Hey, remember when the White House thought that they were going to be a help for vulnerable Democrats running on all those tough, unpopular, unprincipled, and job-killing votes that the White House insisted that said vulnerable Democrats make?  Yeah, well, that’s gone by the wayside.    The White House is now telling said Democrats that the President understands if members of his party have to run for re-election without him ‘helping’ out.

Just savor that for a moment: imagine that you are a Democrat from a district whose Republican-leaning constituency has been looking at you funny for your votes on the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and/or Obamacare.  You know darn well that these were going to be unpopular votes, and when you brought that up with your party’s leadership you were given what South American drug dealers call the plata o plomo response.  That’s Spanish for ‘silver or lead;’  it means, ‘take a bribe or a bullet.’  In this case, the ‘silver’ was the promise that the President would be there for your election campaign if you played ball with his administration now… and the ‘lead’ was the promise that the President would not be there to help you out if you did not play ball.  You knew that you’d need the draw if you wanted to win, so you gulped nervously and voted against your district – and now that it’s done, the President is telling you that you have permission to deny knowing the One. And no doubt thrice, if necessary.

No wonder Jerry Connolly sounds here like he’s about to start drinking his dinners.

When Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, was asked last week whether he was convinced that Mr. Obama was fully focused on the midterm election campaign, he paused for 18 seconds and lowered his head before continuing.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” said Mr. Connolly, chairman of the freshman class of Democrats, who were elected in 2008.

Don’t lie, Jerry. You do know the answer to that, otherwise you wouldn’t have spent 18 seconds praying to God, Zeus, the Easter Bunny, anybody to Divinely intervene and make the question go away.  After all, the answer may very well be that the President’s fully focused, all right: fully focused on ensuring that the 112th Congress is a hostile, Republican-dominated foil to his reelection campaign.  Against that need the wishes of an entire crop of Democratic legislators would be insignificant to him.

This would be tragic, except that it’s not.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.