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.
I’ve often said the Maureen Dowd belongs on Page 6 of the New York Post rather than on the oped pages of the New York Times.
She gets prime real estate for her crap and it is a crime given how many people would do a better job if given the chance.
Not much to really say about this level of naive silliness, except that she is far from alone in blatting out this braindead boobery, it’s now conventional wisdom punditry. From elite pundits, their sophisticated “insight” is that personal trumps the political. The personal trumps the structural.
In this simpleton version, DC has no real problems, no manufactured paralysis, only inadequate leaders, when all we need are true pros who can just get everyone to see that the people’s bizness needs to git done! The country comes first! Simply have a drink (or dinner!) and Viola, progress!
Maureen loved the scene in Lincoln, where Abe and Thaddeus Stevens jousted over strategy in the WH cellar. She just forgot that Lincoln and Stevens were members of the same party….details, details.
That one is going into my collection:
“blatting out this braindead boobery
Right next to
“nattering nabobs of negativity”
THANKS!!
Oh, and solid comment all round.
I think Safire’s was “negativism” not “negativity”. In any case, Euzolus’s is a lot better.
“Nattering nabobs of negativism” is contrived and arhtyhmic.
The magic process of “Leadership” is rapidly approaching the iconic status in MSM political discourse as the “Confidence fairy” has in Austerity economics. In both cases some supernatural force is supposed to overcome all human obstacles placed in its way. They are the political and economic equivalents of creationism – the notion that some external deity must be invoked to do the heavy lifting and that all who refuse to bow down to this reality are atheistic, communist, Muslim terrorists…
Are we going to get a post ripping “The Mustache of Understanding” today? Someone needs to pie him again.
her stupid ass is doubling down on her idiocy.
fuck her.
Yes, but you know why? Because it’s gotten a lot of notice.
I guess nowadays it pays to be stupid when you can be blatantly stupid on the op-ed page of America’s newspaper of record.
The gun violence fight is not over.
MoDo is not worth the bandwidth to comment on.
The President can do something about a large number of prisoners in Guantanamo. He can stop the the military commissions from being Kangaroo courts, for one. He can rein in the CIA and DoD from trying to cover its bloody tracks on torture and order John Brennan to release the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture. He can order the release of all Guantanamo detainees cleared for release. He can order the CIA to stop negotiating detention and asssasination sidedeals and promises to repatriate Guantanamo detainees to countries where they clearly would be tortured or killed.
Or he can wait until the International Committee on the Red Cross comes down on the US administration of Guantanamo.
He can also willfully disobey Congress on its restrictions and move all of the cases to Article III courts. That would provoke a very interesting constitutional crisis with the bedwetters.
The kabuki that he is helpless to get the prisoners away from the legal no-man’s-land of Guantanamo because of Congress is nonsense.
And he better watch the Saudis because it looks like they are trying to sandbag him on the Boston bombing by claiming that they warned DHS about Tamarlan Tsarnaev. The publication is the UK Daily Mail. So look for the hand of Bandar and the rest of the Bush clan trying to whitewash W’s failure to keep us safe. Which is what the political nonsense trying to tie his hands on Guantanamo is about as well.
It’s time to call out the bedwetters for what they are. The US Constitutional bill of rights is our strength in defending against terrorism. It’s time we used it instead of pretending that it is a weakness.
The following is from the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 and it demonstrates exactly why Obama can’t do what you are asking him to do. Read it and then discuss the law at it is, not as you are pretending that it is.
Where in this is there a prohibition of transfer to Article III courts?
Where in this is there a requirement that military commissions be conducted as Kangaroo Courts?
Where is there in this that the DoD cannot make the certifications required and move detainees on that basis?
The problem is not a legal one. It is a lack of political will.
Because no matter what the President does, the bedwetters will wet beds. The political issue is with the Democratic caucus and the public and they are likely to be easily convinced if the White House actually makes the effort.
