As a freshman Democrat, Rep. Parker Griffith looked to be in trouble next year. Sure, his district hadn't ever elected a Republican to the House, but it was trending red -- it consistently gave 60 percent or more of its vote to the Republican presidential candidate -- and in a year in which Democrats are bound to take some losses, especially in the South, he seemed very vulnerable. So his fellow Democrats, including most of the party's leaders in the House, opened their wallets.
Now that Griffith has announced that he's becoming a Republican, however, some of them want their money back.
"House Democratic Members and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee took Parker Griffith at his word and, as a result, invested a great deal in working with Alabamans to bring Mr. Griffith to Congress. We were committed to helping Mr. Griffith deliver for his constituents and successfully helped Mr. Griffith fend off the personal attacks against him from the far right," Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement.
"Mr. Griffith, failing to honor our commitment to him, has a duty and responsibility to return to Democratic Members and the DCCC the financial resources that were invested in him. His constituents will hold him accountable for failing to keep his commitments."
Griffith will reportedly be giving money back to any donors who ask; if all of the political action committees and campaigns affiliated with elected Democrats want a refund, he could be giving back about $80,000 of the $600,000 or so that he currently has in the bank.
This week, and last, the Senate had been facing the rather unpleasant prospect of having to hold its final vote on Senate Democrats' healthcare reform bill at 7 p.m. EST -- maybe even later -- on Christmas Eve. And though no one really wanted that to happen, due to the combined force of Republican stalling tactics and Majority Leader Harry Reid's determination to get the bill passed before Christmas, it looked inevitable.
On Tuesday afternoon, though, Reid announced that his chamber has gotten a reprieve. Senate Republicans, who know that the result is bound to go against them no matter what at this point, have agreed to give up some of the time the body's rules allow them for debate, thus speeding up the process appreciably.
The vote will still be held on Dec. 24, but is now scheduled for 8 a.m. EST, hopefully allowing members and their staffs -- not to mention everyone else who makes the Capitol run, plus the reporters who have to cover the vote -- time enough to travel, if need be, in order to join their families for the holiday.
In an interview with the Washington Post that hit the Internet Tuesday afternoon, President Obama sought to defend himself from the criticism he's faced from the left over the way the healthcare reform debate has ended up. While doing so, though, he may have only succeeded in further alienating and angering liberals.
"Nowhere has there been a bigger gap between the perceptions of compromise and the realities of compromise than in the health-care bill," Obama told the Post. "Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill."
By itself, that's basically true, though it's not what many progressives want to hear right now. But Obama may have really stepped in it when he went to the real sticking point for a fair number of liberals right now, the lack of a public option in the Senate bill and the perception that the White House did little, if anything, to fight for it.
The idea has "become a source of ideological contention between the left," Obama said, adding, "I didn't campaign on the public option."
The president's claim that he "didn't campaign on the public option" is at best on shaky ground, factually speaking. It's unmistakably true that during the campaign his plan for reform included a public option.
A summary of Obama's proposal -- still up on BarackObama.com -- says it "Offers a public health insurance option to provide the uninsured and those who can’t find affordable coverage with a real choice." And a document his campaign put together, "Barack Obama's Plan for a Healthy America," says:
The Obama plan both builds upon and improves our current insurance system, upon which most Americans continue to rely, and leaves Medicare intact for older and disabled Americans. The Obama plan also addresses the large gaps in coverage that leave 45 million Americans uninsured. Specifically, the Obama plan will: (1) establish a new public insurance program available to Americans who neither qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP nor have access to insurance through their employers, as well as to small businesses that want to offer insurance to their employees
On the other hand, the words "campaign on" have a fairly specific meaning -- they imply making some issue or message a particular focus of your campaign, as in, "In 2004, President Bush campaigned on terrorism." And while it was indeed a pretty weaselly thing for him to say, Obama's comment was, on that score, accurate.
Yes, the public option was included in his plan for healthcare reform, but he never really ran on it and barely even pushed it during 2008. As NBC's Chuck Todd noted in September, Obama "never uttered the words 'public option' or 'public plan' in his big campaign speeches on health care."
