Reps. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) and Mike Ross (D-Ark.) (house.gov, ross4congress.com)

By accident, simply by being polite, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) drafted the best-known opponent of one of the leading Blue Dog Democrats.

At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Coburn was on his way out when he was approached by a 25-year-old constituent, Dan Arnett. The young law student didn’t get much time to talk. “[Coburn] was on his way to Hannity or something,” Arnett told TWI. A few weeks later, Arnett got a second chance to talk to Coburn in a town hall meeting held in the eastern 2nd Congressional District of Oklahoma, the traditionally Democratic stronghold held by Coburn as a Class of 1994 congressman, held now by Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.). Arnett told Coburn about his problems with Boren, who had just voted for the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Arnett recalled the senator’s advice: “If you think you can win, you should run.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

That’s how Arnett found himself where he is today–a candidate for Congress, splitting his time between law school in Philadelphia and politicking in Oklahoma and meeting with members of the National Republican Congressional Committee. He has taken some credit for Boren’s decision to hold town hall meetings on health care, a move that came after Arnett held renegade town hall meetings because the congressman was not “meeting voters face-to-face.” And he has watched the congressman, who declined to endorse Barack Obama for president in 2008, become more and more outspoken and oppositional on the priorities of the Democratic leadership in the House.

“I’ve talked to strategists who say Boren seems unbeatable right now,” said Arnett, “but they remember that they said the same thing to Coburn when he ran in 1994. And look what he did.”

Arnett’s optimism is not totally unfounded. Boren is one of the 70 members of Congress named in the National Republican Campaign Committee’s list of potential 2010 targets. State political wags, however, are not expecting a real fight for the 2nd District. According to Keith Gaddie, a radio commentator and political scientist at the University of Oklahoma, the NRCC is only including Boren in its sights to “keep him honest.” That was the sentiment, often expressed with the same words, of other Washington-based Republican strategists who are putting heat on the members of the Blue Dog Coalition, the conservative, anti-spending Democratic caucus that was founded after the party’s 1994 electoral wipeout.

One immediate effect of that campaign has been to raise the profile of Blue Dogs, often portrayed in media coverage as the Democrats with the most to lose from the battle over health care reform. Blue Dogs such as Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) and Rep. Colin Peterson (D-Minn.) have become media fixtures as power-brokers without whom health care reform can’t work. Blue Dog Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) has said that his constituents were “coming home” to the GOP, and he needed to be “independent” to get re-elected. “The problem for Pelosi in this [health care] debate,” wrote Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post, “is that her caucus is almost too big.”

But a closer look at the Republicans’ 2010 map suggests that the Blue Dogs are in a safer position than many more liberal members of the Democratic majority. Of the 70 possible NRCC targets, only 23 are Blue Dogs. The outspoken and powerful Peterson, who recently told constituents that Democratic leaders had “screwed up” health care reform so far, is not a target, and neither is Cooper. Rep. Alan Boyd (D-Fla.), a Blue Dog opponent of the House health care bill who in 2005 was the only Democrat to engage with Republicans on the possible privatization of Social Security, is not on the list and is being challenged in 2010 by a Republican he defeated by 24 points in 2008.

And few of the Blue Dogs who’ve found themselves in the GOP’s sights face tough Republican opponents. Boren has $1.2 million in the bank, while his possible opponent Arnett is finishing up his law degree and has yet to file a finance report with the Federal Elections Commission. The seat held by Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), the influential Blue Dog whose compromise allowed the health bill to escape the House Energy and Commerce committee, contains voters who chose Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) over Barack Obama by 20 points, but the seat is seen by one Arkansas Republican strategist as “impenetrable,” as is the seat of the state’s other Blue Dog, Rep. Marion Berry (D-Ark.). In fact, while many Blue Dogs represent districts carried by McCain, few of the Republicans’ best pick-up opportunities in 2010 are in Blue Dog territory.

The situation for Ross is typical. One Washington Republican strategist spoke excitedly about beating Ross, who defeated a Republican incumbent in 2000, and possibly sending a “tracker” to tape his appearances. Another strategist pointed to Ross as an example of the “keep them honest” strategy, raising the threat of an electoral challenge in order to keep him from voting for a health care deal and providing cover to other Democrats. Republicans have pushed the Blue Dogs on this all year–Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) has mocked the Blue Dogs as “lap dogs” who were no longer “the force they used to be”–but believe that their challenges have become more credible.