The problem is not a legal one. It is a lack of political will.
Then why did you just say that doing what you want would create a Constitutional crisis, and require him to ignore the legislation Congress passed?
You’re raising the green lantern.
There are lots of items that I described that are short of a Constitutional crisis.
But some actions that would comply with the Constitution but violate the NDAA restrictions could cause a Constitutional crisis in that Republicans in Congress could come unglued. But that is still an option through which the President could prevail in a separation of powers fight in part because it would be a fait accompli.
It does not require him to change the views of Congress or the way that Congress thinks. But it does involve a heavy-duty confrontation with the Republicans in Congress. Therefore, it does not require that he be the Green Lantern.
The list in the comment immediately above yours are things well short of that confrontation.
violate the NDAA restrictions
You mean “the law.” You mean, “violate the law passed by Congress, which is granted sole authority under the Constitution over spending, and over the rules for land and sea forces.”
And you’re saying he should not only violate the law and Constitution, but assuming along the way that the courts would go along with him.
Presidents have done it before and let the courts sort it out.
And I am suggesting that the issue is important enough to have that confrontation.
But I am also suggesting that there are a lot of executive actions short of that confrontation that are available to the President. His “helplessness” is a transparent ploy to try to get public pressure on Congress. The problem is that the current Congress responds to money pressure not public pressure. The President’s appeal to the public just reinforces a status quo that is untenable. And the ICRC is now on the case.
The political issue is with the Democratic caucus and the public and they are likely to be easily convinced if the White House actually makes the effort.
Right, like during the KSM trial episode in 2009.
Everyone remembers how easily convinced the public and the Congressional Democrats were when Obama and Holder put on the full-court press for civilian trials and Gitmo shutdown, right?
I must have missed that full-court press because of the shadow of Rahm Emmanuel undercutting it. Bloomberg squealed and the White House folded. Since then, they’ve just gone directly Article III, as the President listed in his news conference. That latter method seems to work. Why don’t they try that to empty Guantanamo?
Your use of Article III as a term is confusing.
I assume that you mean that we should try these folks in a regular court of law as opposed to a military commission. We don’t have any regular courts of law in Guantanamo Bay. We are prohibited by law from transferring anyone in Gitmo to the United States for any purpose, including to stand trial.
What’s more, we are prohibited from transferring people who are in Gitmo to any other country even if their release has been ordered by a judge in the United States, unless the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense are willing to assure Congress at least 30 days before their transfer that the country receiving them can keep them securely in prison, that no one previously released to that country has ever reverted to terrorism, etc.
I don’t know why you having such difficulty with this. It’s against the law to move the prisoners in Gitmo, except under very limited circumstances which the president cannot meet.
Congress has created a lawless zone just for these “enemy combatants”. And in doing so they have involved President Obama in the same human rights abuses that Bush set up. And you are telling me that there is nothing that any official in Washington can do about it.
And I am saying that that is bullshit. There are executive actions that the President can take that will expose the essentially lawless no-man’s land that is Guantanamo and that will not contravene the letter of the law.
Yes, Article III courts are those regular courts that the President was boasting about.
The President can order the military commissions officers to permit an honest defense of the detainees who are in military commissions. The President can order the sessions open to press coverage.
The President is not without options to begin to move this issue forward.
As far as being prohibited to transfer anyone for Gitmo to the US for any purpose, this is the area in which the President could transfer them to SuperMax custody in the US and dare the Congress to object. What is the worst that could happen? Investigations with media coverage a la Iran-Contra? Heck that might rip the lid off the scandal that GOP in Congress is perpetuating. Like I said, it won’t be the first time a President violated a mandate from Congress.
Why are progressive Democrats covering for perpetuation of clear violations of the Constitution and international law?
Instead, the administration is trying its best to keep the lid on the information, deny those in military commissions an honest hearing, and keep the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture under wraps. That goes beyond just obeying the letter of those NDAA restrictions. Those actions are consistent with the logic of the Bush administration that created this mess in the first place. If the President is not part of that logic, he now needs to show it with actions not just words.
BTW, it is real easy for the White House to stand up to Congress on something like releasing the DOJ memos authorizing targeted killing to the Senate Judiciary Committee or the Senate Intelligence Committee. And it’s real easy to stonewall the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture.
But on moving toward unwinding this nonsense, the White House is totally absolutely helpless? Can do absolutely nothing? This is total BS. There are things that the White House can do as an executive agency that don’t require super-human powers. Just a willingness to to let the American people see the atrocity that has been done in their name.
I must have missed that full-court press
Nobody could have predicted that a bully pulpiteer would manage to forget the use of the bully pulpit when it didn’t work.
Bloomberg squealed and the White House folded.
No, Bloomberg squealed, the White House continued to push, and Congress passed legislation by a veto proof majority denying the White House what it wanted.
Why don’t they try that to empty Guantanamo?
How many times will I need to answer “because Congress made it illegal for them to do that” before you stop asking?
You asked about the prohibition against transferring to Article III courts. SEC. 1027 specifically prohibits the use of funds to transfer any detainee into the United States or its territories. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is what established a legal basis for courts that aren’t up to Article III snuff. I suppose you are aware that the Kangeroo Court characteristics of Military Commissions were set forth in that law.
The DoD can make the certifications required if they are willing to lie. Otherwise, they cannot in most instances. Do you want Chuck Hagel and James Clapper to certify that Syria can secure a prisoner or that there has been no Yemeni recidivism?
You are advocating that the president break the law and that Hagel and Clapper make misrepresentations to Congress.
Clapper is already making misrepresentations to Congress in my estimation. It’s just ones that Congress wants to hear.
I would trust that if the President chose to break the law that he like every other President would ensure plausible deniability.
But I guess this is not really a league game after all.
The Daily Mail is second only to Murdoch’s Sun in the race towards the bottom of the British gutter press. It is also a proudly participating tool of the well-known echo-chamber system.
Yes, the “highly placed Saudi source”, Bandar or one of his henchmen, is part of that same Bush/neocon echo chamber crap that brought us the Iraq War,
Now first, US Homeland Security has denied this report.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/01/did-saudi-arabia-warn-us-about-boston-bombers_n_3193317.htm
l?utm_hp_ref=crime
But now the Saudis have also denied the Mail report. But they still won’t let go of it. In reporting the denial the Mail continues to fan the flames:
“Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington now DENIES his nation warned the United States about Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2012
* Saudi embassy in Washington D.C. issues denial of account of a senior official who talked to MailOnline
* A letter to the Department of Homeland Security allegedly named Tsarnaev and three Pakistanis as potential jihadis worthy of U.S. investigation
* Red flags from Saudi Arabia to have included Tsarnaev’s name and information about a planned explosive attack on a major U.S. city
* Saudi foreign minister, national security chief both met with Obama in the oval office in early 2013
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2317493/Saudi-Arabian-ambassador-Washington-DENIES-nation-wa
rned-United-States-Tamerlan-Tsarnaev-2012.html#ixzz2S4Q1Cz7a
“Who is covering up?” etc. Now the world’s abuzz about something that BOTH the US and the Saudis say never happened.
This is typical echo chamber bullshit, on a par with whether Obama was born in Kenya … or not? You decide!
