Yup. As of right now, he’s the most experienced person on the planet.
You need a better teacher. Today’s Congress is utterly unlike the Congresses of the Johnson years. The dynamics inside Congress are utterly unlike anything of the Johnson years. If you try to use that as your baseline you will get everything today wrong.
How do we know this? We can start with - run, OMGABC, run - Nate Silver. As Swing Districts Dwindle, Can a Divided House Stand?
For most of the 20th century, both parties had liberal, moderate, and conservative wings. People often had more in common with those in the other party than in far wings of their own. That made bipartisan bills possible, even the norm. Those wings no exist in the Republican Party. There are no liberals and few moderates. With the overwhelming majority of Republicans extremely conservative, they have no opposite numbers among Democrats and therefore have no influence whatsoever. Even the moderates in the Republican House cannot deal with the conservatives. Your notion of Obama finding support among these opposites is sheer fantasy and apparently blinds you to any current reality.
I think the problem now is that if you vote for my bill as part of a compromise, the extremist wing of your party will throw a fit and then put a bunch of money behind a challenger in the next primary. So compromise, and you won’t even make it to the next general election.
Continued gerrymandering has probably made this worse for the House, as it reduces the chances of a more extremist candidate resulting in the loss of the seat for the party.
So you risk losing your seat if you compromise, if you don’t the country may go to hell, but you’ll still be in power.
Yes, I think this is the #1 reason why the present Congress is dysfunctional. Many of these Republicans are more concerned with the obsessions of their constituents than the good of the country. This is a colossal shame which, due to gerrymandering, FauxNews, etc., may be difficult to change.
Even if we stipulate that Obama lacks personal charisma and experience, only a hypocrite could deny that there is a far more important reason why his leadership is not accepted: his ethnic identification
Rather than dealing with the birthers and troglodytes, a majority in the lower House could be formed if 17 GOP Members were willing to defect to a Coalition of the Sane. This, I think, should be a priority goal, with Democrats appearing nightly on Sane TV to explain GOP intransigence to the electorate.
Here’s an interesting take by a noted radio commentator on the GOP from 2004:
[QUOTE=Garrison Keillor]
The party of Lincoln and Liberty has been transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brown-shirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch President, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
[/QUOTE]
Conservative Democrats are dying off as well.
And allegations of murder, accusations of military action under false pretenses, and a four-year independent counsel investigation.
And then House Republicans impeached him. This shoots a big flaming hole in your theory, doesn’t it? Clinton was a “master” but still had a lot of the same problems, which ought to suggest this isn’t as important as you’re saying. It’s easy to romanticize the whole “Reagan and Tip O’Neil had drinks together!” thing and Obama’s outreach to Congress has been lacking at times (it hurt him on the health care bill), but there are a lot of issues at play here. I think the biggest one is the fact that the president and Congress serve different constituencies: Obama is elected by the country at large and gets rewarded for one set of goals, and Representatives and Senators can play to different bases and get rewarded by promising to do very different or totally opposite things. A large chunk of the House got elected by running very, very far to the right specifically to oppose Obama. So they’re not going to work with him, period. It does not matter if he has them over for tea and cookies (not that they would do it). And a lot of the remaining House Republican delegation is just trying to keep up with that group. So it makes little difference what kind of relationships Obama has with Congress. John Boehner has been in Congress 20 years and presumably has a lot of strong relationships with his caucus, and he still can’t get them to work with him on a lot of things.
The problem is, in order to work with someone in the Senate or the House, you have to compromise with them. The GOP definition of compromise for the last 4 years has consistently been “You give me everything I want, you get nothing you want.”
Dick Lugar was famous for being able to work with both sides, and find a compromise that could get things done. So of course he was ran out of the Senate by the GOP. Arlen Specter was famous for being in the middle, working with both sides and compromising. He was ran out of the party completely.
When the other side conspires from the very beginning to obstruct and stop everything you do, your level of experience and personal charisma aren’t going to do much to help.
Exactly. You can’t compromise if the other side isn’t willing to do so. The Republicans aren’t willing.
And you really shouldn’t expect them to when they ran and won specifically on opposing Obama on everything. Compromise is not on the table when you win by scaring your voters into believing the other guy is actively trying to destroy America.
Functionally Obama has never had the politicking skills of a Johnson or a Clinton, nor does he have certain technocratic skills like Nixon or George H.W. Bush in regard to things like foreign policy and strategy in that sphere.
Obama is, probably to the horror of both liberals and conservatives here, more of the mold of a Reagan President. Whose primary strength is basically winning elections. The big difference is Reagan had an opposition that could be worked with and by and large Obama doesn’t. Yes, Obama is not a master cloakroom politician like Clinton or Johnson, but I don’t know that much if any of our present troubles has anything to do with that. I don’t believe a Clinton or a Johnson could have gotten a lot done with the 112th Congress. By far one of the least productive in history, and certainly within our lifetimes.
The biggest things I can fault Obama for, is not standing up for himself more in his first two years when he had both houses. He probably should have pushed the Senate to nuke the filibuster at that time, for example, then proceeded to ram all of his policy positions through. Obama was not willing to do that, because again, his core ability is winning elections and I think he calculated that Obamacare was about the most he could really hope to force down the throats of his opponents and still keep his job.
