Tag: obama

Tough lesson for Obama team: trying to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. Better to fight for a set of principles & let chips fall

Peter Daou, pretty much defining leadership.
And, win lose or draw, I feel like if the Obama administration had taken hard stands on something, anything, the excitement gap yawning between the Tea Party and the progressives simply would not exist; the simple fact is that the Democratic majority over in Congress is flatly afraid to lead. Anywhere. On anything. Too little time in the wilderness, apparently. I wouldn’t mind so much if the GOP leadership-in-waiting had even one good idea in its collective head. Rest assured: they do not.
Keep hammering away at that flag, Tashtego.

The main criticisms of the piece have come from Republicans, and their argument (for example, David Frum’s—still doing the hard work of keeping both sides honest) is that what looks to the left like obstruction is really only the minority party reflecting the public’s reservations about Obama’s agenda, and, beyond that, fulfilling the Senate’s constitutional mandate. (Mitch McConnell offered a rebuttal in this Post article today.) I would answer that, on health care, for example, where the public was truly divided and, by some polls, increasingly skeptical, the Senate Republicans should have tried to negotiate a less sweeping bill. Instead (as Frum himself famously pointed out), they shut down negotiations altogether, leaving Olympia Snowe as the lone party holdout, and not for long. They weren’t trying to legislate better; they were trying to prevent any legislation at all. The same with the stimulus bill and financial reform.
…
And the daily toll of legislative blockage is also staggering. The filibuster has become the everyday norm in this Senate—which has nothing to do with the constitution, moderation, the saucer that cools the coffee, or anything else written and said two hundred twenty years ago.

George Packer, defending against criticisms for his article here (via jonathan-cunningham)

This is exactly right. And, not just on health insurance reform. There is no example available in which the Democratic majority pushed legislation for which the GOP presented “Our Conservative Plan” for comparison and/or consideration. At most, they’ve run out what amount to platform planks: broad, non-actionable concepts and mission statements as opposed to actual legislation for debate.
The notable exception here is Paul Ryan. I think it speaks volumes that the rest of the GOP summarily runs and hides (or blathers about not needing to “pay” for tax cuts) whenever his three trillion dollars (or more) in painful (but specific) cuts are trotted out. If we, as a country, can ever get to actually discussing issues and engaging the general public in such a “The Ryan proposal is (A): these are the cuts and changes in it, the Obama proposal (B) saves such and so programs, but cuts this and does this other thing with tax rates” debate we will have made substantial and potentially Republic-saving progress. I am not optimistic. The GOP and the media at large will continue yelling about non-issues until the whole thing collapses around us. And then blame the Democrats as the last inch of railing disappears below the surf.

Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday, not that we’ve seen any proof of that… What? We haven’t seen any proof of that! They tell us August 4th is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that! Sorry. It is what it is.

Rush Limbaugh, birther.
Until he and all the rest of these pitiable individuals admit that Obama was born in Hawaii, Hawaii is and was then a state in these United States, and that his mother was a citizen of same, they must be hounded daily, at every public appearance large or small, about these “beliefs.” And the DNC (or an affiliate thereof) should be paying for said hounding.

Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

–and–

I refused to use the word [socialist] because I have this view that the Ninth Commandment must mean something. I remember one year Bill Clinton—the guy I was out to get [when serving on the House judiciary committee in the 1990s]—at the National Prayer Breakfast said something that was one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard from anybody at a gathering like that. He said, “The most violated commandment in Washington, DC"—everybody leaned in; do tell, Mr. President—"is, ‘Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’” I thought, “He’s right. That is the most violated commandment in Washington.” For me to go around saying that Barack Obama is a socialist is a violation of the Ninth Commandment. He is a liberal fellow. I’m conservative. We disagree…But I don’t need to call him a socialist, and I hurt the country by doing so. The country has to come together to find a solution to these challenges or else we go over the cliff.

Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty

Message Consistency

Bob Corker (R ,TN) 2009: After the president forced the firing of General Motors chief executive G. Richard Wagoner Jr., Republican Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) proclaimed Obama’s actions “truly breathtaking” and said the government ownership roles at Chrysler and GM “should send a chill through all Americans who believe in free enterprise.”
Bob Corker (R, TN) 2010: The ideas we [Republicans] laid out there were followed through. I take some pleasure out of helping make that contribution. . . . I think what we did is we forced a debate and we forced a hard look at these companies.

Barack Obama understands that if people ignore George Will and believe the planet is getting warmer rather than cooler, that this will make him more politically popular. He also knows that people might believe scientists about something like this. His problem is that while American scientists are all ready to coordinate their message in order to advance a foreign agenda, JournoList doesn’t have the reach necessary to extend this kind of partisanship to foreign scientists. Fortunately, though, foreigners hate America. And foreigners know that Obama’s death panels and general socialism will cripple the US economy. So in order to boost Obama’s fortunes, they’ve gotten 48 countries’ worth of scientists together to promote this lie. Fortunately, George Will still has the guts to call it like it is and the Post—and dozens of other papers across the country—still publish his bold work. Kudos.

Matthew Yglesias explaining it all

I think there’s only one way to fight this trend: you force the issue by recess appointing everyone on the docket at the first available opportunity. Only when the system is shown as unalterably broken will anything be done to fix it, and that moment only comes when President(s) throw up their hands and don’t even bother submitting nominees anymore.

The solution, I think, is either:

A) No confirmation process below the Secretary level (and, of course lifetime appointments to the various benches); the President gets whoever he/she wants

–or–

B) Confirmation hearings at Secretary level, everybody else into one big bolus that’s up-or-down voted and can’t be filibustered

Let’s be real, the whole nominations process is simply political theater, and that’s when it’s working. Now it’s not even theater: it’s a weapon with which the gears of the Senate are daily sanded. It guarantees bad governance and bad policy outcomes and it’s got to stop.

Is Afghanistan important? Sure. Does it matter? Sure. Is the performance of a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Khost Province more important to the long-term interests of American citizens than the performance of the Riverside County Public Schools? I don’t think so. Are American efforts in Afghanistan achieving some humanitarian purposes? Sure. Is building a T.G.I. Friday’s at Kandahar Air Base a better way of undertaking a humanitarian mission than increasing appropriations to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria? It’s almost silly to even ask the question.

Matt Yglesias, being absolutely right even leaving aside the relative dollar-for-dollar impact of the two programs directly compared.
And but so this comparison will never be made in this country as it currently stands. And won’t ever be unless somebody, somewhere starts talking about the underlying factors intelligently. It’ll take years of that conversation to get to a point where a national politician could then address this issue in a meaningful way, at least publicly.
Obama, perhaps the only politician in my lifetime that actually seems suited to undertake such a rational long-play, shows absolutely no inclination to do it. So I doubt this happens now or ever. Smiles everyone, smiles!

We could have waited all day. We could have had a media circus. But we took decisive action and it’s a good example of how to respond in this atmosphere.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, reputedly speaking favorably about the White House’s reaction to the Sherrod situation.
You know, he’s right. Instead of a one day tempest in a teapot, with whose outcome you could hound and cow like-minded media Rethuglicans indefinitely, you created a weeks- or months-long, possibly even permanent eruption of fear, uncertainty, and doubt amongst your staunchest supporters, all of whom now think the absolute worst of you: that you have no spine, never did, and never will. This makes you useless to them, by the by.
Well done.