I’ve had a lot of e-mails over the transom asking whether the Democrats should take a confrontational stance toward the president on the Patients’ Bill of Rights, and perhaps take a veto over a piece of legislation. For many pieces of legislation that will come up over the next eighteen months this is a very important question. Tom Daschle’s mentor George Mitchell famously used this veto-inducing strategy against Bush’s father and greatly contributed to Bush’s eventual defeat in 1992.
In any case, many legislative battles will raise this question. But in this case there really isn’t much of a question over what stance to take.
As the recent CBS-New Times poll showed, President Bush is already beginning to appear to a majority of Americans as someone who either doesn’t care or isn’t interested in the issues which matter most to them in their daily lives. What’s more, the Democratic position is overwhelmingly popular with the public. And the Republicans themselves are seeing a slow hemorrhage of defections as moderates and even some conservatives don’t want to get stuck carrying water for the president’s unpopular position. The president’s hand on the domestic policy front is extraordinarily weak.
The real question would have been this: If president Bush had come to the Democrats, should they have kept upping the ante on him to force a veto which they would then take the public in the next election? But that’s not what’s happened. The president’s new threat to veto the Patients’ Bill of Rights legislation is either a hollow threat or a political gift.
There’s really no reason — either on substance or politics — for the Democrats to give one bit.
