It's not gonna happen, I know, but Obama had better realize the stakes.
It's all about basic arithmetic and the calendar.
The Senate is divided into three classes - Class I, which will be up for re-election in 2012; class II, which will be up for re-election in 2014; and Class III, which we just voted on, and can rest easy until 2016.
Right now, we've got a 53-47 Senate majority, nowhere close to enough to break a filibuster.
The class of 2012 is the same class of Senate seats that came up for election in 2006 and 2000. 2000 was a good year for Dems in the Senate (we picked up 5 seats that year, if I recall), and we really had to pick up just about every contestable seat in 2006 to go from 45 seats to 51 and re-take the Senate. So there isn't much left on the table.
How little is left? Well, we should regain Ted Kennedy's old seat that Scott Brown currently holds. And we can replace Joe Lieberman with a real Democrat, even though that doesn't change the numbers. And John Ensign in Nevada should be vulnerable.
That's really it, unless a Teabagger takes out Olympia Snowe in a primary that year. And we've got a slew of Dems in red/purple territory coming up that year - Tester in MT, Webb in VA, McCaskill in MO, both Nelsons, Sherrod Brown...it'll be a tough year.
And we really need to do well in the Senate in 2012, because there are NO good pickup opportunities in 2014, unless Susan Collins loses to a Teabagger. We REALLY maxed out our winning chances in 2008.
In short, the biggest Senate majority Obama has even a decent chance of seeing is on the order of 55-45, and he'll see that for only the first two years of his second term, assuming he's re-elected in 2012.
So even if we win back the House in 2012 - and by enough of a margin so that we have a functional majority as well as a technical one - Obama still isn't going to get a thing through Congress besides budgets for the rest of his Presidency. Because he will never again have anywhere near the votes it takes to break a filibuster.
Which is why he needs filibuster reform.
Barring that, the Obama Presidency is effectively over. Sure, he can veto bad GOP bills, but he could step down tomorrow, let Joe Biden veto them instead, and let some other sucker run for the Democratic nomination in 2012. (Wouldn't be a bad idea in some ways, given how young he is: if he stepped down before January 20, he could still run for two more terms as President sometime later on, once people look back fondly at his Presidency the way they look back at Clinton's.) So there's nothing he could really do as President that someone else couldn't do just as well.
Unless the filibuster is done away with.
He really needs to be confronted with this now. I hope and pray that, the next time Obama has a conference call with a bunch of bloggers, one of those bloggers points out that he's never again going to have anywhere near 60 votes in the Senate for anything between now and January 3, 2017, and asks him what he plans to do about that.
Because without filibuster reform, what we have is a zombie Presidency. It's dead, but it just hasn't stopped moving yet. It even thinks it's alive. But it's dead.