Republican Party strategists and independent analysts argue that it’s still prudent for Blue Dogs to act as if they’re in danger. “There were plenty of Democrats who lost in 1994 who didn’t look vulnerable in August 1993,” said David Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the Cook Political Report.

Blue Dogs, suggested Wasserman, could look to the lessons of 1994. In the run-up to that midterm election, only 18 members of the Democratic majority opposed President Bill Clinton’s budget and the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. Seventeen of them won, even as the party lost a total of 54 seats.

“Bucking the administration is extremely helpful, if history is any guide,” said Wasserman. “But Blue Dogs are not necessarily the most endangered group of Democrats.”

Republicans in Arkansas, while appreciative of the rare attention the NRCC has devoted to the state, did not see many takeover opportunities. “This is my job, and I can’t tell you who a good candidate to beat Ross would be,” said Little Rock Republican strategist Bill Vickery. Most Republicans were focusing on drafting a strong candidate to oppose Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) or possibly to take on Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.), who represents a more Democratic, Little Rock-centered district and is not a member of the Blue Dog Coalition. “Ross and Berry are dug in,” said Vickery. “Their personal relationships in those districts are long and deep.”

One of the Republican leaders in Ross’s district, Garland County GOP Chairman Glenn Gallas, was less pessimistic about defeating Ross and suggested that the “political winds are blowing” for Tim Griffin, a Republican lawyer who was briefly a U.S. attorney for the state but resigned after the release of emails he’d sent about “caging” (sending mail to expired addresses as a way of challenging the residence of voters) during the 2004 election. But even Gallas did not think a strong Ross challenge was in the cards. “If you want to go super-big picture, there are much worse guys who need to be defeated.”

One Blue Dog whom strategists do agree is in trouble is Rep. Travis Childers (D-Miss.), who won a special election in northeastern Mississippi in 2008 and has drawn a first-tier opponent in State Sen. Alan Nunalee, a conservative, Tea Party-attending legislator with a political base in the district. “If I was a consultant for Childers,” suggested Mississippi Republican strategist Howie Morgan, “I’d tell him to vocally oppose anything that Pelosi and the rest of the liberal House leaders and their agenda.” The strategy, said Morgan, could be inspired by Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), who has held a Republican-leaning district in the state since 1987: stand against the administration, and deny Pelosi support whenever possible. “Taylor can always say that he was the only Democrat to support all four articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton.”

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

When President Obama showed up for a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Tuesday, he heard more than just protests against health care.

“We don’t need illegals,” yelled a white-bearded protester into his megaphone outside the high school auditorium in Portsmouth, caught on video here. “Send ‘em all back. Send ‘em back with a bullet in the head the second time.”

If the threats of violence weren’t clear enough, the man goes on to say: “Read what Jefferson said about the Tree of Liberty — it’s coming, baby.” Thomas Jefferson’s actual quote was “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

As the heat gets turned up on the health care reform debate, anti-immigrant activists are using the issue to whip up fear and anger toward immigrants, portraying them as a costly and burdensome drain on any taxpayer-supported U.S. health care system. Angry questions about illegal immigrants getting health care at town hall meetings across the country have put many lawmakers on the defensive.

At his town hall meeting in Pennsylvania, for example, Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter had to assure protesters that illegal immigrants would not be covered. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has gone out of her way to make that point as well. Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) faced similar shouted questions at his town hall forum on Wednesday, and repeatedly emphasized that illegal immigrants are not covered by the House bill. President Obama has also made the point, although it’s not clear that the anti-reform activists have heard it.

The protesters are spurred on in large part by immigration restrictionist groups who are using the health care debate to spread fears about immigrants. The restrictionist group Numbers USA, for example, has been posting video interviews online with unnamed “experts” warning that emergency rooms are overwhelmed by both legal and illegal immigrants, and that subsidized health care won’t be available for other low-income Americans because immigrants will be using it all up.

The Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, meanwhile, a non-profit research organization that says it’s “animated by a pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision,” is sponsoring a panel discussion next week in Washington called The Elephant In the Room: Immigration’s Impact on Health Care Reform. Steven Camarota of the center writes on the group’s web site that “one out of three people in the U.S. without health insurance is an immigrant (legal or illegal) or the U.S.-born child (under 18) of an immigrant,” and claims that immigrants and their children “account for one-fourth of those on Medicaid.” Yet “the enormous impact of immigration, both legal and illegal, on the health care system has generally not been acknowledged in the current debate.”

Immigrants’ advocates vehemently dispute the CIS statistics, and argue that immigrants — particularly illegal immigrants — are actually far less likely to use even emergency health services than American-born U.S. citizens are.

“We’re really concerned about what the anti-immigration community is doing to try and stop health care reform from moving forward,” said Jennifer Ng’andu, Deputy Director of the Health Policy Project at the National Council of La Raza. “We see it as those communities trying to stir the pot and create controversy. These are not folks who come to the table with solutions. They’re not looking to talk about a health care reform plan. They just assume that by creating anxiety about immigrants, that they’ll stop this debate.”

The protests have put lawmakers on the defensive. At town hall meetings focused on the health care debate, they’ve repeatedly been questioned about whether they support providing health care for illegal immigrants. Pelosi, Specter and Obama have all emphasized that illegal immigrants would not be covered under the current health care proposals.

The issue has gotten so heated that even the Congressional Hispanic Caucus issued a statement supporting health coverage only for “legal, law abiding” immigrants who pay their “fair share” for health care.

Under federal law, illegal immigrants are entitled to receive only emergency health care, although some states offer assistance to uninsured children. But conservative groups such as CIS and the Heritage Foundation complain that even emergency care for illegal immigrants is a big problem.

Immigrants’ advocates deny that that immigrants, legal or illegal, are driving up the costs of the health care system or disproportionately relying on government health services. And they point to a stack of studies showing that, on the contrary, immigrants actually use fewer health services than do American-born citizens.

A July 2009 article in the American Journal of Public Health, for example, found that insured immigrants had much lower medical expenses than insured U.S.-born citizens. And while recent immigrants constituted 5 percent of the nonelderly adult population, they were responsible for only 2 percent of adults’ total health care costs.

Meanwhile, a study by the non-partisan Kaiser Commission found that although noncitizens receive less primary health care than citizens, they are far less likely to use the emergency room.

The current House health care bill would not provide insurance coverage for illegal immigrants, and severely restricts coverage even for legal United States immigrants. Immigrant adults have to wait five years before becoming eligible for Medicaid or federal Children’s Health Insurance Plan benefits, for example. (CHIP covers pregnant women in addition to children.) That concerns both immigration and public health advocates.

“Legal immigrants might not achieve equitable access to health coverage in this health care reform bill, but they will be subject to the same requirements to purchase insurance,” said Ng’ara. “They pay the same taxes and will have to share in the responsibility of fixing our health care system, but they may be subject to waiting periods or restrictions before they qualify for many of the benefits.”

Michele Waslin, Senior Policy Analyst at the Immigration Policy Center, made the point in a recent blog post that including immigrants in any health insurance plan would actually help reduce the costs for everyone else. “An important function of health insurance is to pool risks and use premiums collected from the healthy to pay for the medical care of those who need it,” says Waslin. “It is common sense that the more people who pay into the health care system, the more the risk—and thus the costs—are spread out over the entire population.”

What’s more, she argues, public health improves the more people receive regular health care, including preventive services. “It’s also very expensive when people do not receive regular health care and wait until they are very sick to receive care,” she said.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has concluded that “Comprehensive prevention programs are the most economical way to maximize health and minimize costs.”

The economics of health care may not be what’s actually motivating the controversy, however. The move to bar even legal immigrants from receiving any support to purchase health insurance is consistent with a broader rise in anti-immigrant sentiment that experts who track hate groups are noticing.

A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center released this week, for example, noted a dramatic rise over the past decade of right-wing militia movements. The group attributes the phenomenon in part to “high levels of non-white immigration and a decline in the percentage of whites overall in America,” which has made race a much larger focus of its anti-government “Patriot movement.” The result, says the law center, has been that even “ostensibly mainstream politicians and media pundits have helped to spread Patriot and related propaganda, from conspiracy theories about a secret network of U.S. concentration camps to wholly unsubstantiated claims about the president’s country of birth.”

