He may be thinking of that full-page ad the Cato Institute ran a few days ago.
You know those guys, right? The Herbert Hoover acolytes?
If the dems fix this repub mess, they will be in power for a long time. The repubs are sabotaging due to political reasons. They want to have a chance to win again. They care less about the country than they do about gathering power for themselves. They sold the people out to make big money happy. It hurt the masses ,but they do not have what the repubs want. a huge concentration of wealth and power, used for their benefit. The last 8 years have revealed who the repubs work for.
Obama put 3 Republicans in his Cabinet. How many Democrats did Bush put in his?
Obama is mking a heroic effort at bipartisnship. Much more than his predecessor did. The problem is that the Congressional Republicans in both houses are slaves to their moron constituencies. They’re all terrified of challenges from their right (especially in the House), so they’re all going to reflexively oppose (and filibuster if they can) anything Obama wants because their knuckle-walking voters won’t let them compromise on anything for a second. All Supreme Court nominations are going to be brutal.
Obama is trying to be bipartisan, but the right wing voting base of the Republican party is so inflexible and hostile in its ideology that Congressional Pubs are going to have their hands tied. They’ve spent so many years pandering to Joe the Plumber retards that now the retards control the party.
And that is why they are following Limbaugh’s approach: “I want Obama to fail.”
It’s most disappointing to see even McCain, so soon after unveiling his “Country First” motto, do it too. At least the remaining Northeastern Republicans know that their own political future is aligned with the country’s, not their party’s.
I do hope Reid dispenses with the namby-pamby version of filibustering that prevented progress the last 2 years - all the minority had to do was say “We’re filibustering”, and that stopped almost literally everything. Let’s go back to insisting that filibustering involves nonstop, around-the-clock, no-potty-break speechifying, and let the national TV audiences know who’s responsible for stopping progress.
Its not about cooperation, its about cover. Political cover. Its not so important that Pubbie ideas work, or don’t. What is crucial is that there is some Pubbie input, but not too much. Enough so that if ponies rain down from Heaven, the Pubbies can insist that it was the tax cuts that saved the bacon. But not so much that the lion’s share of blame attaches.
See, thing is, every indication is that we are in for a long, ugly slog. This won’t be fixed in six months, or even a year. The Pubbies know this, but want to be in a position to blame Obama for his “failure”. And if, against all odds, Obama does draw one card to an inside straight flush, they can insist that it was their tax cuts that performed the miracle, and the miracle would have happened even sooner if they had but been permitted to apply the same wonderful medicine they’ve been applying for years.
Broken leg? Tax cut. The heartbreak of psoriasis? Tax cut. Black water fever, cholera, neuritis and neuralgia? Oh, yeah, tax cuts, for sure.
Actually, Robert Gates is an independent. So with that we have two Republicans and an independent - which isn’t terribly different from Bush, who had one Democrat and an independent.
Now, granted, Bush tallied this up over eight years while Obama has beat him (marginally) at the outset. The record he ends up with remains to be seen, obviously, but as of now it is an incremental step up from what Bush did and not a massive change. For that matter, it isn’t terribly different from Clinton, who had a Republican in his cabinet.
I’ll give him a lot of credit for this, mind - but let’s not pretend it is a sea change.
Gates is Republican.
[My Repub newsletter shows that they are doing so much to work with the dems. They are after Spector, Snow etal as traitors. Yeh, they play nice.
No he isn’t. If you don’t believe me, ask Harry Reid what he thinks.
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2008/11/09/does_bob_gates_count_as_a_republican
My two cents.
The Bush administration was very partisan. His attitude towards the Democrats when there was a Republican majority was that he didn’t need them. If they wanted to do what he said, fine. If not, he’d ignore them. He certainly wasn’t interested in receiving any advice from them.
During the Bush years we even saw the talk about RINOs; there were Republicans who were so partisan they were even fighting other Republicans. Obviously people like that aren’t going to work with the Democrats.
Now we’re in the early days (literally) of the Obama administration. It’s way too early to tell how he will work with the Republicans in the long run. There’s evidence that President Obama could go either way on partisanship issues. Heck, he probably doesn’t know himself where he’ll end up. A lot of his direction on where he goes from here will depend on how other people act.
I’d speculate that the Republicans right now are lying low. Obama is at the peak of his game right now. If they allied with him now it would be as subordinates. So they’re going to sit back and see how things go. If there are some big failures they can work on discrediting the Democrats and regaining control of Congress and the White House in future elections. If Obama stumbles but doesn’t fall they can seek an alliance on more equitable terms. If Obama and the Democrats are undeniably successful, they can jump on the bandwagon and say they were rooting for him all along.
Obama last night (you should have listened, Sam):
I don’t care what his voter registration says. He’s a conservative, a Republican apointee and former Bushista. He counts as a Republican. It’s particularly relevant to this thread since Obama carried him over from Bush. It was a bipartisan mve. There’s no question that Obama has given the Republicans far more consideration than they deserve, especially since the Bush administration was vetting people for ideology even for mid-level DOJ jobs.
Can not wait for the Atty. General nominations to come up. I want to hear Sessions (the senatorial joke) insist on an up or down vote that he used to say every nominee deserves.
Frankly I can’t believe how short people’s memories are.
Bush & Ted Kennedy coauthored the NCLB Act in 2001
Satan, right? A being who granted them magical powers over congress right up until January 20th, despite having been the Congressional minority for two years. I know, I know, “Democrats have only had control for two years!” But if they too were Satan’s minions like George Bush, they could have been causing problems before they were even elected - he caused the dotcom bubble to burst back in 2000 after all. Bunch of under achieving slackers.
Back to the OP. With Obama reaching out to Republicans, he didn’t really tell them to “remember who won the election,” did he? That was made up to make him sound uninterested in bipartianship, right? Because that doesn’t sound like someone willing to keep the lines of communication open…
Oh, I agree with you fully. The fact is had the Bush administration been a bit more bipartisan friendly the Democrats wouldn’t have the chance to figuratively through ignoring them tell them to do something that is biologically impossible.
I hope the Dems take a close look at and include the Republicans. This is going to be a tough ride and it would be a smart idea for the Dems to include the Republicans as much as possible. If anything goes wrong (which in some ways it will… We don’t live in magic POOF bill passed, economy fixed, let’s have lunch) the Republicans can’t be screaming that the Dems are messing everything up. If things do go great and we are out of this mess before it gets drastically worse then Obama would look great, he could thank the Republicans for their help and we can all live happily ever after.
It is really hard for the Democrats to be bi-partisan when the opposition is batshit insane.
Why? It’s not as if they haven’t had time to get used to it.
The dems had a very narrow house lead the last 2 years. There was a repub president and senate. So where is the dem power? They could not set the policy. They could not get the senate . They could not get enough support from repubs to do anything.
Obama was reacting to the repubs saying they should have equal say in policy now. That was a proper response. Hell the repubs say they could create twice as many jobs for half as much money. Then why didn’t they?
Why ? It wasn’t her policy. It was his. She could not be impeached for Bush’s policy. That makes no sense.