In precisely the way that a vulture circles a dying jackass in the badlands, yes. Here Patrick Caddell is telling Fox News just how badly Obamacare is going to hurt the Democrats (hint: I picked the vulture/jackass/desert metaphor for a reason):
Admittedly, he’s been yelling about this since March, and admittedly he’s been privately called by a colleague of mine as sort of a Democratic David Frum (which is a vicious insult to Caddell’s effectiveness, reasoning abilities, and possibly his ability to breed) – still, that’s some tasty, tasty despair there. Accurate despair, seeing as Obamacare currently polls even worse than the President right now, but I guess that ‘tasty’ and ‘accurate’ are not actually mutually exclusive…
Moe Lane
PS: By all means, Democrats: count your cash-on-hand and dismiss Caddell completely. Much obliged.
Except that Caddell has been doing the polling and analysis stuff for a real long time and actually knows what he is talking about, you know – an opinion based on some data.
Unlike David Frum who is just an opinion based on his beliefs.
I have A LOT of respect for Pat Caddell for a couple of reasons:
1) I remember him being on FoxNews during the Gore-Bush recount nonsense and him consistently calling out Gore for the rank dishonesty and underhandedness of his selective recounts. IIRC, he was the only Democrat willing to say it like it was.
2) He’s an honest-to-goodness “old-fashioned Democrat” not a self-styled “I’m better than you” type like David Frum. As you’ll notice from the clip, he complains that HIS party is supposed to be the one who represents the working people, and he’s mad that they don’t any more. I think he’s one of the few people who can lay honest claim to the “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me” – even though he remains a registered Democrat.
3) Unlike Frum, his contrarianism is exactly OPPOSITE the kind that gets you invited to the best cocktail parties in DC and Manhattan. So there’s no way to claim that he’s doing this to curry favors with the “in crowd.”
4) I suspect that he and I would differ very much in our preferred policy prescriptions; however, I also suspect that he would be an awesome guy to have a few drinks with – and that’s saying a lot for a Democrat.