No, mostly unnamed third-hand reports always go public.
Wrong again – it wasn’t Reid, it was someone on his staff.
HAHAHAHA! Thanks for that, Mr. Pot.
And you ignore all the rest. Like the many, many stories about the success of the ACA.
I’d like to know the legitimate reasons, and the legitimate criticism – both of which exist. Obama is very far from perfect. But you’re just terrible at criticizing him. Very, very, very bad. Awful, awful stuff.
It is a phase that pretty much every President goes through, so it’s not terribly surprising.
I don’t dismiss it, and the article may be fine. You just mischaracterize it, as you do most things. You’re incapable of reading an article without being overwhelmed by your bias against the President.
All I said about the Klein piece was that it accepts the authenticity of the NY Times article, and that the upshot of that article is that it doesn’t matter. According to Klein.
Personally, I think Klein’s wrong. Partly, anyway. Political self-interest means that Democrats want Obama to succeed and so won’t torpedo his agenda the way the Democratic Party would have in the days when their control over Congress was assured. So there’s an interest in being united even if they don’t personally like the President. But Klein assumes this is just the “new normal” and I don’t think it is at all. It’s partly BECAUSE of his shitty diplomatic skills that he has to rely on Congressmen focusing on their own interests rather than loyalty to him. He’s lucky the health care bill was passed relatively early. There’s no way Democratic Senators would have laid down their careers for him today. As a matter of fact, by Klein’s own logic, the health care bill should have never passed at all. It is actually one piece of legislation that got through because Obama hadn’t ruined his relationship with Congressional Democrats yet.
The article says pretty clearly that Ezra Klein hears from a lot of Democrats about the President’s poor relationship with Congress. By now, that fact should no longer be in dispute.
So you’ve latched onto this mundane, very predictable bit of political minutiae as a way to continue your ridiculously biased and fantasy-based one-man crusade to portray Obama in a bad light.
By the way, reporters hear stuff like this from congressmen about every President, even from their own party. Congressmen will always be unhappy. They won’t speak up about it when the President’s popularity is high, but when his popularity is mediocre, they’ll feel more free. This was true for Bush, Clinton, and the first Bush. And probably for Reagan and Carter, though I was very young and don’t have any examples off the top of my head.
That salts it- no way am I voting for Obama in 2016. I agree that Obama has not been the maestro with Congress that LBJ was. But with Republicans in lock step opposition, it hardly matters.
Would Republicans be in lockstep opposition if Obama was better at diplomacy? Personally, I think it’s childish to think that Republican are behaving this way because they just don’t like him for reasons having nothing to do with how he’s handled them.
But like I said before, the only way to prove you guys wrong is for Hillary Clinton to win in 2016 and have a better working relationship with Republicans.
I’m sure they don’t like how he’s handled them, but they decided from the beginning how they would behave, and they’ve stuck to it. From the very beginning, immediately after the 2008 election, the Republican leadership decided that their top priority was to thwart Obama, whatever he wanted.
So it hasn’t mattered what Obama has done – the Republicans made the decision early to oppose him at every turn.
So your argument is that the Democrats are just behaving the way Democrats always do, that there’s nothing historically notable about their dissatisfaction with the President. But on the other hand, the Republicans are acting in historically unprecedented ways to obstruct.
What I see is the same thing we saw with Bill Clinton, only Bill Clinton established a positive relationship with Newt Gingrich. Boehner is much less of a hardass than Newt, yet he doesn’t trust the President as a negotiator.
The Republicans met on Inauguration night 2009 and decided they would oppose every single thing Obama tried to do. Even LBJ couldn’t have swam against that current.
Pretty much. Obama is a pretty standard Democrat. Pretty close to Gore/Clinton/Dukakis/Carter on the issues. His style is a bit different, but not his substance.
The Republicans these days are not ‘standard Republicans’, in either style nor substance. Bob Dole wouldn’t be welcome in this party, nor would Bush I, McCain of 2000, Reagan (the real Reagan, not the fantasy-Reagan they worship), or Nixon.
I don’t buy that Boehner doesn’t trust the President – Boehner is just too weak (and cowardly) to buck his caucus, and goes along with their “oppose Obama every time we can” mindset – a mindset that was set at the very beginning of Obama’s 1st term.
All the more important to preserve your Congressional majorities then, no? Instead, Obama asked them to vote for unpopular shit and then tried to console them by saying, “But you’ve got me!” on the campaign trail.
No wonder they don’t think much of him. A lot of Democrats fell on their swords for him and he just hasn’t been there for them. Again, if the health are bill came up today, it couldn’t pass even if Democrats still had the HOuse and 60 votes in the Senate. I don’t think a single Democrat would take a bullet for him anymore.
I’ll third this and offer as a cite my memory (such as it is) of the early part of Obama’s first term. I recall very well thinking that Obama was being too accommodating and was compromising too much. At least Obama eventually quit bending over backwards for the Republicans once he realized they just wanted him to bend over period.
Obama was not compromising, he was giving the appearance of compromising. We saw how transparent this was when the President and Republicans came to a debt ceiling agreement and then Obama turned “yes” into “no” by demanding more revenue increases after they had come to an agreement.
Obama doesn’t want to get to “yes”, unless “yes” is give Democrats 90% of what they want.
They had a grand bargain, and Obama scuttled it by demanding another $400 billion at the last second. He never wanted a grand bargain. He just wanted to be seen as trying to compromise.
Meanwhile, Bob Woodward explains how relationships do matter and were extremely important during the debt ceiling negotiations: