The fabled 60th vote! Finally, the Democrats can override filibuster threats and pass the Obama agenda! Except that even as Specter was arriving, his new fellow party members were reminding their leaders that they reserved the right to gum up the works at a moment’s notice. “They might have a 60-member majority. That doesn’t mean they have 60 votes,” warned Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, who is busy trying to block the Obama student loan reform bill.
The real import of this story isn’t the 60 votes. It’s that Arlen Specter, with his unparalleled instinct for self-preservation, became a Democrat because the people of Pennsylvania like the Democratic agenda better. And the Republicans were too fanatical or deluded to allow him to straddle the line.
I would add this: As Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of Daily Kos, wrote recently, we've got enough Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate now to start emphasizing the "better" part of "we need more and better Democrats."
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