By John Brummett

Barack Obama has big problems. The top three, in order, are a failed economy, failing wars and Tim Geithner.

Republicans would not come next. They are outnumbered. They are at sea. They pledge their allegiance to a grotesque radio blowhard. They’re pitiful.

No, next come congressional Democrats, specifically that they are not of common political interest.

Obama did not win the presidency because of a Democratic message or majority. He won it because George W. Bush was an awful president and the economy failed and John McCain ran a horrible campaign and, for good measure, presumed to give the country a woefully unqualified vice president.

The Democrats are dissipated, perhaps fatally so.

You have your traditional liberals, generally coalescing around Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

You have your Blue Dog Democrats in the House, representing, among a few dozen others, your garden-variety rural Arkansas Democrats like Marion Berry and Mike Ross. They extol guns and social conservatism and, until the realities of the ongoing crisis, fiscal discipline. They’ve given up fiscal discipline for the time being on account of the fact that the world is bankrupt and the only thing anybody knows to do is print and spend American dollars.

Then you have your so-called New Democrats in the House. There are a few dozen of them as well. They are not so economically and socially conservative as the Blue Dogs. They’re less “new,” actually, than throwbacks to JFK. They advocate free global trade and military and international muscularity. They met Wednesday at the White House with Obama, who proclaimed himself one of them.

Now there’s Blanche Lincoln’s new group. Didn’t you know she had one?

She’s one of three organizers, along with Evan Bayh of Indiana and Thomas Carper of Delaware. It’s 15 Senate Democrats who call themselves centrist, moderate and pragmatic.

What that means specifically is anyone’s guess. What it really means is that Bayh and Lincoln are Democrats who are up for re-election next year in conservative states and need a little insulation from a president overseeing a deficit of a couple of trillion dollars and getting called a socialist.

By the common cliché, Lincoln and Bayh and their buddies want to “reach across the aisle” to Republicans like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and the embattled Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Let’s get to the point: Obama carried Bayh’s Indiana, but it was narrowly and an aberration. Lincoln will seek re-election next year in a state that favored McCain by 20 points. So it behooves these two to form themselves a group to advocate practical, bipartisan solutions and fiscal restraint and so forth.

For example, Bayh, who is not widely liked among Senate Democrats, actually, got out front a couple of weeks ago encouraging Obama to veto that spending bill with all the earmarks.

For another example: Now we have signals that Obama may try to throw a carbon tax and health care reform into a budget reconciliation bill. That’s because budget reconciliation requires only a majority vote and thereby provides an end run on filibusters requiring 60 votes to end. Lincoln is in the lead against that one, saying we need bipartisan solutions and that it would amount to “sticking in (Republicans’) eyes” to get those hot-button issues accomplished unilaterally by Democrats through budget reconciliation.

In a conference call with Arkansas reporters Thursday, Lincoln said the group was about seeking consensus from regions supplemental to the East Coast and West Coast.

And, finally, a delicious postscript: Conspicuously missing from these 15 centrist Democrats assembled by Lincoln and Bayh was Mark Pryor. Isn’t he a pragmatic, centrist, moderate Democrat, too? Or was he actually too conservative for their tastes? Actually, it was none of that. What happened was that Bayh, a chronic attention-seeker, went on television and talked about this group. Then his press secretary put out a press release announcing it. And his press secretary plumb forgot Pryor. The next day, Pryor aide Michael Teague read to me from an e-mail from Bayh’s press aide: “Oh, my God. Huge monumental mistake on my part. What can I do to make this right. Want to do some TV?” It’s always the TV with these guys, isn’t it?
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.