I’m not one to recoil reflexively at all talk of bipartisanship. I know that some lip-service needs to paid to the illusive goal of getting both parties to come together to make compromises to solve problems. So, I understand why the president says stuff like this:
Citing the urgency to “accelerate this [economic] recovery,” Obama said: “But we won’t do it as one political party. We’ve got to do it as one people. And, in the coming weeks and months, I hope we can work together, Democrats and Republicans and independents alike, to make progress on these and other issues.”
The president mentioned a White House meeting next week with congressional leaders from both parties, a get-together delayed once and intended, he said, to yield “a real and honest discussion.” Thorny discussions await on matters including whether to permit Bush-era tax cuts to expire for the wealthy and consideration of the START nuclear treaty. Referring to the challenges of navigating the divide, Obama said, “I believe that if we stop talking at one another, and start talking with one another, we can get a lot done.”
I believe that if wishes were ponies we would all ride.
Now, I think the president has to make some concessions if he’s going to be able to govern effectively. He can’t just ignore the results of the midterm elections, nor can he pretend that the House of Representatives doesn’t exist. There are basically no areas of common agreement between John Boehner and anything the president campaigned on doing. So, if he wants progress in one area he’s going to have to accept regression in another. That’s politics, and that’s okay.
But, at a certain point you have to knock off the happy talk about how we can solve our problems if we just talk to each other. These idiots think you’re a Muslim who isn’t even an American citizen. They think you’re pushing some Leninist agenda. They’re cuckoo for cocoa puffs. And those who aren’t are perfectly content to pretend that they are. I am not saying you should accuse them all of doing six months in Chino for exposing themselves to eight year-olds, but it might not be the worst idea. The truth doesn’t matter anymore, and you’d probably be half-right with a bunch of these kooks.
I’m just sayin’, if John Boehner talks some smack, come back with, “eight-year olds, Dude.”
That would be some change I could believe in.
But, seriously…what needs to change is that the administration needs to stop pretending that the Republicans are acting in good faith, ever. They’re not. And the public needs to understand that, or the president is going to get blamed (again) for shit that is mainly the Republicans’ fault.
So, yeah, it’s all fine to play nice and pretend, but only as a set-up for bringing the hammer down later.
Finally, just because there is no record of John Boehner doing six months in Chino for showing his junk to an eight-year old doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Shit, have you seen the state of paperwork these days? Ask your bank if they can find your mortgage note. If these thugs can’t even prove that they own your house, how can you expect them to prove John Boehner isn’t a pederast? Just look at him, for chrissakes.
But, seriously…what needs to change is that the administration needs to stop pretending that the Republicans are acting in good faith, ever. They’re not. And the public needs to understand that, or the president is going to get blamed (again) for shit that is mainly the Republicans’ fault.
I get the first part, but how do we get to the second part? Because the fact of the matter is the public doesn’t understand that the Republicans are not acting in good faith. Nobody in the media is going to tell them that. And certainly Obama isn’t going to tell them that because he can’t. The Beltway concern trolls would swarm all over him. So what exactly do you want the administration to do?
Honestly, pick a point in time to let the flies swarm. Now isn’t that time. Now we play Kabuki. But soon. Soon he has to go ballistic and spell it all out and tell people that he’s the president and these other folks are pukes, and pick a side.
The Party of No Strategy was brilliant, but it worked in part because of Obama’s refusal to quickly abandon his hope and change promises on changing how Washington works. He won’t get anything done in the next Congress but he can damn well make it crystal clear why. If he doesn’t, we may be singing Hail to the Chief to Sarah Palin. For real.
I’m not sure, actually. It seems to me that an awful lot of the GOP strategy of no has been calculated to get Obama to take exactly the stance you call for: the GOP wants to turn this whole thing into a play of partisan theater, because they know very well that they are very likely to come out on top in any scenario that draws lines between us and them. They are very good at it, and the Dems are very poor at it. I’m not saying Obama can stand pat and continue doing what he’s been doing, but I don’t think taking up obvious partisan stances is the way forward and to success in 2012.
When he talks like this, Obama is not really talking to the congressional GOP. He is talking to the moderate Republicans. WHAT moderate Republicans, you ask? Voters. But do they exist? Ah, that is the question. The press has been giving so much attention to the Tea Party since Obama was elected, we don’t even know the extent of this phenomenon. But Obama at one point in his campaign, in a remark that was widely criticized and misunderstood by Dems, said there was something to be learned from Reagan. That you could peel off votes from the GOP just like Reagan did from the Democrats. It seems that he did it to some extent in the election. The received wisdom is that all of those crossovers regret that they voted for him. But is that really the case?
Is Boehner’s and DeMint’s grandstanding in congress the GOP counterpart to Obama’s “bipartisanship”? If so, the message is not really to the Democrats, but to their own members — don’t cross us or you’re dead. In fact there is a lot of incentive for them to break ranks, or they will accomplish nothing.
Are a lot of Republicans seriously turned off by Palin and her ilk? If the Tea Party is strongly a regional phenomenon of the South, does this mean the GOP has been taken over by the South? Like a new CSA?
Well then, does that mean that the moderate republicans are also a regionally-based bloc (bi-coastal?)
