Monday, September 08, 2008

Dems "Secretly Against" Ethics Reform?!

clipped from www.beldar.org

Better still was when Mr. Wallace asked Mr. Axelrod to name an example of Sen. Obama standing up against his own party. The best Mr. Axelrod could come up with was "ethics reform." He's referring, of course, to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, whose principal sponsor was Sen. Russ Feingold. Sen. Obama was one of seventeen co-sponsors. And it passed the Senate by a vote of 96 to 2. Since both of the "nay" votes were Republicans (Sens. Orin Hatch and Tom Coburn), it's pretty hard to paint this as Sen. Obama "standing up against his own party." (The best Mr. Axelrod could come up with was to claim that many Democrats were secretly against the bill, which is hardly a ringing endorsement of his party, now, is it?)

If political reconciliation and legislative success is the sole standard, however, then the do-nothing Democratic Congress of which Sen. Obama is a part is surely a bigger failure.