Greg Sargent confuses Obama with Elizabeth Warren. Or with Harry Reid. While Obama confuses the congressional Republicans with Michelle.
Presuming Republicans win the Upper Chamber, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will claim a new era of constructive governance has arrived, while simultaneously claiming a mandate to chip away at President Obama’s already achieved policy gains. (Those who profess a love for bipartisan cooperation will politely ignore this absurdity.) But McConnell’s only way to re-litigate Obama’s policies will remain budgetary guerrilla warfare that will only work if Obama allows it to work, which he won’t, which he won’t. This election won’t resolve any of the larger arguments of the Obama era — whether backward looking or forward looking — and while compromises may be possible here and there, the big picture will mostly be more stalemate.
— Morning Plum: Get ready for more gridlock and dysfunction, Greg Sargent, this morning
McConnell’s only way to re-litigate Obama’s policies will remain budgetary guerrilla warfare that will only work if Obama allows it to work. Which, if past is prologue, he will. And with Obama, past is always prologue.
Obama spent the first three years of his presidency, and, intensely, 2011, waving the budgetary white flag so desperately that it was only the farthest-right contingent of House members that prevented significant changes to Social Security, Medicare and other major safety-net programs. The House contingent that blocked the deal did so because it didn’t go far enough, in their opinion. But it went very far.
What I remember most strikingly from that period, and what Sargent apparently has forgotten, is Obama’s angry public response to the death of this Republican-dream legislation. Always one to invoke some stunningly stupid family-is-like-government analogy, however clearly the analogy adopts the Republicans’ factually erroneous and very harmful policy mantras (“Families are tightening their belts, so the government should tighten its belt, too.”), Obama said he was willing to give the Republicans 90% of what they wanted if they would give him 10% of what he wanted, because that’s his arrangement with Michelle.
His party controlled the executive branch and one-half of the legislative branch. But he was willing to give the one-half of the legislative branch controlled by the Republicans 90% of what they wanted. If only they would stop looking that gift horse in the mouth.
Biden said yesterday that “we’re willing to compromise.” Read: “We’re willing to cave.” And the Dems’ standard-bearer-apparent—who’s aggressively blocking anyone else from running for the presidential nomination—couldn’t explain Keynesian economics, or cite healthcare coverage or healthcare-cost-reduction specifics, to save her life, yet she’s what will pass for the Dems’ fallback voice.
Great.
Well Beverly your disdain for Hillary is well known and does not warrant further comment at this point, but you are spot on in highlighting the danger of a Republican Senate with our current President. In the past he was angling for re-election, but now he is only working on his legacy and he obviously does not want that to be in the area of foreign adventures which leaves caving to the GOP to get anything done domestically. Although some do not think the GOP will go there, I think Ryan’s plans to privatize social security and voucherize medicare will be presented to Obama and if he gets some infrastructure spending and maybe a few new taxes he will sign it. Certainly, he has demonstrated a willingness in the past to cave and at this point as the lamest of lame ducks I hardly expect him to take on the GOP.
In this I firmly believe the GOP whacko birds will save Obama from himself.
Basically they’ll require full repeal of Obamacare as part of any deal, and that is the one place where Obama will hold firm
Axt113, I wish you were right, but you’re not. McConnell has made clear time and again in the last few months that it will all be done through the budget process.
Of course, Obama COULD—theoretically—give a short primetime TV address once Koch-McConnell Industries starts doing this, explaining what exactly they’re doing, what the intent is, and what the effect is. He COULD, theoretically, even mention how many Kentuckians will lose their healthcare insurance if McConnell gets his way.
Just as he COULD, theoretically, during the last several budget confrontations, and even during this year’s congressional campaigns, given a short primetime TV address, using charts, and telling the public that the budget deficit has declined by more than half in the last four years; that the federal workforce has declined dramatically because of that; that the budgets for key federal agencies such as the NIH and the National Weather Service have been gutted, as has federal financial assistance to state and local governments, causing dramatic reductions in employment by state and local governments (including for teachers and firefighters).
But just as he hasn’t done these things before, he won’t do it going forward. He doesn’t feel comfortable speaking into a camera from his office in the White House and doesn’t feel comfortable explaining things to the public, see. Which I guess is why he didn’t do either of those things regarding Ebola and the travel-ban issue.
We’re in a perfect storm, here, and have been for the last nearly-six years. There no longer are any cultural barriers to brazen misstatements of fact about government policies, statistics, affects, so the Republican media machine inundates the public with false facts. And the only person who could actually penetrate and counter this false-propaganda fest by gaining nationwide attention for the refutations, using statistics and other facts, and the economic effects of these statistics (i.e., Keynesian economics), refuses to do that. And in any event probably couldn’t do it coherently, to save his live. Or to save anyone else’s (political) life.
I’ve known, and right now know, a small number of people who seem very bright and are highly educated (graduate degrees of one sort or another), and yet whose thought process is so “off”, so utterly weird, so illogical, that eventually I realize that there’s no actual way to communicate normally with the person, and no reason to expect that the person will ever have a normal recognition and understanding of normal things. I don’t know Obama personally, but I put him in that category.
This is not to say that he doesn’t deserve great credit for some of what he’s done as president—especially his decision in early 2009, against the political advice of some of his aides, to ask Congress to pursue healthcare insurance reform.
But his bizarre, hands-off, delegation of the policy design to Congress—and his stupefying failure, throughout, to refute the false statements of fact about the eventual law and to make one infamous one himself (“If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan,” which is true for most but not all), rather than explaining the actual policy, and that virtually identical or more comprehensive policies will be available, and why—is emblematic of so much that is very wrong with his presidency.
They are, specifically: His extreme lack of mental agility—an inability to recognize when something, including false facts being propagated, needs to be addressed, needs to be dealt with; his extreme delegation to Congress of complex and very important legislation that should be designed at the outset by the White House; and, most of all, his failure to do what is necessary to educate the public about absolutely critical facts that the public clearly is unaware of and facts about which holds outright-false beliefs.