I don’t know if it is a coincidence or not but Mitt Romney is certainly on-message with his latest criticism of the president.
In his first public comments since Election Day, Romney slammed Obama for “berating Republicans” instead of leading the country, adding that the president’s habit of “blaming and pointing” has contributed to Congress’s inability to reach a deal. “That causes the Republicans to retrench and to put up a wall and to fight back,” he told Fox News’s Chris Wallace.
Cameron Joseph has a piece in The Hill that makes the same point. It begins with this almost unbelievable sentence:
President Obama’s public shaming of congressional Republicans to act on a range of issues may be winning at the polls — but it risks alienating the people needed to reach bipartisan compromise.
The article goes on to detail the targets of Organizing for America’s first foray into political advertising, and then quotes some of those targets, like Rep. John Kline (R-MN) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), complaining about getting attacked when they are expected to negotiate. It’s part of a theme that the GOP is rolling out (with a great deal of assistance from the press) that criticizes the president for waging a “permanent campaign,” refusing to make concessions or negotiate, failing to “lead,” “poisoning the well,” and so on.
You can see this strategy in action in Peggy Noonan’s latest meandering screed in the Wall Street Journal. Noonan is up to some old tricks, like name-dropping Maxine Waters and Al Sharpton (as if that isn’t 20-years-and-running code for the mouth-breathers). But she hits all the marks of the current campaign. Ignoring a recent front-page article in the New York Times that reported that Boehner has walked away from the negotiating table (“Amid clamoring from his more conservative members, Mr. Boehner eventually reaffirmed his own conservative principles, abandoning even the pretense of reaching a bipartisan solution on the spending cuts.”) and despite other reporting that Boehner told his caucus in mid-December that he was done negotiating with the president, Noonan gets things exactly backwards.
A crisis is coming—a series of crises actually, with more ceilings and the threat of a government shutdown—and [the president] is not engaging or taking ownership. The “We’re not speaking” thing with Congress is more amazing and historic than we appreciate. Only a president can stop that kind of thing, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t even seem to think he owes the speaker of the House—the highest elected official of a party representing roughly half the country—even the appearance of laying down his arms for a moment and holding serious talks. He journeys into America making speeches, he goes on TV but only for interviews the White House is confident will be soft.
She continues with more inverted history and reasoning.
But here’s what seems really new. Past presidents, certainly since Ronald Reagan, went over the heads of the media to win over the people, to get them to contact Congress and push Congress to deal. Fine, and fair enough. But Mr. Obama goes to the people to get them to enhance his position by hating Republicans. He’s playing only to the polls, not to Congress, not to get the other side to the bargaining table. He doesn’t even like the bargaining table. He doesn’t like bargaining.
For some reason this calls to mind Harry Truman’s response to someone who told him to give the Republicans hell, “I don’t give them Hell, I just tell the truth about them and they think it’s Hell.” There’s no evidence to support the idea that the president doesn’t like bargaining or the bargaining table, but there is plenty of evidence that John Boehner feels that way. Consider Ryan Lizza’s reporting on the aftermath of John Boehner’s failure to pass his Plan B on December 20th:
At a White House meeting eight days after Plan B’s demise, Boehner was sullen and silent. He refused to engage in the discussions, and instead repeated talking points: the House had done all it could; now the Senate needed to act. The White House and the Senate negotiated a deal to avert most of the tax hikes in the fiscal cliff…
When Boehner realized that he didn’t have the votes for Plan B, he recited Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer to his whole caucus before releasing them for the Christmas holidays.
Noonan then engages in one of the clearest cases of projection I have ever seen in print.
Where does that get us? We are in new territory. There is a strange kind of nihilism in the president’s approach. It’s a closed, self-referential loop. And it’s guaranteed to keep agreement from happening.
There is nothing quite so closed and self-referential as right-wing media, and the strange nihilism we’re dealing with here is the Republicans refusal to negotiate even a little bit, despite the fact that taking that position guarantees that no agreement will happen.
After this, Noonan changes gears to attack Michelle Obama for appearing at the Oscars and on late-night television, and on morning television, and for being “a glamorous star.” Then she tries to tie it all together.
All of this—the president’s disdain for Congress and for Republicans, the threats of damage unless he gets his way, the first lady’s forays—is part of the permanent campaign, and the immediate sequester campaign.
But they push it too far. It feels uncalibrated, over some invisible line.
It looks like what critics have long accused this White House of being—imperious, full of overreach, full of itself.
Meanwhile, the Republicans refuse to make any concessions or even negotiate. They can reiterate all these talking points as many times as they want, but their all-or-nothing approach is what is causing the problem, and nothing will change until they stop being unreasonable. The impasse isn’t going away and, if some people are still confused about the facts, the truth will ultimately become clear and blame will be assigned appropriately.