Even as House lawmakers are celebrating their remarkably swift move to infuse the popular cash for clunkers program with additional funds, some lawmakers and environmentalists are warning that extending the program is premature without knowing what it even does.

Of the $1 billion committed under the initiative — which offers drivers up to $4,500 to trade their gas-guzzlers for more fuel efficient vehicles — the Obama administration has released data on the trades surrounding less than $69 million. Without further information about what models are being scrapped, what models are being sold, and the environmental benefits of the swaps, critics worry that the program might be failing in its stated goals of reducing emissions and a reliance on foreign oil.

“A billion dollars has been spent on a program that could conceivably be a disaster for the environment, and without even waiting to see where that money went, they’re throwing more money into the pot,” said Daniel Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, which advocates for better fuel efficiency. “This whole thing is a blind experiment. Congress is making fact-free decisions.”

Launched just this week, the cash for clunkers program has already blown through its initial $1 billion in funding — money that was projected to last though October. House lawmakers rallied with rare speed Friday to pump an additional $2 billion into the program, just hours before they departed for a five-week recess.

Supporters of the program, lining up behind Michigan’s powerful delegation, argue that it offers a slew of economic and environmental benefits befitting both the recession and the threat of climate change. On the House floor before the vote, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the extension “a very positive, bipartisan initiative to help our auto industry, to help consumers, to grow our economy, to do it in an environmentally sound way.”

The House vote was 316 to 109, with 77 Republicans favoring the bill and 14 Democrats opposing it.

Among those 14 Democrats was Rep. Earl Blumenauer (Ore.), who said afterward that he felt “uncomfortable” voting to extend a young program around which so little is known. “We don’t know actually what we’ve been getting,” Blumenauer said in a phone interview. “We want to see the data.”

He’s not alone with that request. On Friday, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) sent a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood urging the administration to release more data to inform Congress’ next move on cash for clunkers. While the program has proven itself to be an effective catalyst for vehicle sales, the lawmakers wrote, “Congress needs this data in order to determine if the fleet modernization program delivered significant fuel economy gains and oil savings.”

The skeptics have some reason to be wary. The latest official DOT figures indicate that, through Tuesday, less than $69 million of the initial $1 billion had been spent to facilitate roughly 16,350 vehicle sales. About 62 percent of those purchases were for new cars — a good sign in the eyes of environmentalists interested in minimizing the number of trucks and SUVs on the road. But until further analysis reveals what trades were encouraged by the subsequent $931 million, some lawmakers and public interest groups oppose the additional funding.

Lena Pons, policy analyst at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch Division, said the popularity of the program comes as little surprise. Who, after all, wouldn’t want a $4,500 gift from Washington? But popularity is no indication that the program is meeting its stated goals. “Before appropriating any additional funds,” Pons said in a statement, “Congress should study whether the program is working.”

The Senate is expected to take up the cash for clunkers extension next week, and already a small, bipartisan contingency is threatening to block the proposal. On Thursday, Feinstein and Collins issued a statement arguing that any renewal of the program “must go further in advancing the goals of better fuel efficiency and greater emissions reductions.”

“We will not support any bill that does not meet these goals,” the senators said.

On Friday, they got some more backing when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced his intention to filibuster the bill.

There are also concerns, both on and off Capitol Hill, about the source of the funding. The $2 billion was siphoned from stimulus funds earmarked for a federal loan program encouraging the use of environmentally friendly technologies.

After the House vote, President Obama gave a short speech vowing to work with Congress to replace that funding sometime “down the road.”

Under the current program, drivers can get between $3,500 and $4,500 when they trade in their gas-guzzling cars, trucks and SUVs for new vehicles with better fuel efficiences. Yet the efficiency thresholds were set so low that consumers can trade in their old clunker for a brand new clunker — a boon for the automakers and dealers, but hardly a way to reduce the greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming.

“They weren’t set very high,” Blumenauer said of the mileage guidelines, “so it wasn’t getting the worst of the worst off the roads.”

Feinstein and Collins, along with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), have sponsored a competing bill that sets stricter fuel efficiency thresholds for the newly purchased vehicles. The lawmakers say their proposal would result in oil savings that trump the existing program by more than 30 percent.

