"Moderates and independents who leaned toward Obama didn’t come out because they saw a continuing polarization. Health reform was only supported by Democrats. So, the message from Washington was that Obama was getting his way,” said former Rep. Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.), who has become a senior fellow with Third Way, the centrist Democratic group....Former Rep. Glenn Nye (D-Va.) blamed Pelosi’s liberal agenda for his more decisive 10-point loss. “A winning political strategy is to take issues that are popular with the center. Democratic leadership brought too many votes that weren’t going to be enacted. It was a ‘choose and lose’ approach,” said Nye, now a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund.
