Yep, this is about it. One of the things that attracts some of us to Hillary Clinton is that we feel she’ll dispense with this whole, I’m going to try to compromise from the start BS and actually just push stuff through. Get later Obama from the beginning, basically.
And how would she push stuff through a Republican Congress? Please. She has far less in the way of ideological lines she won’t cross than Obama. She’ll do whatever is best for Hillary Clinton, and looking like a smarter President than her predecessor by getting more things done helps her on two levels: 1) It helps get her reelected in 2020, and 2) it makes it obvious that she should have been elected in 2008 in the first place rather than the neophyte.
How is Obama getting things done now? How did Bill Clinton? Executive actions and relying on shaming the opponents for their votes (aka, using the bully pulpit) can work really well if you do it right. Bill Clinton was a master of it.
Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress got a ton done: NAFTA(not really the GOP Congress, but mostly GOP votes), welfare reform, repeal of Glass-Steagall, GATT, budget cuts, tax cuts, SCHIP, deregulation…
NAFTA - meh
welfare reform - gee, thanks
repeal of Glass-Steagal - your mother must be proud
**GATT **- oh boy e_e
budget cuts - many of which were penny-wise & pound-foolish, starting with the cap on medical residents and going on to cutting research offices and internal accountability departments
tax cuts - Clinton? what, when?
SCHIP - ah, yes, the consolation prize for totally screwing up comprehensive health insurance reform
deregulation - yes, of course, that ended well [That was sarcasm in case you couldn’t tell.]
Yeah, Ted Cruz is looking good by comparison.
The issue was whether they could work together. They did, very well. When you have a Republican Congress, those are the kinds of bills you can get passed. Now if Obama doesn’t want those kinds of bills, that’s absolutely fine. But he can’t claim, nor can his supporters claim, that he’s trying to work with the Republicans. “I want Democratic legislation” is not an attempt at compromise. But that’s pretty much all he’s asked for since Republicans took over. “Pass the bills I want”.
But Clinton’s Republicans are not Obama’s. The most conservative Congressional Republicans of 25 years ago would be among the most liberal ones today. In previous times no matter what public squabbles rival parties had they were always able to eke out a backroom deal that gave both sides something to show the folks back home. The beginning of the end was Gingrich and the Contract with America. You may recall that Clinton and the Republican Congress got progressively less done, what with the budget brinksmanship and the Whitewater investigation and subsequent impeachment (and, incidentally, Congressional Republicans accusing Clinton of trying to distract the country with his pursuit of Osama bin Laden instead of focusing on the key priority of whether or not he got a hummer). So it wasn’t exactly all sweetness and light between Clinton and his Congress.
Since you mentioned how Obama’s approach changed with the GOP takeover of Congress it’s also worth noting that with the 2010 wave of Tea Party members joining we got the Freedom Caucus, a group of True Believers whose mantra was “No Compromise Ever”, a view which also applied to their own party, which meant that the few reasonable people left in the party couldn’t work with Obama even if they were so inclined. As a result we got endless threats of shutdowns (or indeed actual shutdowns), 50+ attempts to repeal ACA, and a lot of irrational but fervently-held idiocy passing for legislative discourse.
Obama tried working with the Republicans. They rebuffed him repeatedly, they shouted “You lie!” at him, and they spread endless false accusations of scandal and disaster. So eventually he stopped working with them. You blame him for not continuing to beat his head against a brick wall instead of blaming the people who built the wall in the first place. And now you’re complaining that he’s decided to use a wrecking ball instead in order to make some progress. That says more about you than about Obama.
At what point did Obama do anything other than say, “Pass this bill.”?
On which planet?
Awww, did their poor fee-fees get hurt because the President actually tried to do what he thought they wanted?
Goddamn, if that’s the level of maturity in the Senate GOP caucus, Lord save us all.
The hell there weren’t! $100B got chopped off the stimulus just to make Susan Collins happy, since it looked like we needed her vote.