress to get things done -- while trying not to marginalize the Democratic minority on Capitol Hill. Many Democrats felt shortchanged in that deal.

So far, Obama has warmly supported Pelosi as the new minority leader and has not signaled that he's going to go around the Democratic leadership in the House or the Senate to cook up deals with Republicans. But there are those Bush-era tax cuts. When the White House indicated it could accept a compromise extending tax relief for at least a period of time to high-income taxpayers as well as the middle class, Pelosi said she wasn't interested in such a deal. And earlier in the year, during the health care debate, she quashed a White House-initiated feeler for a smaller, less ambitious reform plan.

"We think if he'd (Obama) done less compromising in the last two years, there's a good chance we'd have had a jobs bill that would have created jobs, and then we wouldn't even be worrying about having lost elections," Woolsey told the AP's Julie Hirschfeld Davis. Some Democrats think the White House was slow on the draw in the midterm election campaign -- muddling the party's message and not rushing to the rescue of lawmakers who took tough votes for Obama.

Pelosi can provide a balance for the Obama administration, said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) a prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus, a liberal bulwark. Democrats, he said "want to make sure they've got somebody at the [bargaining] table with the president, looking him eye-to-eye and saying basically, 'You've got some people who have been very, very loyal to you -- not just progressives but moderates too -- and they truly believe that that's not the right thing to do.' "

Source: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/24/house-liberals-counting-on-pelosi-to-block-obama-from-giving-awa/