Campaign Diaries

Recent fiscal debates have allowed us to get a sense of Democratic Senators’ positioning within their caucus. While all voted in favor of the stimulus bill, three Democrats chose to oppose the omnibus bill: Russ Feingold, Evan Bayh and Claire McCaskill. While Feingold was moved by his opposition to earmarks, Bayh and McCaskill justified their “no” vote based on their concern over excessive spending - an ideologically charged statement that puts them well on the right of their party’s spectrum.

Beyond the omnibus bill, Bayh and McCaskill have vocally positioned themselves to the right since the beginning of the 111th Congress, but they have taken very different routes. On the one hand, the Indiana Senator is doing his best to become the de facto leader of the Democrats’ conservative faction and has offered particularly harsh and public criticism of Obama’s plans, particularly on taxes. Bayh is also one of the organizers of the Senate’s newly-created centrist caucus.

Bayh is looking to get “pragmatist, moderate” Democrats to work with “like-minded” Republicans. Accordingly, Bayh is explicitly aiming fire at his party’s liberal faction. In a recent recent Fox News interview, Bayh warned of a “cataclysmic” collapse if Obama continue to implement their economic policies and dismissed some Democrats’ support as “resentment:”

Some of them like the just higher levels of spending for all the programs, the 8 percent across the board increase. They resented some of the lines that were drawn during the Bush years, and they want to make up for that in their minds, and I think some others would prefer maybe to not buck the leadership, that kind of thing, so you put all of that together, and that generates support for the bill, but again, Greta, the day of reckoning is coming. We can’t run deficits like this forever. The markets will react and punish us if we don’t…I am talking about something truly cataclysmic, our currency collapsing, interest rates skyrocketing because of our unsustainable deficits.

McCaskill, meanwhile, has taken a different route: She rarely offers harsh criticism of the President or live up publicly to her behind-the-scenes efforts to push legislation towards a more conservative direction, for instance during the stimulus debate. As for the omnibus bill, McCaskill had hinted that she would vote for the bill before casting a vote against it on the floor. (McCaskill also was one of four Democrats to vote in favor of the Enzi amendment on HIV/AIDS funding.) Asked by George Stephanopoulos why she had reversed herself on the overall bill, McCaskill tweeted back:

Ultimately just couldn’t do it. Not just earmrks tho, also increase in spendng(8%too much)& failure to reconcile $ with stimuls

In short: If Bayh is making himself one of the leading critics of Obama’s agenda, McCaskill is erecting herself as an obstacle to liberal objectives while trying to avoid drawing too much criticism.

And given that McCaskill looks to still be in favor of the Employee Free Choice Act, she is likely to avoid drawing much fire from liberal groups indeed. The lines are now being drawn on card-check, and a number of Democrats who have previously backed EFCA are now either undecided or publicly critical. The most prominent on-the-fence Senators are, in declining order of opposition/indecision: Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson (the only one who has gone as far as to state he would not vote for the bill in its current state), Mark Pryor, Michael Bennet, Bayh, Mark Warner and Mark Udall.

I will conduct a more specific vote-counting effort soon, but I will refrain from going further in legislative calculations in this post since it is devoted to the ideological lines within the Democratic caucus. In this respect, there are several interesting points to make on the above list. The first is Kay Hagan’s continued absence from such lists. Other newly-elected Senators, on the other hand, confirm their moderate-to-conservative reputations, especially Warner and Bennet.

More surprising is Mark Udall’s refusal to state his support of EFCA; not only did Colorado decisively vote for Obama, but Udall is not up for re-election until 2014. On the other hand, this is not the first sign we have gotten that Udall is a centrist on some issues - and he certainly looks less liberal than his cousin Tom, New Mexico’s new Senator. (One vote on which the two cousins parted ways while they were both in the House, for instance, was last summer’s FISA bill.)

Finally, Mary Landrieu’s stance as a leading Democratic hold-out is surprising because she was a co-sponsor of EFCA when it was introduced in the previous Congress - and that was just a year before Landrieu was up for re-election in a very tough race against state Treasurer John Kennedy, who opposed card checks. Now, Landrieu is not up for re-election until 2014, so her partial reversal cannot be due to electoral reasons but to ideological ones. This is certainly not surprising, as Landrieu has done her best to position herself as a leading figure of her party’s right wing, along with Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh.