I don’t even know what to make of this piece by David Ignatius in the Washington Post. I have seen precious little evidence that John McCain has mellowed or decided to seriously work with the president. His tantrums over Chuck Hagel and Benghazi are still too fresh for me to credit any soft rhetoric he provides now. McCain is pissed off at his own party for allowing sequestration to whipsaw the Pentagon’s budget and he’d like to strangle Rand Paul like a chicken. But that’s intraparty squabbling. It’s also a demonstration of how little influence McCain has in his own party. He’s made too many lifelong enemies. Even if he wants to cut a deal with president on a Grand Bargain or immigration reform, there’s no sign that he can bring more than a half a handful of his colleagues with him, and the House Republicans could not care less what McCain thinks or wants. They don’t even care what Speaker Boehner thinks or wants. They just don’t care.
I think it is probably true that the president has convinced some Republican senators that the country needs them to make some compromises, but that only gets us so far. Until someone gets a harness on the House GOP, we’re stuck in the tar pits.
I’ve been wondering of late if it is crossing McCain’s consiousness of who is more his enemy; Obama or the Cruz/Paul coalition?
If he has his Legacy hat on, perhaps Obama might be the better choice.
The title of the piece, “John McCain brings back the happy warrior” was so ridiculous I couldn’t bring myself to read past it. Which “happy warrior”? Which “maverick”? If you re-fry beans 50 times there comes a point where you simply can’t call them that anymore because they’ve become inedible garbage.
Same with “That one,” “Country First,” “Just Build the damn fence” John McCain. There ain’t no “maverick” or “happy warrior” left in this bitter, senile old f*ck.
Booman, your “republicans in disarray” stuff sounds nice, but if the party is in disarray, why have they brought legislative action on virtually every issue facing this country to a standstill? I guess you argue this is dysfunction and sign of an imploding party. But the fact is, the monomaniacal focus on denying Obama a single advance has ably served the ruling class interests, interests that Obama and senators must also bow to. Of course, democrats talk about the rest of us “also”. And good for them. But the other party clothe themselves militant fealty to our billionaire saviors, whom they call “small business men”.
For example, who said this?
Could have been anyone. That’s just it. In fact if was Jeff Sessions. And of course, Obama can reasonably argue that he has in fact and does propose greater debt reduction than Republicans ever have, even with their latest offer to crush social programs to pay for tax cuts to plutocrats. But that’s irrelevant. The fact is, Democratic complicity in the austerity game has allowed republicans to entrench themselves in austerity gospel and so clothe their naked obstruction of our democracy as pure and unimpeachable debt righteousness.
People act like Democratic supermajorities are inevitable. Perhaps they are. But even if they are, the democratic party needs to be going somewhere right now. What I see is a party that despite Obama’s perhaps considerable stumping efforts, has no plan for addressing republican obstruction and has been left waiting around for the teaparty to deign to allow government to function on a deliberately impaired and disrupted level. What they should be doing is dropping the debt talk entirely and saying the government needs to invest, and it needs to invest by tilting income growth away from the global .1%.
Yes, it’s nice that after 10 years, anyone saying something about occupying Iraq as self-righteously hyperbolic as what Sessions said about debt only gets mockery and crickets, but right now, today, the ruling class gets to trot out this message of debt apocalypse whenever it pleases. If it takes 10 years to explode this adulterated horse shit, that’s going to be 10 years of deliberate misery, just like in Iraq, democratic majorities and republican disarray or no.
What’s inevitable imo is another Great Depression.
I internalized our current situation a while back now, when I was lamenting the fact in early 2012, perhaps even late 2011, that we had no chance to change the status quo through the election. I knew all along, as we tried to get Obama reelected that we stood only one chance of having a productive 2013-14 and that was if Romney utterly collapsed in Mondale/Dukakis fashion. That is why I pushed so hard the idea that such a collapse was possible, and I believe it was. The timing was just a little off. Romney did just a little too well in the first debate. All we needed was a win in the 55-56 range.
Well, we shall have that win next time around. Of that, I am almost certain. In the meantime, we get incrementalism, with most things moving in a slow progressive fashion, others snapping forward more surprisingly (gay rights), and some moving slowly in the wrong direction (destruction of state-level public sector).
Point is, the conservative movement is falling apart.
I’d like to challenge this premise a little. I understand that the minority party has power in our form of government, but Democrats are too fixated on the need for everything to be aligned perfectly for them in order to make change. The mindset is that it’s not enough to win, we have to blow them out of the water. It’s not enough to have the majority in the Senate, we need a supermajority. It’s not enough to have two branches, we need all three. This premise would have more credibility if it worked the other way, but it doesn’t. Republicans have less than what we have and make more of it. Just think back to the post-election mess of 2000. How many Democrats were thinking maybe it’s best not to win under these compromised circumstances? But Bush governed unashamedly.
I also think it’s too soon to dance on the grave of the Republican party. Six years after their President resigned in disgrace, they held the presidency again and for a straight 12 years. Two years after the Republican brand was trash, they regained the House. Our vision of their disarray is much informed by our inability to imagine how they’ll get out of their losing position, because we have so much difficulty imagining how to win in any position.
What choice does the President have? Many. He can make the case for investment over austerity; for increasing Social Security instead of cutting it. He can release his spokesman from making palpably dishonest claims that the American public approves of the “balanced approach” that takes money away from senior citizens. He’s said that we have to make the politicians do the right thing. He should tell us in concrete terms how we should do that. Are Democrats playing to leave nothing on the field? No.
If the President did that, the big donors would leave in droves. He and the other politicians are bought and paid for. Even Bernie Sanders who is owned by Vermont’s local business. Bernie is outspoken on national issues only because he hasn’t taken money from the New York banks and multinational corporations. That leaves him free to speak and vote his conscience. But will Bernie ever agree to a ban on maple syrup because of sugar or end dairy subsidies?
Sadly, if a party is busy tearing itself to bits, the only thing you can do is to ask them to say no to the other guy. Its actually relitivly easy.
But asking them to actually DO SOMETHING? Not a hope.
That’s why the “party of no” strategy was so brilliant. It allowed the GOP to appear united in opposing every single thing that came out of Obama’s mouth without actually coming up with anything that they could rally around. Its very easy to be unified in hatred. But that does not mean that they actually have any ideas of their own. Obama only got the Debt ceiling deal through by betting large that the Democrats would not cave like all the propaganda was saying that they would, by using the contempt of the GOP for Him against them.
Remember the only reason Paul Ryan’s budgets became the default GOP budget is that he was pretty much the only one that came up with anything.
Yes this situation sucks ass, but I’ll put a large part of that blame on Harry Ried for not actually doing reasonable and sane filibuster reform. He is lower than dirt on my estimation at this point.
Hey, but he still has his gig on MTP, so it’s all good.
I would argue McCain had no influence even when he was running for Prez. Since then I would argue he has made himself a laughing stock trying to stick his oar into every faction of the GOP, and wound up isolated by pissing all of them off.