It is amazing that Maureen Dowd, a good Catholic, would compare our president unfavorably with Pope Alexander VI. Better known as Rodrigo Borgia, or the father of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, Pope Alexander VI was probably the most unholy of Renaissance popes. If you want to know why there was widespread disgust with the papacy in the early 16th-Century, if you want to know why there was a Reformation, you would do well to study the Borgias. The selling of indulgences was the least of the rot that had developed in the Vatican.
I know that “guttersnipe” is a noun that means vagabond, but I think it should be a verb that describes Ms. Dowd’s recent attacks on the president. Some people are calling it the Green Lantern Theory that the president can just exert his hidden superpowers and get Congress to do his bidding. “It’s called leadership,” Ms. Dowd says.
Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do.
Her advice for getting Congress to do what Obama wants them to do?
The senior senator from Kentucky has been a leader in Keep-Terrorists-Offshore. Maybe, if the president really wants to close Gitmo, he should have a drink with Mitch McConnell. Really.
Really?
I mean, really?
The president can close Gitmo and sign gun and immigration reforms if he has a drink with the man who called a meeting two weeks before Obama’s first inauguration to lay out a scorched earth policy of total opposition? The man who
said in October 2010 that “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president”?
Opposition to the president’s policies will just melt away if the president gets drunk with Mitch McConnell?
During his first term in the White House, the president was careful to not pick fights he could not win. It was this cautious strategy that most closely aligned with Pope Alexander VI’s admonition that the mere appearance of weakness begets weakness. When you pick a fight and you lose, you invite more opposition.
The wisdom of Obama’s approach was promptly displayed the moment he abandoned it and went after the gun violence industry. He did all the things people had been advising him to do. He dined with Republican senators. He used the bully pulpit. He went to the American people. He had victims come to the Rose Garden. He put pressure on lawmakers. Polls showed that north of 80% of the public agreed with at least the background check part of his proposals. And none of it mattered.
At least, none of it mattered if the goal was to actually accomplish something in Congress. The people who opposed him saw a sudden and dramatic drop in their approval numbers, for whatever that is worth.
During the president’s first term, the Republican leadership opposed him at every turn in an effort to prevent his reelection. Their strategy now is to prevent him from being judged among our greatest presidents by denying him even small victories. But Ms. Dowd devotes her column to blaming the president for inaction by a Congress that she acknowledges is “mind-bendingly awful” and “dunderheaded.”
Those adjectives could just as well describe Ms. Dowd’s work product.
