DownWithTyranny!: Steve Driehaus Is Suing A GOP Front Group For Defamation But If He Wants To Know Why Democrats Didn't Bother Voting, He Should Examine His Own Record

The misleading Susan B. Anthony List billboard

Last we caught up with Cincinnati Congressman Steve Driehaus, a middle of the road Democrat on his way to a thumping 52-45% defeat, he was denouncing the DCCC for abandoning his race. They spent exactly $59,778.01 in his district, while he was being inundated with third party ads tearing him apart, much of it, $77,698.00, from GOP front group the Susan B. Anthony List.

Driehaus announced Friday that he's bringing a defamation suit against the anti-Choice group for lying about him in public statements.

The group claims Driehaus, who has campaigned as an anti-abortion candidate, supports taxpayer-funded abortions because he voted for the national health care law. Driehaus said the claim is false and that the law bars any federal funding of abortion.

"A lie is a lie," Driehaus' lawyers wrote in his federal defamation lawsuit. "The First Amendment is not and never has been an invitation to concoct falsehoods aimed at depriving a person of his livelihood."

In fact, Driehaus lost a great deal of support from Democrats because he followed the Susan B. Anthony List position on abortion by voting for the Stupak Amendment on November 7, 2009, one of only 64 Democrats to cross the aisle and vote against Choice. In fact, it's been my contention that that was one of the votes that cost Driehaus his reelection bid in the rematch with former Congressman Steve Chabot, a Boehner crony he had decisively beaten in 2008.

Driehaus' 51.18 ProgressivePunch score shows that on the contentious substantive issues that divided the Congress along partisan lines he voted with the Democrats a tiny bit more than he voted with the Republicans. There were an awful lot of disappointed Cincinnati voters who turned out for him-- and Obama-- in 2008. Back then Obama took OH-01 by beating McCain 55-44% (this after two consecutive Bush wins against Gore and Kerry). Cincinnati voters were ready for Hope and ready for Change. Neither Obama nor Driehaus lived up to voter expectations and two years later, Democrats and left-leaning independents stayed home on election day.

Before we look at how Driehaus beat Chabot in 2008, let's go back to 2006, the last midterm before the one that we just went through. That was a wave year for Democrats but Chabot had managed to beat City Councilman John Cranley 101,838 (53%) to 90,963 (47%), taking both OH-01 counties, the sliver of suburban Butler plus Hamilton (Cincinnati itself). In the hard fought Senate race going on simultaneously-- in which Sherrod Brown ousted incumbent Republican Mike DeWine-- DeWine eked out a narrow victory in OH-01.

Two years later the story changed. Obama won Ohio 52-47% and he managed to win Hamilton County with a slightly larger margin of victory, 53-46%. That helped sweep Driehaus to victory as well and he beat Chabot 155,089 (52%) to 140,469 (48%), strictly based on a great Democratic turnout in Cincinnati, where Driehaus pulled 151,547 votes (54%) to Chabot's 131,012 (46%), while getting creamed in the Butler County suburbs (Driehaus 27% to Chabot 73%, about 13,000 voters participating in total). If that wasn't a message to cater to the Democratic base, there has never been one. But instead Chabot's voting record indicates he was trying to placate implacable conservative voters in the suburbs. And look what happened. Over 50,000 Democrats who had propelled Driehaus to victory in 2008 just stayed away this year. Chabot beat him in both counties-- 76-21% in the white flight suburbs of Butler County and 94,502 (51%) to 85,450 (46%) in Cincinnati itself.

It wasn't the Susan B. Anthony List's lies about Chabot that ended his congressional career-- although they certainly helped keep the GOP turnout high. He lost because he failed to inspire Democrats and they just did not bother to come vote for the lesser of two evils. Obama should be looking at results like this around the country because he's falling into the exact same trap Driehaus did, a trap poignantly laid out by Frank Rich yesterday, that will guarantee him the same one term that Driehaus got. Here's a news report on Driehaus' problem and after that, Rich's explanation of Obama's dilemma.