Where to begin? You say that the wisdom of avoiding any fight the President could lose was proven with his commitment to passing some measure of gun control. On the contrary. I was never prouder of Obama than when he put what seemed like all of his effort into passing that legislation, even though it’s failed. The legislation itself didn’t go far enough, and would probably have been of limited effectiveness. But he fought the good fight as far as I can tell, and he exposed the Republicans for the mercenaries that they are. The sudden and dramatic drop in the approval numbers of the people who opposed the legislation is worth a lot. It’s our only hope to get Democrats in control of Congress. Having exposed the weakness of the legislators who cater to the NRA against the interests of the American people, he should immediately choose another wildly popular issue that those same legislators have been blocking progress on, get a bill submitted, and pummel them with their positions, now that they’ve lost their balance a little. Instead, it sounds like you would, along with the rest of his council, advise him to spout platitudes from the corner in an effort to avoid appearing week. Wrong advice, wrong strategy, bad outcomes. He and we are being ill-served.
Are you still talking about his being probably one of our greatest Presidents ever? This is silly. There are three overarching, urgent problems that our country has faced continuously while he’s been in office: the financial bedrock underlying everything, the constitutional rights we have under stress, and our inexorable advance towards climate catastrophe. He’s done nothing adequate on the first, cemented the neocons’ policies on the second, and on the last issue, made progress that would have counted as progress had it been done thirty years ago. Presidents don’t get to be judged by what they would have done had everything gone their way, or by what the worst President in history would have done instead. The consequences of Obama’s positions will be more than evident ten years from now, and will make NAFTA and Glass-Steagall look quaint in comparison.
Where to begin is right.
The president was reelected because he wasn’t perceived as weak and ineffectual by most Americans. He was tough, perhaps too tough, on terrorism. He was tough on pirates. He was tough on Qaddafi. He got bin-Laden.
We’re all familiar with the left’s critique of Tim Geithner and the coddling of the banks and the lack of relief for homeowners. and also the critique of the right that we were spending like crazy. But Obama did put the economy back on its feet, even if it has limped along. He did sign Dodd-Frank. He did create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He did sign major credit card reform. He had a string of consumer-friendly accomplishments.
ObamaCare is the biggest legislative accomplishment since Medicare.
His record on climate is limited by Republican and some Democratic obstruction, but he’s making progress, particularly with the Department of Defense.
On guns, I agree that he did the right thing by choosing to fight. You seem to be missing my point. He fought and he lost. And now he looks weak. Now he looks ineffectual. Now is being asked if he lacks juice. He’s a lame duck. That’s the cost of fighting and losing, and it’s a bad idea to do that if you want to be reelected. Yes, he moved the American public and his opponents are less popular. But he’s less popular, too. He is less feared than ever.
You have to pick your fights carefully, and if you are going to intentionally pick a fight that you know you will lose, you better have a damn good reason for doing it. Those kids in Newtown and their families are a damn good reason.
But losing isn’t a governing philosophy. In this case, he still has time to win and he hasn’t given up.
When it comes time to judge Obama, a lot will depend on who succeeds him. Do you know how many president’s served two terms and were replaced by a member of their own party? Here’s a list:
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
Andrew Jackson
Abraham Lincoln* (sort of)
Ulysses S. Grant
Teddy Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt
Ronald Reagan
You put Obama on that list, and see what you get.
I must be misunderstanding your position, because as I understand it, it’s far too superficial for your abilities. You seem to be saying that showing commitment to legislation that lost in Congress makes Obama look weak and offer as proof that a reporter asked him about “losing juice”. You contrast that with the idea that his strength and greatness can be judged in large part by electoral victories. There is way too much emphasis on winning and I say this as a pragmatist. We say in one breath that Republicans won’t allow any of Obama’s agenda to pass in Congress, and say with the next that he should put effort into only what he can assuredly win. And the executive actions that he’s capable of are too fraught with political risk. You leave him with no choice but to whine. When your whole orientation is to avoid looking weak, you’ve already lost the game.
And if you’re going to put that list together, you have to include Clinton as one of the greatest Presidents ever, because Gore won that election by both the popular and electoral count.
There is way too much emphasis on winning and I say this as a pragmatist.
Except that you just argued that a President should devote his efforts to advocating for doomed proposals in order to make the opposition look bad and win a political victory.
