By John Brummett
A rural conservative Democratic congressman from Arkansas — Marion Berry, one of those “Blue Dogs” wanting to tug the Democrats rightward toward fiscal and social conservatism — announced his retirement last week.
At 67 and with seven terms behind him, the pharmacist/farmer and former agriculture adviser in the Clinton White House had grown weary, speaking physically, mentally and politically.
Always known at home for homespun candor and quote-richness, he got a little national attention for something a tad striking that he said upon his retirement announcement.
Nonpartisan observers said Berry’s anecdote revealed President Obama’s hubris. Right-wingers said it revealed Obama’s messiah complex, even mental instability.
What Berry related was that he and other Blue Dogs kept warning the White House that the big stimulus package enacted early last year wasn’t wise either as policy or politics unless it had offsetting spending reductions. These Blue Dogs kept sounding an alarm that this would be 1994 all over again, when Democrats lost their majorities in the mid-terms because Clinton had lurched left out of the presidential gate.
So the Blue Dogs got summoned down to the White House a few times, but never, Berry said, for consultation. They were summoned merely for listening, he said.
Then, he said, there was the time Obama himself dropped by and assured the Blue Dogs not to worry about a repeat of 1994.
“‘Well, the big difference between 2010 and 1994 was you’ve got me,’” Berry quoted Obama as saying.
My goodness. You want a president to be confident. But you may not want him talking quite so freely about his own singular difference-making.
So I got on the phone with Berry later in the week to invite the irascible new retiree to expound.
“They’d bring David Axelrod (leading Obama political strategist) in there (to these Blue Dog sessions) and he’d tell us how lucky we were and how smart they were,” Berry said. “At the time, the poll numbers really were outstanding. But then we got to Labor Day and we weren’t so lucky anymore.
“Before long, Axelrod quit coming altogether.”
Berry’s complaints could be dismissed as merely reflective of the self-serving recriminations said to be pervasive among congressional Democrats after the debacle in Massachusetts. Berry says Democrats are acting these days “like cats in a roomful of rocking chairs whose tails have been mashed once or twice already.”
But he’s not running again, so he lacks any real personal stake.
His compelling point is that the Blue Dogs were proven right — and by a state, Massachusetts, with nary a Blue Dog in sight.
They were right not only about holding the line on the deficit, but also about how health care reform could be done for less cost and in a simpler bill of 30 pages of so.
Berry himself has filed a bill in several congressional sessions to require that Medicare negotiate drug prices, permit prescription drug re-importation, let people over 55 buy into Medicare and protect pre-existing conditions from denial of coverage for those over 55 choosing to go into Medicare.
He’s wondering what would have been so wrong with going that route. He says optional Medicare at 55 at no expense to the government was popular until the mood got poisoned.
Finally, an aside: Berry told me years ago that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was the smartest political and strategic tactician he’d ever encountered. So I asked him if he still believed that.
“Yes,” he said promptly.
To take the pressure from the left and the pressure from the White House and the pressure from the Blue Dogs and win 220 votes for a massive health care reform bill in the House … why, it was mastery, Berry said.
All for naught, of course.
——-
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.