When the initial $1 billion program passed the Senate in June, Feinstein told reporters that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had given her “absolute assurance” that any extension would be altered so that the fuel efficiency requirements were more stringent. With the House leaving town, however, Reid’s office indicated Friday there’s little chance that Senate leaders will alter the House-passed bill, particularly with Obama urging quick passage of the existing extension.

That’s bad news in the eyes of environmentalists, who worry that the program is following the path of a similar initiative in Germany, which went from a 1.5-billion-euro program to a 5-billion-euro program in just six months.

“This is turning into a methadone program for addicted automakers,” Becker said. “They have no incentive to turn it off.”

Suggesting that such claims, if proven false, would “harm national security” undermining morale at the CIA, King cited a federal law that criminalizes fraud and false statements by a government official.

It wasn’t clear if King was referring to Pelosi or the CIA officials that she says misled her.

Pelosi’s plan wastes hundreds of millions on programs that won’t help the economy: smoking cessation, arts funding, treatment for STDs.

Arts funding did make it into the bill that President Obama signed, as did smoking cessation. But the $335 million included in the House’s first version of the stimulus package, passed on January 29, was stripped out in the Senate. If it was once part of “Pelosi’s plan,” it no longer is, because it no longer exists.

The argument that arts funding “won’t help the economy” is controversial, too, but controversial is better than outright false.

No numbers accompany the summary, but The Associated Press reported earlier today that an $8,000 tax-credit will be available for first-time homebuyers who purchase homes through July 31. That’s a drop from the $15,000 credit passed by the Senate, which would have benefited all homebuyers (not just first-timers), but provides a slight increase over the $7,500 credit passed last month by the House.

No word yet whether there are income restrictions on the final credit.

Just a few hours after the Senate voted yesterday to grant the Obama administration its request for the second $350 billion in Wall Street bailout cash, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) said the lower chamber will still consider its bailout-reform bill next week. From Pelosi’s statement:

The Senate has cleared the release of the second half of TARP, but now the process must ensure that there will be full accountability and transparency to the taxpayers and that substantial assistance will go to homeowners facing foreclosure. [...]

With Chairman [Barney] Frank’s legislation, Congress will ensure that financial institutions using taxpayer funds provide credit to consumers and small businesses, commit at least $100 billion for foreclosure mitigation, and end golden parachutes for executives of financial institutions receiving TARP assistance.

It’s a noble goal. Despite President-elect Barack Obama’s vows to spend the TARP money differently and with more more transparency than the Bush administration did — Obama, for example, says he’ll use between $50 billion and $100 billion mitigate foreclosures, something that Bush officials refused to do — those promises are nonbinding. The commitment to spend at least $50 billion on the housing crisis arrived as part of a three-page letter sent yesterday from top Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers to congressional leaders. The House bill would make that spending a legal obligation.

No matter. Senate Democrats appear unlikely to take up the Frank bill, even if Pelosi and the House Democrats pass it next week — and unlike the release of the second $350 billion, Frank’s bill would require both House and Senate passage, not to mention Obama’s signature.

Meet the new TARP. Same as the old TARP.

Democratic House leaders, with Nancy Pelosi. (flickr)

For the past two years, the House of Representatives has been busy as bees getting not much done. Under Democratic leaders who took the helm in 2007, the party has had great success moving the policy priorities that propelled it into power in 2006 — only to see most die an early death by Senate filibuster or White House veto.

Measures to shift the nation’s energy policy toward renewable fuels, rehabilitate crumbling infrastructure and expand health coverage to millions of uninsured kids are just a few of the proposals to hit a wall of GOP opposition after sailing through the lower chamber.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

With Barack Obama assuming the presidency in January, congressional leaders should be eager to return to their wish list. And it seems likely they will. In an interview last week with CNN, Obama listed the priorities of his (then-theoretical) administration, which amounted to an agenda that could have been written by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Energy independence. Health-care reform. Middle-class tax breaks. Education investment. Obama’s list melded with Democratic priorities of the past few years.