A search of Lexis-Nexis' database of news coverage for the words "Barack Obama" and "public option" returns only 46 results from the period between Jan. 1, 2008, and Oct. 31, 2008. Similarly, a search for "Barack Obama" and "public plan" comes up with only 362 results for the same time frame, and most of those don't bolster the case that Obama did campaign on the idea -- the results are dominated by media outlets' comparisons of the candidate's published plans. And when the formulations used on Obama's Web site and in his campaign document, "public health insurance option" and "public insurance program" are swapped into the search, there are only three results and 51 results, respectively.
At the same time, one result from that last search, a candidate questionnaire sent out by Newsday, does show again that this really is a question of Obama trying to get cute with semantics.. Asked to keep each of his answers to 50 words or less, Obama's summary of his healthcare plan was, "I have pledged to sign a universal health bill into law by the end of my first term in office. My plan will ensure that all Americans have health care coverage through their employers, private health plans, the federal government or the states. For those without health insurance I will establish a new public insurance program."
If you haven't seen it yet, check out the list we here at Salon put together of the year's most bogus stories. Our top pick was "death panels," the entirely fictitious things supposedly contained in the Democrats' healthcare reform bills that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin made famous when she wrote, on her Facebook page, "my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care."
Coincidentally, on Tuesday Palin took to Twitter to comment on the Senate healthcare deal. And when she did so, she went back to a familiar topic.
"NOW w/the Prez "threatening" &Congress "rushing" is when we MUST pay more attention than ever 2what this HealthCare Takeover is all about," Palin wrote in one tweet. "[M]erged bill may b unrecognizable from what assumed was a done deal:R death panels back in?"
You almost have to admire the chutzpah it takes to write something like that for tens of thousands of people to see. The "death panels" were never even in the bill in the first place, so they were never taken out -- and it's not like Palin would have seen news reports that they had been removed from the legislation. But they are gone now (because of the former governor's intervention, no doubt), apparently; however, we have to watch out, because Democrats are just dying to sneak in a provision that would allow them to kill your loved ones. It's vintage Palin.
When Democrat Parker Griffith ran for Congress last year, it was in a district that the GOP wanted badly to win. So the Natioanl Republican Congressional Committee really went to town on him, putting out an attack ad filled with dark images of terror attacks, including 9/11, that ended by quoting Griffith as saying, "We have nothing to fear from radical Islam."
Griffith won anyway. But on Tuesday, news broke that he plans to switch parties, and will officially announce his decision to become a Republican Tuesday afternoon. Problem was, that ad was apparently still on YouTube.
The NRCC seems to have moved quickly, though. Their official copy of the spot has been removed from the video-sharing site. One other user's copy still remained as of this post, however. You can view it below.
Update: Not wanting to be left out of the action, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is now scrubbing positive statements its people made about Griffith in 2008.
Rep. Parker Griffith, D-Ala., will announce Tuesday afternoon that he's switching parties and becoming a Republican, a GOP source familiar with the decision who didn't want to preempt the announcement tells Salon. A first-term congressman, Griffith represents a district that's trended more and more conservative in recent years but hasn't been represented by a Republican since shortly after the Civil War.
Griffith is a doctor, and he's expected to cite his differences with Democrats over healthcare reform as a major issue in his move. But politics likely played a major role as well.
The congressman won 52 percent of the vote in a 2008 race for the seat, which was open as a result of Democrat Bud Cramer's retirement. But the district went to John McCain in the presidential election; the Republican got 61 percent of the vote to Barack Obama's 38 percent. President Bush got 60 percent of the district's residents in 2004. With numbers like that working against him, Griffith was seen as one of the most vulnerable Democratic members of Congress next year, even though he'd been voting against his party on major issues since being sworn in.
Republicans remain 40 seats away from taking back the House.
Politico's Josh Kraushaar, who was the first to report Griffith's decision, noted that the congressman already has more than $600,000 in the bank for his race next year, and at least $14,000 of it came from House Democratic leaders.
War Room is written and edited by Alex Koppelman, with contributions from Salon reporters around the country.
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