Those desperate to decipher the baffling Obama presidency could do worse than consult an article titled “Understanding Stockholm Syndrome” in the online archive of The F.B.I. Law Enforcement Bulletin. It explains that hostage takers are most successful at winning a victim’s loyalty if they temper their brutality with a bogus show of kindness. Soon enough, the hostage will start concentrating on his captors’ “good side” and develop psychological characteristics to please them-- “dependency; lack of initiative; and an inability to act, decide or think.”

This dynamic was acted out-- yet again-- in President Obama’s latest and perhaps most humiliating attempt to placate his Republican captors in Washington. No sooner did he invite the G.O.P.’s Congressional leaders to a post-election White House summit meeting than they countered his hospitality with a slap-- postponing the date for two weeks because of “scheduling conflicts.” But they were kind enough to reschedule, and that was enough to get Obama to concentrate once more on his captors’ “good side.”

And so, as the big bipartisan event finally arrived last week, he handed them an unexpected gift, a freeze on federal salaries. Then he made a hostage video hailing the White House meeting as “a sincere effort on the part of everybody involved to actually commit to work together.” Hardly had this staged effusion of happy talk been disseminated than we learned of Mitch McConnell’s letter vowing to hold not just the president but the entire government hostage by blocking all legislation until the Bush-era tax cuts were extended for the top 2 percent of American households.

The captors will win this battle, if they haven’t already by the time you read this, because Obama has seemingly surrendered his once-considerable abilities to act, decide or think. That pay freeze made as little sense intellectually as it did politically. It will save the government a scant $5 billion over two years and will actually cost the recovery at least as much, since much of that $5 billion would have been spent on goods and services by federal workers with an average yearly income of $75,000. By contrast, the extension of the Bush tax cuts to the $250,000-plus income bracket will add $80 billion to the deficit in two years, much of which will just be banked by the wealthier beneficiaries.

The cliché criticisms of Obama are (from the left) that he is a naïve centrist, not the audacious liberal that Democrats thought they were getting, and (from the right) that he is a socialist out to impose government on every corner of American life. But the real problem is that he’s so indistinct no one across the entire political spectrum knows who he is. A chief executive who repeatedly presents himself as a conciliator, forever searching for the “good side” of all adversaries and convening summits, in the end comes across as weightless, if not AWOL. A Rorschach test may make for a fine presidential candidate — when everyone projects their hopes on the guy. But it doesn’t work in the Oval Office: These days everyone is projecting their fears on Obama instead.

...In the summer before the election, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll (of June 21) found that only 15 percent of respondents thought the deficit should be the government’s top priority (behind jobs and economic growth, at 33 percent); the Washington Post/ABC News survey just a week before Election Day found that only 7 percent chose the deficit as the most important issue influencing their vote (again well behind the economy, at 37 percent). After constant G.O.P. fear-mongering about the budget-- some of it echoed, rather than countered, by Obama-- deficit reduction did jump to first place in Nov. 2 exit polls as voters’ highest priority for the next Congress. The disciplined Republican message had turned the deficit into a catchall synonym for America’s entire economic health. But at 40 percent, deficit reduction still was neck and neck with “spending to create jobs” (37 percent). Cutting taxes was chosen by only 18 percent.

We’re now at the brink of a new economic disaster that will eventually yank a chicken out of every pot. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that the extended Bush-era tax cuts will contribute by far the largest share to the next decade’s deficits-- ahead of the recession’s drain on tax revenues, Iraq and Afghanistan war spending, TARP and Obama’s stimulus. The new Congress’s plan to block any governmental intervention on behalf of 15 million-plus jobless Americans guarantees that the unemployment rate, back up to 9.8 percent as of Friday, will remain intractable too.

Obama should have pounded home the case against profligate tax cuts for the wealthiest before the Democrats lost the Senate. Even now Warren Buffett-- not a socialist, by the way-- is making the case with a Christie-esque directness that usually eludes the president. “The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll all go out and spend more, and then it will trickle down to the rest of you,” he told Christiane Amanpour on This Week last Sunday. “But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.”

Everyone will have caught on by 2012, but that will be too late for many jobless Americans, let alone for Obama.