Washington watch

You know the Democrats are in deep trouble when they lose a senate seat in Massachusetts, among the most liberal states in the country. Only 15 months ago, the Republicans were fighting to stay ahead in the red state of Idaho. Now they have won the special election for the seat held by the late Teddy Kennedy. Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. They had feared voters might mistakenly opt for the beguilingly named Joe Kennedy (no relation), an independent candidate with libertarian views. But Kennedy got 22,000 votes—less than a fifth of the margin by which Republican Scott Brown beat his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley.

US voters, or at least the independents who tend to decide elections, have become volatile. This group voted two to one for Obama in 2008. Now they are two to one against him. In the latest National Journal poll, only 39 per cent of Americans say they will vote for him in 2012, while 50 per cent say they “probably or definitely” won’t.

Back in May 2009, Obama warned staffers that they had little time to enact their agenda. The worry back then was the November 2010 midterms, in which the Dems looked likely to lose a number of senate seats. Given the special election and the polls, this is now almost inevitable.



But what of healthcare, over which Obama has spilled much legislative blood? To stop debate in the senate and move to a vote, the Dems needed all of their 60 seats. Now that they have a mere 59, the Republicans hold an effective veto over legislation they don’t like. Their weapon is the filibuster—talking out legislation until it withers and dies, a fate Dems now think awaits healthcare. That’s why Brown ran adverts in the recent election calling himself “the man who can stop Obamacare.”?

Yet there is no actual law or constitutional clause behind the 60-vote rule. It is merely a code of the senate, and could be changed. The Republicans proposed doing just this during the Bush administration in 2005, to overturn Democratic opposition to nominees for judges. Democrats have flirted with the idea too—15 years ago senators Tom Harkin and Joe Lieberman (then a Dem, now an independent) proposed a rule that would cut the 60 votes required to 57 in the first week of debate, 55 in the second and then to a simple majority. It went nowhere: too many Dems thought the veto could be useful someday.

Making matters worse, a survey cited by the New York Times in December 2009 suggests that the rule is being widely abused. Filibustering blocked important legislation 8 per cent of the time in the 1960s, 27 per cent of the time in the 1980s and a staggering 70 per cent of the time since 2006. At the extreme, senators who represent just 10 per cent of US voters can wield a veto by filibuster. The 60-vote rule could have been changed on the first day of a newly installed senate in January 2011—but only if the Dems still had 60 seats.

Superdelegates

But the real trouble could come in 2012, when 23 of the senate seats the Democrats hold will be on the line compared with just nine held by Republicans. In the House, the Democrats are defending a 40-seat majority. Haunted by their loss of 54 seats in 1994, the Dems have been preparing and their congressional campaign committee has so far outraised the Republicans by $18m. And in 1994, 22 of the seats they lost were open because the incumbent was retiring—there are unlikely to be so many in 2012. But the Republicans know that if they win all the Democratic-held districts that John McCain won in the 2008 presidential race, they will take the House.?

Although the filibuster will probably survive, another rule is being changed, suggesting Obama is confident he’ll be running again in 2012. Two years ago, when he won his shock victory in the Iowa caucus, his campaign team were worried about the superdelegates, the unelected party officials whose vote looked to be decisive at the nominating convention. Hillary Clinton had signed up over 70 per cent of them.

Once in charge, Obama established a Democratic Change Commission to review the party’s rules for nominating presidential candidates. It has now reported, and while the recommendations have yet to be made public or agreed by the Democratic national committee, the key decision has in effect been made. The superdelegates will keep their star status and their votes, but they lose their freedom of choice.

In future, superdelegates will have to cast their votes in accordance with the primary or caucus votes of their state. So they will no longer have presidential candidates wooing them and promising them nights in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House. But they still get the best hotel rooms, special passes to the convention and invitations to the best parties. The importance of such perks should never be underestimated. At the same time, it strengthens the power of the party’s grassroots and rules out the embarrassing prospect of the caucus voting one way but the superdelegates casting the state’s vote elsewhere.

The “Stop Sarah” Republicans

Sarah Palin’s bestselling book and her new gig as a commentator on Fox News have sparked a “stop Sarah” movement among traditionally-minded Republicans who think they can topple Obama in 2012. But who could be their candidate? Ex-governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney was not impressive in the last primaries. Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty is solid, worthy and deeply unexciting. Newt Gingrich has too many enemies. So keep an eye on South Dakota’s handsome senator John Thune. He is 49, an evangelical Christian and a high school basketball star who has a 100 per cent approval rating from the American Conservative Union. And he’s a passionate supporter of windpower—South Dakota having a lot of wind.