Yes, if Obama does nothing but lose legislative battles for the remainder of his presidency, his legacy is going to suffer. That’s exactly what the Republicans are trying to do because they don’t want Obama to become the left’s Reagan.
But you are also missing the point that the president doesn’t have to run for reelection so he can better afford to pick fights he won’t win than he was in his first term. However, the more he times he loses, the less likely that he will win on anything.
his legacy is going to suffer
More importantly, those causes will suffer.
A lot of people don’t get this. Look at how the Republicans have been able to cast proposals that “lost” with 50+ Senate votes as “nonstarters” that just prove how extreme the President’s policies are.
People don’t seem to get this. Glorious losses are great if you’re a guerrilla insurgency or the 1981 version of the gay rights movement, but they don’t advance the cause if you’re President of the United States.
We want the same thing but disagree on the process. In his first two years, Obama had the means to pass a lot of his agenda and precious little time, so he had to focus on battles that could be won. Winning legislative battles now isn’t really an option (hasn’t been for 2 1/2 years and may not be for another 3 1/2) and frankly, the legislation that he can pass with this Congress may not be victories we want our name associated with. So it’s a false choice. I believe the approach that says that “every loss makes every next battle more likely to be lost” is a loser’s approach. The argument that Republicans and pundits will frame it this way is unconvincing when the battle is fought over an issue that gets overwhelming public support and when there’s room for improvement in the way that our side manages the optics.
Let me use an analogy and bear with me here. There’s a repeated noise. In some circumstances, the noise becomes maddening (sensitization). In other circumstances, the noise becomes part of the background (desensitization). With repeated attempts at legislation, sometimes it becomes associated with a losers’ agenda; other times, it becomes the process of erosion of resistance, of seeming less radical, of becoming more familiar. I just don’t buy the argument that the President or the party loses whenever we lose a fight. And I believe that that argument is one of the most destructive approaches that we can embrace.
You use a good analogy.
Probably the best use of it is to apply it to individual cases to see if your strategy is going to be maddening or it is going to grind down the opposition.
At this moment in time, when the leadership of the House is basically helpless to deal with their own caucus, the idea that we will grind down the opposition on anything can seem pretty fanciful.
But we have little choice but to try.
Just keep in mind that going all-in to pass legislation and then failing to pass it is only going to work over the long term, if at all. And it is not a good idea for the president to expose his own impotence repeatedly unless there is some realistic prospect that he will eventually prevail. And it comes with a cost, effectively collateral damage.
I don’t place any hope on grinding down the opposition directly. It has to be done by upsetting their financial incentives. That’s a tall order, but I don’t see an alternative. Obama has only one audience who’s a potential asset: the majority of Americans. He should do everything he can, openly and clandestinely, to make us stronger. Voting rights is important; so is immigration reform, but he needs us more immediately than that.
In backgammon, money play and match play require different strategies. I see the 2014 Congressional elections as the match and the party who has public opinion on its side as the one who’s holding the doubling cube.
I was never prouder…
That’s nice, and should be the driving force of any President’s legislative strategy.
Not passing bills; making supporters feel awesome. That’s what governing is all about.
Maureen who?
Hell, Obama already answered this at the WH Correspondents dinner: “Really? Why don’t you have a drink with Mitch McConnell?” That must be what she’s referring to, although she obviously missed the point.
And it is a good point. I mean, is it asking too much that she should at least stop and listen to herself for a second. “Congress sucks. Obama has to do something.” Maybe repeat it a few times, and keep asking yourself if it makes sense. I really don’t think it’s too hard to see the logical problem there.
Did you see this? More proof that Obama just isn’t trying hard enough.
Good reminder for those of us who ever begin to forget what Obama has been up against.
Yes, but Patton didn’t quit when he faced Rommel’s troops in Africa, did he? And in Sicily, he took the hard route and still stuck it to Monty! The point being is that “Impromise, adapt, overcome!!” hasn’t exactly been the Obama Admin.’s strong point. There are many routes that could take.