Has anybody tried to figure out lately whether disaffected, sane Republicans are a significant factor in the American electorate? I have a feeling Obama knows the answer to this question, he’s just not saying right now. Here are a couple of news links (recent stories) that make me wonder:
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/130171-moderate-republicans-lament-gop-climate-change-d
enial
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/11/poll-moderate-republicans-reject-prop-23.html
And here are a couple more:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/1026/1224282004329.html
http://spearboard.com/showthread.php?p=1315910
Oh, can’t leave these out:
“it’s a pretty sure bet that Democratic voters, who are still pretty fond of President Obama, will come back out in 2012 to support his reelection and if a solid chunk of moderate Republicans are added to the Democratic base in 2012 there’s a good chance we’ll see an election with a pretty similar outcome to what happened in 2008. This Tea Party stuff may serve the GOP fine in an off year election, but whether it can do the same in a Presidential year is likely to be a whole different story.”
http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2010/06/looking-at-moderate-republicans.html
“John Martin, a moderate conservative activist who in 2008 led the “Republicans for Obama” campaign, says unequivocally that the Tea Party will be bad for his party. ‘A lot of people who are running as independents today were Republicans three years ago,’ he points out.”
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/10/tea-party-republicans-obama
There’s way more of this stuff than I ever thought!
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/126421-republicans-who-backed-obama-say-they-may-vote-for-him-a
gain
very interesting! thanks for posting.
But, he’s really more like Floyd Patterson; great style, yet can’t take a punch, nor has one.
Nobody I know would have taken the abuse Obama has taken since 2008 and not gone on the offensive. Akin to the 2004 “Swift Boat” attacks on John Kerry’s patriotism, one has to wonder that if a man refuses to defend himself from even the most surrilous of personal attacks, will he even defend the beliefs he shares with his supporters?
If the guy is not going to stick up for himself, just who or what will he defend? Apparently, very little.
Does Obama have any beliefs?
I think he’s become delusional. If he doesn’t get his act togeter and start actually standing for something, we will be looking at President Palin. That alone should shake him out of his bipartisan schtick.
I’m not holding my breath.
I have called for the LBJ/Rove “let’s say he fucks dogs and make him deny it” tactic for months (it’s been roundly rejected here). Good to see you coming around, finally.
It’s been my contention that from day one, the minute the republicans bit off the hand extended in reconciliation, that Obama should have called the GOP leadership into a conference and told them straight up that if they didn’t cut the shit that he was going to go medieval on their asses. Something like this:
And so on. I hope that the president takes your advice. I doubt he will, but he’s gotta do something to make these guys fear him because right now, he’s got nothin’.
I agree in general with Booman and the comments here, other than the “he won’t stand up for himself part” – because he frequently does and the media just doesn’t report it. Or places his comments opposite a conservaDem who says Obama just needs to be bipartisan. And everyone who reads Booman knows that the preferred media (paper and teevee) narrative coming out of the midterms was “Obama did too much, too liberal, needs to move to the center, needs to work with the republicans.”
The media has spent the last two years pretending that the republicans haven’t been perfectly clear, and perfectly public, about their plan to obstruct everything he does no matter what it is. It is deeply irresponsible for them to not start every discussion of bipartisanship with “McConnell said their strategy from the beginning was to prevent any successes” — but they never do.
Booman replied to one comment: “Soon he has to go ballistic and spell it all out and tell people that he’s the president and these other folks are pukes, and pick a side.” I have absolutely no difficulty imaging what the media response to that would be. And it wouldn’t be good.
It all comes down to this question: “If a President speaks in front of 30,000 people, tells them the republicans even run away from their own proposals when he supports them, and the media doesn’t report on it, did he make a sound?”
I will concede that Obama also needs to preface “every discussion of bipartisanship with “McConnell said their strategy from the beginning was to prevent any successes.”
you can’t be bipartisan with mofos who are partisan to the nth degree.
that’s all I’m gonna say.
The president should call the republicans child molesters? Huh?
Well, it’s true. John Boehner raped and killed a young girl in 1990. With Glenn Beck.
Look it up.
true story.
The president could shout etc. and then what?
It is quite a contrast between Obama’s reasonable words and the crazy coming from Republicans.
The emotional satisfaction some would get from Obama telling off the oposition wouldn’t last very long.
Obama has stated the facts of the Republican resistance to helping the country.
The country has enough trouble without a knock down drag out fight in Congress.
Being calm and making sense is a good long term strategy.
I’d wait and see how things play out in the next year.
But Obama has conceded and conceded and conceded and then conceded on the concession but I still haven’t seen anything close to effective government. It’s such a shame that Obama has turned into the most impotent politician I’ve ever seen in his mad chase for Goldman Saks money and his spurious wish to become a 80s-style throwback Republican/Reag-ocrat. You can cheerlead all you want but Obama’s failed one term is set in stone. So much for that myth of Obama playing 11-dimensional chess while I played marbles and drooled in my sippy-cup. He hasn’t changed that stupid tone in two miserable years and he won’t change now because he’s still trying to find the perfect middle. The Republicans simply move the middle further to the right, and Obama goes “Duhhhh, okay,” and follows, follows, follows. No leadership. No independence. No spine. Just mush and more right-wing Obamanomics.
The Mendacity of Hope indeed.
“Eight year olds, dude”
Once again proof that all the truth in the universe exists in The Big Lebowski
Look it up.