Obama's Smackdown of House GOP
It was entertaining to watch President Obama take on the hapless GOP House caucus last Friday. It was basically 140 vs. 1....and the 140 fell one-by-one to blistering defeat. Unfortunately, it was no more than that....a two-hour intellectual mismatch between scores of obstructionist hacks fighting to control the levers of power once again and one intellectually superior man desperately trying to govern a nation in decline. In no way does it change the political scorecard beyond a couple news cycles. But the unfortunate reality is that it would if we were able to see the Barack Obama that we saw last Friday more than once a year. Regretably, we won't.
Paul Krugman's 2008 primary season criticism of Obama proved right on one front. Obama lacks the fight in him to effectively take on a city as cynical as Washington. Obama underestimated the opposition's obsession to destroy him and went into office the way so many before him did, extending the hand of "bipartisan cooperation" only to have it slapped. Obama's problem is that he let that argument define his candidacy to the point where he can't now respond to Republicans with the Nixonian partisan bloodlust needed to put fear in them. He threaded the needle about as well as possible last Friday, but the Republicans can be expected to continue rebuking him at every corner on every issue because Obama has not yet given them a downside to doing so.
With every two-year political cycle, Washington gets more partisan, even when it seemed at points in the recent past that it would be impossible for the town to get more partisan. Hard to see what can change this and the country has become almost ungovernable as a consequence, but it's a reality Obama needs to come to terms with if he has any hopes of saving his Presidency. The opposition party wants to ruin him and will never bargain in good faith no matter how many olive branches he extends to them. He should use Friday's smackdown as a stepping stone to heightened aggressiveness and more persistent reminders to the American people of how badly the opposition is playing politics. It's painfully clear that if he doesn't, those playing politics so cynically will be rewarded by a confused and angry voting public looking to make the most convenient target pay, and that convenient target now happens to be the majority party that Obama belongs to.
Paul Krugman's 2008 primary season criticism of Obama proved right on one front. Obama lacks the fight in him to effectively take on a city as cynical as Washington. Obama underestimated the opposition's obsession to destroy him and went into office the way so many before him did, extending the hand of "bipartisan cooperation" only to have it slapped. Obama's problem is that he let that argument define his candidacy to the point where he can't now respond to Republicans with the Nixonian partisan bloodlust needed to put fear in them. He threaded the needle about as well as possible last Friday, but the Republicans can be expected to continue rebuking him at every corner on every issue because Obama has not yet given them a downside to doing so.
With every two-year political cycle, Washington gets more partisan, even when it seemed at points in the recent past that it would be impossible for the town to get more partisan. Hard to see what can change this and the country has become almost ungovernable as a consequence, but it's a reality Obama needs to come to terms with if he has any hopes of saving his Presidency. The opposition party wants to ruin him and will never bargain in good faith no matter how many olive branches he extends to them. He should use Friday's smackdown as a stepping stone to heightened aggressiveness and more persistent reminders to the American people of how badly the opposition is playing politics. It's painfully clear that if he doesn't, those playing politics so cynically will be rewarded by a confused and angry voting public looking to make the most convenient target pay, and that convenient target now happens to be the majority party that Obama belongs to.
posted by Mark at 1:32 PM
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