Obviously the president needs to have a beer with you.
Since I’ll never get a chance to tell Maureen what I actually think of her, I can only come up with one recourse to satisfy my loathing of her. I have one book of Maureen’s on my bookshelf. In the spirit of Michele Bachmann, I think I’ll go home tonight, take it off the shelf and set it on fire.
Maureen Dowd’s advice on presidentin’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRQijskAMp4
At last, something on which we can wholeheartedly agree…
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.
This how it’s always been with Obama’s critics. I remember when he was being denounced for not using the bully pulpit on DADT, after he had featured it in two State of the Union addresses and frequently campaigned for it across the country. Even before Election Day 2010, they were blaming the results on the White House not drawing a sharp distinction with the Republicans on economic policy, despite that being Obama’s core message throughout the campaign.
Bully Pulpiteers manage to cling to their narrative by systematically ignoring any public communication the President engages in if it doesn’t work.
Joe, you just don’t understand. The bully pulpit always works. Therefore if it didn’t work for Obama, he obviously doesn’t know how to use it. Q. E. D.
They bully pulpit can never fail.
It can only be failed.
When women’s suffrage was a major issue of the day, many of the leading (male) thinkers of the time who opposed the notion justified their opposition with crass stereotypes: Women were frivolous, not logical thinkers, let petty emotions rule their judgment, lacked the mental capacity to understand Great Issues, and so forth.
At least Maureen Dowd wasn’t around then for them to use as an example. Though some days it sure feels like she’s been spouting her vicious inanities for that long.
The NYT’s “Good Catholic Girl” Op-Ed writer is the lady of the “magic dolphins.” And Charles P. Pierce reminded us this week in Today The Bottle Let Peggy Noonan Down.
That’s not to excuse the silliness that Dowd often writes. Particularly when by her standards of manliness, she fails to see what she considers that oh-so-vital quality in the male and premier Democratic politician. Quoting an actor playing Pope Alexander VI in a TV series on public relations impression management revealed what she uses for source material. Fine if she’s opining on contemporary pop culture, but ridiculous for much of anything else.
Far worse is this:
Whatever, if anything, Obama “absorbed” from “Lincoln,” Dowd totally missed that the movie likened Obama’s compromise style to that of Lincoln.
What’s odd about her piece is that after pointing out how Obama’s conciliatory behavior towards Republicans is ineffective and makes him look weak (or unmanly), she recommends that he do even more of that by having a drink with McConnell. Forgetting completely that in “Lincoln,” Abe had a drink with Thaddeus Stevens, the left wing radical, and not the pro-slavery Democratic twit from NY.
All Obama wants to sell is GOP-lite (although with phrases like “create a permission structure” not sure who he thinks his customers are), and since the beginning of his presidency, he’s appeared perplexed as to why more Republicans don’t get on board with him. After all, his policies aren’t much different from Bush’s (and in some areas no different) and they loved Bush. And if Democrats can accept those policies now that it’s Obama and not Bush selling them, why or why can’t Republicans embrace the continuation of GWB’s Common Sense?
It’s not that complicated. Much more than in Bill Clinton’s time, “Republican-Lite” is FAR to the left of the GOP. But in going for Republican-Lite, Obama cotninues to erode Independent and moderate Republican voters away from the GOP. It’s that simple.
The Republicans never give in. They just get fewer and fewer.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/02/1154403/-Republicans-Suppporting-Obama#
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/3/extremists-chase-some-republicans-toward-obama/?page=
all
http://www.wnd.com/2012/02/20-of-republicans-leaning-to-obama/
It’s only simple if the construct is simple — nothing but rank partisanship.
Don’t accept this at all:
“GOP-lite” at any time is always just slightly to the left of median amongst GOP politicians. With each election cycle in which Republicans win, they move a bit “right” — always moving towards the real and permanent agenda to end all forms of socialism in the US. And they along with many Democrats are running on more cylinders than they once did. Honestly never thought I’d live to see the day when both Republicans and Democrats seek to destroy one of the oldest forms of socialism in this country, public education. But here we are.