Foreign policy wise, he made a good choice with Clinton as Sec State and has done a good job “fence mending” after GWB antagonized much of the world. But he’s done a poor to abysmal job in realpolitik in the international sphere, and the U.S. has frankly been outmaneuvered at several steps by our larger “not-quite-enemies” like Russia and China and hasn’t really taken advantage of potential diplomatic moves that could have thrown either off balance. For instance India is almost a pariah in that it has no clear strong friends internationally, we could really improve relations there and all of a sudden our relationship with India is a thorn in China’s foot and a counterweight against China’s desire to become hegemon of Asia. Not to mention the traditional support we’ve given Pakistan, which has made alliance with India impossible, serves no material purpose whatsoever any longer. Pakistan is as bad as our worst enemy and by maintaining any sort of fiction to the contrary we miss out on making friends with far better nations.
Maybe if a majority of Republicans didn’t think Obama was a non-American, Muslim sent here to destroy us, we’d get some stuff done. The crazy shit spewing out of the GOP side of the aisle for the last few years didn’t come about because Obama didn’t invite them for a beer, it came about because Republicans have been sowing the seeds of the nutjobs for decades and it finally came time to harvest
He calculated that his job entails compromising and working through the system, not forcing stuff down people’s throats.
He was however wrong. He can’t compromise with the Republicans because they absolutely refuse to do so. And he can’t do his job by caving in to people who want him to fail.
Did the Republicans hold a meeting in a Washington hotel the night of Nov. 22, 1963 and vow not to cooperate with LBJ on a single issue? No. But they did exactly that on Jan 20, 2009 when they pledged that their sole purpose in life was to destroy the Obama presidency.
That was where he went wrong. The new Republican Party only gets things done when it is shoved down their throat. They are still trying to starve the beast until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub. They are not worthy of a compromise that does not leave them gagging.
Note I’m a Republican and typically an opponent of Mr. Obama’s policies and much of Der Trihs stated policy positions over the years as well, and I’m in 100% full agreement here. The President was simply incorrect that his job was to compromise.
In reality the Presidents job has never been “to compromise” but to do what is best for the country. Sometimes that means compromise, but sometimes it means not compromising, Lincoln could have compromised, for example in many areas, he intentionally chose not to because he recognize said compromise was not in the long term best interests of the country.
In this case, it’s definitely attributable to a cancerous growth of absolutists in the GOP. I can materially say, as a life long member of the Republican party we have basically become more conservative on every issue since George H.W. Bush was President. I remember a time when “pro-choice” and “Republican” were not mutually exclusive, when the national party was fine being pro-life but leaving many pro-choice Republicans in the fold. Reagan and Bush I both raised taxes when appropriate in recognition of the fact taxes are not an ideological issue but a fiscal and economic one. Individuals like Grover Norquist have created this conception that on taxation there are universal moral laws and that is extremely injurious to the common good.
In the remainder of my life, about all I have to look forward to is the implosion of the party and a dangerous swing to leftism in its wake, but there is no one to blame but the party leadership that drank from the cup of the reactionaries far too many times and without realizing it gave them the keys to the castle.
I don’t remember them running around in 2008 promising they would never compromise. And in the past, every politician recognized that some compromise is necessary for the government to actually function.The GOP has been pro-life for decades, but they didn’t waste their time passing 33 anti-abortion bills in the only chamber they controlled while ignoring things that they could actually do.
But he had no way to know how serious they were before they showed their hand. If he started off ignoring them, and pushing through his agenda without input, they would have a decent argument for their intransigence now. After actually trying to compromise, people (Outside the beltway and news commentators anyway) can see who is really stonewalling and damaging the country.
And I hope you are doing something to convince other Republicans of this, and working to change what your party has become. We need 2 reasonable parties that can work together, otherwise we will break down.
No, but in 2010 the Tea Party most certainly ran on a “stopping Obama’s agenda from destroying America” platform, for them compromise is impossible.
I agree with pretty much all of this. Saint Cad makes it sound like the SDMB is full of nonsense about Republicans, and to an extent that’s true. However, nobody can deny that Mitch McConnell said his party’s primary goal was making Obama a one-termer. That was actually the second time he said it.
What’s concerning is that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner aren’t really part of the “new radicals”, both have been in office a long time and aren’t plainly associated with religious fundamentalism or the Tea Party movement. Both are basically the kind of adult supervision that used to run the party while using the Falwell gang as vote-getting support without being controlled by them. And yet, both Boehner and McConnell are more or less scared of the radical wing, acquiesce to them at almost every turn, and basically have become totally subservient to them.
Boehner especially, and I suspect many Democrats don’t know much of his life story, I’m shocked has been so willing to protect the tax rates of the super wealthy. Boehner grew up in a two bedroom house with him and his 11 siblings, his parents were so poor they did not even have a bed of their own and slept on a pull out couch. Boehner himself used to mop up the family owned bar as a child, and took seven years to finish college because he had to pay his own way by working multiple jobs (including one as a janitor) to pay for his tuition. Several of Boehner’s siblings are unemployed and most of them work middle class or lower blue collar jobs (one of his sisters is a waitress at the family bar, for example.)
I don’t see how someone like that could legitimately be so out of touch with the vibe of the country that he thinks it wise to die on the cross of tax increases for people making over $400,000 a year (which was the number Obama offered earlier on as part of a comprehensive package, now most likely unavailable as the GOP has squandered the leverage they had at that point), how could someone from a family like that, not at least understand how this is going to play in the court of public opinion?
I wager he does understand it, and is just simply afraid of the extremists in the party, he doesn’t think he can keep his Speakership without kow towing to them, but if he kow tows to them then he’s a a weak Speaker in the first place.