Here’s an excellent article that tells it like it is. Mike Lillis of The Hill does a great job of accurately describing the political dynamics of the country at the moment. Here is the key part:
Complicating life for Obama, GOP leaders – particularly those in the Senate – have adopted a strategy of opposing the White House even on some legislation Republicans support. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), for instance, raised eyebrows at the start of the deficit-reduction debate when he helped kill a bipartisan bill – a proposal he’d previously characterized as the “best way to address the [budget] crisis” – after Obama endorsed it.
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell told National Journal last year.
The GOP’s rigidity has forced Obama to the right in order to pass anything through Congress, which in turn has only heightened the backlash from the left.
What’s left unsaid in the article is that the president is taking a bigger percentage of the flak than he should. Not only is the GOP’s intransigence forcing his hand in almost every case, but the Democrats in Congress are not united and do not uniformly have his back even for the compromised solutions he is forced to propose. At root, our problem in this Congress is that Congress is divided and cannot agree on anything. The SuperCommittee is struggling to even begin negotiations over the budget, and its likely failure to reach an agreement could lead to another downgrade of the nation’s credit rating.
Meanwhile, as the president tries to arouse the left in support of a modest, reasonable Jobs Bill, the left’s heart has left the building and is now focused on protests against corporate greed and mismanagement. Yesterday, whether lured by police or through a lack of any leadership structure, many of these protesters strayed from the agreed path and occupied the Brooklyn-bound lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge for two and a half hours, shutting down traffic and forcing many to abandon their cars. Perhaps as many as 700 of them were arrested and carted off in buses.
This is a recipe for the failure of the Obama presidency and the emergence of a conservative revolution in this country unlike anything we’ve ever seen. For a long time the activist left begged the president to really fight for jobs, both as a political and a moral issue. Yet, it was right in the middle of his push for a jobs bill that they gave up on the political process completely, turned their loving attention elsewhere, and decided to join the pox-on-all-their-houses crowd.
Perhaps the average person cannot be faulted for giving up, or for not being motivated to fight for a president whose hands have been shackled by the Republcians’ determined efforts to ruin him. But a lot of people who should know better are getting caught up in a sideshow.
Yet, the eruption of protest on the left can help the president if he recognizes the opportunity. Unlike what Steven D has recommended, I do not think the administration should align itself with the protestors. What they should do is what FDR did with Huey Long. While the protesters call for Wall Street to “Share the Wealth” the president should tack to the left but maintain himself as the safer alternative. “If you don’t give me a win on this jobs bill, these protests will continue to grow and the pitchforks will really come out.” I don’t know how many of the protesters would agree with my advice, but I do think that at least part of what they’re trying to do is to change the political consensus in this country and yank the discourse out of the death-hold it seems to have become locked in. The economy is terrible and headed into a double-dip recession, and neither the president nor Congress is capable of doing anything big or adequate to fix the problem. The answer certainly is not to give the Republicans another chance. So, maybe the left can shake things up and create a crack in the wall of obstruction.
The administration has to look at this as an opportunity, because if it doesn’t adapt to take advantage of it, his effort on jobs will die a pathetic death, and his presidency will likely follow.
