What the hell is this bull shit: Dems praise DeWine [View All]

[liberal N proud]

Maybe they forgot that their party is supposed to trash him, or maybe they got caught up in the excitement of the moment. Or -- just maybe -- this bipartisan stuff really works occasionally.

Mike DeWine won hero-worthy praise from Democratic colleagues on the Senate floor last night after Republicans and Democrats united to pass a long-sought pension reform bill.

Said Ted Kennedy of the compromise legislation that he said will help strengthen the retirement security of over 100 million Americans: "Sen. DeWine and Sen. (Barbara) Mikulski have worked to be sure that we addressed the need of manufacturing companies in this country."

Said Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, of her colleague DeWine: "We chaired the subcommittee on aging and held some of the first hearings out of the box and we tried to go at it with intellectual rigor and with the fortitude where we promised we would do no harm to those who relied on a pension, to those who provided a pension, and to the pension guaranty. And you know what? We did it."

Both "DeWine and I come from a manufacturing base," she continued. "Those blue-collar workers with dirt under their finger nails and bad backs wonder what they're going to have at the end of the day. We stood up for them..."

They did stand up. DeWine and Mikulski even bottled up the bill for a while rather than allow a provision that could have forced ailing companies into bankruptcy by making them accelerate their Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. premiums. The PBGC certainly needed the premiums, DeWine had said, but not at the expense of harming already struggling manufacturers.

Ohio Democrats this summer and fall will try to blame DeWine for not doing enough to stop the state's manufacturing losses. Fortunately for them, the seemingly spontaneous candor of Kennedy and Mikulski was unlikely to have been witnessed by anyone other than reporters and diehard C-SPAN viewers. For now, at least.

- Stephen Koff
http://www.cleveland.com/weblogs/openers/index.ssf?/mtlogs/cleve_openers/archives/2006_08.html#168779