Speaking to reporters yesterday, Pelosi deferred to Obama’s yet-unspecified strategy but seemed to anticipate a well-coordinated effort. “We’ll be working with the new president on his legislative agenda,” she said, “but our priorities have tracked the Obama campaign priorities for a very long time.”

As a result, the days of the Democratic Congress’s ineffectiveness may be over. In the wake of Tuesday’s remarkable win, Obama not only controls the White House but has influence over a Democratic Congress that owes much of its electoral success to his presence on the ticket. Party leaders have been careful not to call his victory a mandate — at least not publicly. But the enormous popularity of Obama — combined with wider Democratic margins in Congress and public anxiety over the sputtering economy — gives the party a rare opportunity to get something done.

At the top of Obama’s domestic wish list is energy independence. On the campaign trail, the Illinois senator vowed a 10-year, $150-billion investment in renewable technologies as a way to wean the country from its foreign-oil addiction and create jobs in the fast-growing clean-energy sector.

The goal is shared by Democratic leaders. Last month, Congress allotted $18 billion to extend tax credits for investments in renewable fuels. That extension, though, is temporary — eight years for solar technologies and one year for wind.

Environmentalists view Obama’s green-investment plan as a vital part of any shift toward green technologies. “The tax credits alone are not enough,” said Nick Berning, spokesman for Friends of the Earth.

To pay the tab, Obama’s plan calls for a cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions — another goal of Democratic congressional leaders. The president-elect’s proposal would require large-scale polluters to pay for every ton of carbon emitted. The effort would reduce emission levels 80 percent by 2050, according to the Obama campaign.

Obama is also pushing for an increase in fuel-efficiency standards. Last December, Congress passed legislation setting a 35-mile-a-gallon floor by 2020, but many Democrats have called for stricter measures. A proposal pushed by Democrats almost two decades ago would have bumped that floor to 40 mpg.

Daniel Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, pointed out that because the new law doesn’t include a ceiling on fuel standards, Obama could make the change without going through Congress. “They can go well beyond 35 miles a gallon,” Becker said.

Obama also told CNN that health reform will be one of his top priorities. Many experts predict that a logical place for Democrats to begin next year would be children’s health care. A year ago, Democrats passed a $35 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, to cover millions of kids currently without insurance.

The proposal attracted enough Republican support to elude a Senate filibuster, but not enough to override two presidential vetoes. With a Democrat in the White House, the bill would easily become law — a scenario some policy experts predict for early next year.

“They’ll do it very quickly,” said Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus, a child-welfare group. “They’ll be looking to get some things done, get some quick wins. And of course they’ll have a president who won’t veto it.”

Lesley also pointed to the likelihood that an Obama administration would repeal a controversial Bush administration regulation — issued quietly in the summer of 2007 — that sets strict (some say impossible) limits on states wanting to expand their SCHIP programs.

Yet many key Democrats talk about health-care reform that far transcends the SCHIP slice. This leaves some experts speculating that party leaders might try to use the post-election momentum to pass a far larger package.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) is busy crafting one such plan. The nine-term Democrat hopes to tackle the proposal early next year, putting pressure on Obama to join the effort. Michael Myers, staff director of the Senate health committee, which Kennedy heads, told reporters Thursday that the details of that plan have yet to be worked out. But he stressed that the issue will certainly come up next year.

“With the Obama victory,” Myers said, “the question is no longer whether we will pursue comprehensive health reform, but when — and in what form.”

Much of what the 2009 Congress will confront hinges on what the 2008 Congress gets done this month. Democrats are pushing hard for yet another economic stimulus measure, to be taken up when Congress returns to Washington on Nov. 17 for a short, post-election “rump session.”

Party leaders hope to include billions of dollars in new infrastructure spending, unemployment benefits and low-income health-care funding. The Bush administration opposes much of the plan, however, leaving the real possibility that passage will be delayed until early next year.

Another wildcard: How the nation’s lenders respond to the infusion of cash from last month’s $700-billion Wall Street bailout. “We don’t know yet what’s going to happen in January,” Obama told CNN last week. “None of this can be accomplished if we continue to see a potential meltdown in the banking system.”