No, I don’t agree. How can you say it’s always slightly to the left of median GOP, when even the “median” GOP is now totally off the charts?
Obama’s “Republican Lite” is no more to the right than Clinton’s, and the actual effect of it are much more benign than Clinton’s, although the condition of the country is worse (by no fault of Obama’s). You want proof? The Republicans never compromise with Obama. The GOP was usually very happy to compromise with Clinton.
I think you may be confusing some of Obama’s “opening offers” with what he is actually doing. These offers are stances for negotiations that never take place.
Yes, it is true as you say that ‘With each election cycle in which Republicans win, they move a bit “right”‘. But also true that fewer and fewer are following them.
What you say about both Republicans and Democrats seeking to destroy “one of the oldest forms of socialism in this country, public education” has some truth to it. I have children in public school right now and I’m very concerned about it. However, Republicans and Democrats have supported the Michelle Rhee-type reforms for different reasons: republicans really to destroy public schools, but Democrats because they were gulled into the mistaken belief that such reforms would IMPROVE public education.
There is now a pushback and I predict charter schools, standardized testing, etc. have already reached the high-water mark and are on the way down. Here in Texas (where it all started), opposition is fierce and universal, and it is already being rolled back. What I notice is, just as support was bipartisan, so is the rising opposition.
Something similar is happening on another issue: banks. With the public, the push back against the banks has bipartisan support. It’s going to be interesting.
Funny missed all those whistleblowers that the Clinton DOJ arrested and indicted. Did Clinton also tell us that Social Security is going bankrupt and required fixing by reducing promised benefits?
There may be pushback on the ground wrt to the privatization of public schools and the too-big-to-fail banks, but haven’t seen or heard anything from the Obama administration that they are changing their tune. Any word from them wrt to the discover of the fraud perpetrated by Reinhart-Rogoff that was used by this administration as the statistical proof that austerity works, and therefore, Obama’s “Grand Bargain” was what we needed?
http://www.edsource.org/today/2013/duncan-admits-flaws-in-current-standardized-testing/31379
He only agrees that the current standardized tests are flawed. Then promises new measurement tests. He’s still on board with closing public schools in favor of charter schools.
btw — Nobody interested or invested in improving public education, would join ranks with Republicans to privatize education unless they were stupid which Democratic politicians aren’t.
I thought you asked me for evidence that a push back was starting, not that the whole issue was taken care of. I don’t think that will happen over night, but my sense is that it is beginning. There will be more and more pressure against charter schools and against standardized testing, by which I mean too much testing and too much standardization.
Even when I was in school, quite a while ago, there was standardized testing. New York has given statewide regents examinations in all high school subjects every year since 1866.
As for the pushback on TBTF, there’s a lot of kabuki going on. You will not see Obama lead on this, but it is happening.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/democrats-debt-crisis-90717.html?hp=t1
Finally, as to the pushback on the banks, the thing to watch is this:
http://www.investmentu.com/2013/February/sp%E2%80%99s-5-billion-lawsuit-why-it-matters-and-what-to-d
o.html
The S & P suit settled a few days ago is peanuts compared to this one, and probably not relevant.
True, S & P is not a bank, but the suit is centrally related to the bank failure of 2008.
http://www.investmentu.com/2013/February/sp%E2%80%99s-5-billion-lawsuit-why-it-matters-and-what-to-d
o.html
What does any of that (which I’d already conceded) have to do with Obama and his leadership?
The Department of Education and the Department of Justice are components of Obama’s cabinet.
To back up my point about even Republicans turning against the congressional GOP and supporting the president, this is just out today — concerns in Alabama over the sequester:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/01/mike-rogers-sequestration_n_3195909.html