Legislatively, the Democrats have a formidable playbook from which to draw. Since taking control of Congress in 2007, the House has passed dozens of bills fulfilling the campaign promises that led to their dramatic takeover the November before. The issues run the gamut — everything from pulling troops out of Iraq to curbing discrimination against gays; from expanding stem-cell research to regulating tobacco as a drug. One bill would force mining companies to pay royalties to Washington for metals harvested from federal lands. Another would expand funding for low-income affordable housing. The list goes on.

The House is the best barometer of party priorities because its rules prohibit filibusters, meaning bills pass with a simple majority. That is, the party in control can do what it pleases — assuming leaders can unite the caucus.

In all of these cases, the White House had either threatened a veto, or applied one.

Under an Obama White House, of course, the veto threat all but vanishes. Meanwhile, Democrats picked up at least six Senate seats Tuesday, while adding at least 19 new members in the House. Several races in each chamber are still too close to call.

Party leaders are vowing not to abuse the new power. Senate Majorty Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday night that the election results are “not a mandate for a party or an ideology, but really a mandate for change.”

Still, the changes the Democrats hope to see are pretty overt. Four years after President George W. Bush proclaimed his thin victory over Sen. John Kerry to be a mandate, Democratic leaders will be hoping, at least inwardly, that this year’s historic election constitutes the real thing.

First, at the start of the year, we had the $168 billion package that delivered cash money to you and me.

Then Congress passed the $700 billion financial bailout — a jolt for Wall Street designed to thaw frozen credit markets by boosting lender confidence.

In the middle of the bailout debate, the House passed a $58-billion package aimed to help Main Street by doling out fresh cash for infrastructure projects, the unemployed and social programs like food stamps and Medicaid. It died in the Senate.

But with financial markets still on the fall, there’s now real talk of yet another injection of (borrowed) cash into the economy.

On Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) told reporters that Congress might have to return to Washington after the election to work on a new stimulus bill. Estimated price-tag: $150 billion.

“What we can’t wait for is a stimulus package,” Pelosi said, according to numerous reports. “We may have to go back into session before the next Congress.”

Citing a Democratic aide, The Washington Post reports that the new package might include not only help for the states, but also another round of rebate checks for us. It must mean we weren’t patriotic enough the first time to fritter all our cash away.

Nice that Congress might lend a second chance.

House Minority Leader John Boehner and House Whip Roy Blunt (WDCpix)

As congressional leaders scramble to resuscitate the $700-billion financial bailout plan that died a stunning death in the House this week, many historians and political experts ascribe the bill’s failure to a lack of political leadership in Washington.

This power vacuum was revealed in a lame-duck president who went virtually ignored; congressional leaders who neglected the importance of counting votes; and a slew of lawmakers more concerned with re-election than the fate of the economy.

Indeed, despite pleas from the White House, House leaders and the major presidential candidates, no one had the influence to rally public sentiment — or push the rank-in-file — in support of the bill.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

“It’s a crisis of leadership,” said former Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Cal.), a House majority whip for several years in the late 1980s. “The country’s in trouble, and they just didn’t rise up to get this done.”

That diagnosis bucks the conventional wisdom. In the wake of Monday’s vote, Washington’s prognosticators have, at various times, attributed the defeat to public outcry, election-year politicking, ideological entrenchment and even a partisan floor speech just before the vote. Exempting the last, all these factors were certainly in play. Yet the bailout plan has also lacked an influential champion — someone with the credibility to sell its importance, the persuasiveness to unite both parties and the political savvy to secure votes from even the most reluctant lawmakers.

The result: A surprising failure that sent lawmakers scurrying and stocks plunging.

John Morton Blum, history professor emeritus at Yale University and a Roosevelt scholar,” summarized this power vacuum, asking ruefully: “Where are you, Franklin Roosevelt, when we need you?”

Chief among the impotent is President George W. Bush. The bailout strategy — a product of the Treasury Dept. — is essentially his adminsitration’s. Yet he failed miserably to convince even members of his own party to support it. Of the 198 Republicans who voted Monday, only 65 (not even a third) sided with Bush.

“The core of the problem here is the president,” said Julian E. Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “He’s a weak, lame-duck president — the worst of all combinations. He can’t mobilize public opinion.”

“Bush is not a lame duck, he’s a dead duck,” offered Blum. “[Herbert] Hoover was about as unpopular, but at least he was intelligent.”

Vice President Dick Cheney, once a powerful influence on Congress’s conservative Republicans, also proved to be an ineffective promoter of the bailout plan. After Cheney stormed the Capitol last week to rally support, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) summarized the meeting with a not-so-subtle rebuke. “I do not appreciate,” Barton said, “being told that I have to vote for something in one week, with no limitations … to solve a problem that the average constituent in my district has never heard of.”

Then there’s Congress. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), who supported the measure, still spent much of the last week disparaging it. At one point, he called the plan a “crap sandwich” — hardly a persuasive sell to on-the-fence lawmakers. Instead of urging Republicans to follow his lead, Boehner freed them to vote their consciences. Many did just that — leading, in large part, to the bill’s failure.

“Republicans are just used to having party loyalty carry the day,” said former Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R), now a visiting scholar at Brown University. “It just didn’t happen. The president cried wolf one too many times.”

Of the other actors in the bailout drama, none was convincing enough to push the financial rescue through the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.), one of the most liberal members, had only partial influence with keeping fellow liberals in the fold, and even less over the conservatives who fled the bill in droves. Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, an openly gay Massachusetts Democrat, commands great respect on financial matters, but his signature abrasiveness is also known to alienate.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the presidential contenders, showed only mild support before the vote, with neither coming to Washington to sway votes. And Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson Jr., who crafted the plan, is a former Goldman Sachs CEO, leading to endless criticisms that his blueprint represents Wall Street helping Wall Street — the fox guarding the henhouse.

It wasn’t always this way. Congress has a long history of persuasive giants — lawmakers who got what they wanted despite the better inclinations of those they were asking. In his book “Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism,” Bruce J. Schulman, a history professor at Boston University, relates how one such master was able to secure the passage of favored legislation:

LBJ’s legislative strategy rested, as it had during his days as Majority Leader, on his sure and certain knowledge of every congresssman’s needs, inclinations, problems and convictions. When aides told him that they “thought” they had lined up a particular representative’s support, LBJ exploded: “Don’t ever think about those things. Know, know, know! You’ve got to know you’ve got him, and there’s only one way you know.” Johnson looked into his open hand and closed his fingers into a fist. “And that’s when you’ve got his pecker right here.” The president opened his desk drawer, acted as he if were dropping something, emphatically slammed the drawer shut and smiled.

Congressional leaders going into Monday’s House vote hadn’t taken Johnson’s advice, and fell 12 members shy. “This was just a classic case of, ‘You don’t go to a vote unless you know you’ve got them,’” Schulman said in a phone interview Wednesday.

There are other examples. An infamous 2003 vote leading to the creation of Medicare’s controversial prescription drug program, for example, relied on GOP leaders leaving the 15-minute vote open for three hours while they twisted arms on the chamber floor. One tactic of persuasion: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) offered one reluctant Republican, Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich), his endorsement of Smith’s son, who was running for his retiring father’s seat.

Coelho suggested that Pelosi and Boehner, in a similar manner, might have prolonged Monday’s vote. “It was only 12 votes,” he said. “Why wasn’t it held open until they got them?”

They will have another chance. The Senate is preparing Wednesday to vote on a slightly modified version of the bailout bill, with the House expecting to vote again Friday if the Senate passes it. Changes include new tax breaks for small businesses, which should inspire more GOP support, though it might also alienate fiscally conservative Democrats, already wary of the cost.

Injecting himself into the debate, Bush delivered yet another message from the White House Tuesday, urging a quick resolution to the stalemate. “It matters little what path a bill takes to become law,” Bush said. “What matters is that we get a law. …The reality is that we are in an urgent situation, and the consequences will grow worse each day if we do not act.”

Despite Bush’s unpopularity, statements like that — combined with an urgency among congressional leaders to forge a passable proposal — gave Wall Street a dose of buoyancy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average leapt 485 points Tuesday, after tumbling 778 points the day before. On Wednesday the Dow held steady, dropping only 19 points.

That rebound might encourage many House Republicans to continue opposing the bailout, which endorses new regulations, effectively raises corporate taxes and represents the greatest government intervention in private markets since the Great Depression.

“For Republicans, this is a mighty hard pill to swallow,” said Wayne Steger political science professor at DuPaul University. “I don’t know if even an LBJ could pull this off.”