It may be he is just biding his time until the next election is over. Then he may do more of what we expected .
I expect a war if he gets to appoint another Supreme Court judge. The rightys know how much power that so called neutral establishment has provided them. They wont give it up without a fight.
To get his ratings higher, all he has to do is prosecute a few bankers and financial pros that have been fleecing us for so long. The people have been waiting for that.
The problem is that he left an opening for other people to act like 5th graders and make it work to their advantage.
Seeking for a bipartisan consensus was a good idea. But Obama should have had a back-up plan in case it didn’t work. Obama should have been able to tell the Republicans “Look, I’m willing to work with you guys. But if you aren’t willing to work with me, I’ll do it without you.”
I see no reason to think he would, or at this point that he could do much if he wanted to; he let all his political capital dribble away, sat on his hands until the Democrats lost their numerical advantage. I expect that he’ll keep doing what he has been doing; toadying to the Right, grovelling before them while they spit on him.
I don’t know. Obama has put himself into a bad position.
He originally wanted to work with Republicans by choice. But now that they’ve gained more power since the 2010 election, it’s no longer a matter of choice - Obama has to work with the Republicans.
And the Republicans are unlikely to work with him. They’re seeing they gained by refusing to work with him. Why should they abandon a strategy that’s working for them? All they have to do is continue obstructing Obama until 2012 and they’ll have a good shot of being back on top.
So Obama has to switch to confrontation also. He has to make it a choice between two sides and hope that the voters choose his side in 2012. He has to hope that he gets back to where he was in 2008 and gets a second chance.
And that’s going to be tough. The Republicans are riding on success right now. They’re gaining while Obama and the Democrats are trying to recover lost ground. And the Republicans are still the party out of power which means they lose less from a stand-off.
The left should be happy with someone who manages to work with their only allies in Congress to actually get things done. As mentioned, Obama has had to compromise with his own feckless party on every major issue before he could even start to work with Republicans - which he has to do as well, since we don’'t actually elect a King.
This talking point that Obama “doesn’t even try” seems to be popular among that group of progressive pundits who’ve never actually had to get anything done via a political process.
Perhaps, but that “someone” would be somebody besides Obama, who has accomplished little or nothing for the Left, and has done quite a bit for the Right.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear because I didn’t quote the section I was responding to, but I was actually only referring to the part about not retaliating against Lieberman.
Again, he’s not the king. That’s Nanci Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s jobs. I don’t understand why people think the president is supposed to manage Congress. The leaders in the two chambers are the ones that cut the deals and get the legislation through,
If you don’t like the kind of legislation coming out of Congress, then try to elect Congresscritters who are more left leaning. Good luck with that.
Sorry, the President doesn’t get to decide Senate rules. Ever hear of something called “separation of powers?”
Another colossally ridiculous idea. You expect the White House to reach into a separate branch of government to punish political allies? As a general principle, do you want any president to have the ability to dictate how Congress organizes itself? What a horrible idea. As many problems as there may be in current day politics, the idea of giving a president the latitude to decide who should chair committees in Congress is just a terrible, insipid, dangerous, and unconstitutional idea.
You make me laugh at how ironic this statement is. Was the GOP successful in getting Specter to tow the party line? No. When they started pressuring him more on health care reform in 2009, do you even recall what Specter did?
I’m smoking a pretty good Guatemalan cigar right now and I have a mustache although I don’t wax it. I’m one of the peasantry and I feel oppressed by the Republicans. Is there any hope for me?
Looking at the current crop of Republican candidates, I feel a lot of hope that Obama will win a second term and I can’t help but believe that some of the people who voted Republican in the last election regret their decisions. Assuming that Obama does win, my major hope is that he protects Social Security; I would also like to see a change in our health care system.
I’m speaking as one who is dependent on Social Security and who cannot afford medical care.
Perhaps Obama is so dumb that he thinks when conservatives like yourself ‘like’ him he may think it is because of how charming he is, not because he unilaterally disarms and is inept in the face of conservative opposition.
FWIW, I ‘like’ conservative politicans who let me walk all over them and who liberal politicians can run roughshod all over too.
The repub position has changed. They had complete control over the party before. It would act and vote as the leadership told them to. Now the tea baggers are independent from the party control.
The Dems have never been monolithic. they have always been a loose organization with various viewpoints expressed. The leadership has fought long and hard to try and keep them together. Even as bad a turncoat as Lieberman turned out to be, the party felt it still needed him to get the legislation through.
The Repubs that have just came in both in congress and the governorships, have pushed for some shocking legislation. There is some blowback. Whether it is enough to unseat the craziest of the Repubs remain to be seen, but it could happen.
I tend to give too much credit to the voters. I keep thinking they will begin to vote in their own interests. I have been wrong about that for quite a while. Maybe the next time it will happen.
He’d be re-elected. The Republican position throughout his Administration has been that he’s an ultra-liberal Marxist sympathizer who was born in Kenya and is secretly a Muslim, and so on.
What the hell are they going to say if he moves left? “Uh… he’s still a socialist.”
ETA: that is not necessarily to say that I think he should, just that it’s not going to have any effect on how the other side sees him.
It will affect how much moderate Republicans or conservative Democrats are willing to continue to work with him and attempt to compromise enough so that anything gets done at all. He certainly could ‘move left’, and the right wing propaganda machine will make hay out of it, tear their hair and scream and shout (much like I’m seeing the left wing propaganda machine doing, ironically enough), but that’s just noise. When it comes down to actually DOING stuff, if Obama wants to get anything done at all he has to actually work and play in the real world…a real world where you can’t just ‘move left’ with the happy expectation that you will actually get your agenda through despite opposition from not only the opposing party but from your own party as well…not to mention how the average American is going to actually view it (unless of course one assumes the average American is left leaning and in lock step with the various aspects of the left wing agenda).
Is the average American more like John Mace (‘conservative’) or more like Der Trihs? Is s/he more like Ravenman or more like Wesley Clark? That’s the calculation you (as a politician like Obama) would have to make, to try and gauge how best to represent the will of the American people…not to try and push through a liberal/conservative/Democratic/Republican agenda. That’s his JOB…not to make left or right wingers happy, but to try and make the greatest number US citizens happy and thinking that they are getting represented properly.
-XT
OK, exactly what is insane about my post? Can I have some details please, actual factual stuff. I bet you can’t actually come up with anything substantial.
“Putting all the bankers on trial” and saying that failure to do so is an “absolute guarantee” of another financial crisis isn’t exactly a carefully considered, factually supportable position. I will not call another poster insane, but you’ve got to admit that those are some fringe views you’ve got there.
Here’s a fringe view by a guy called Barry Ritholtz. Barry is an insane fund manager who manages a couple of billion dollars and writes the world’s first or second most popular financial blog. A couple of days ago he made all the same points I did and said that another financial crisis is “inevitable.” His views aren’t exactly fringe in the financial community either. You have a bunch of people who insist no regulation is necessary and any regulation will cause problems (these were the same guys who cheerled previous deregulation and predicted vast economic/market growth because of it.) And you have a bnunch of people like Barry who have looked at the facts of the situation, that not one person has gone on trial for what happened, that the financial reform bill was a Swiss cheese of loopholes and hasn’t affected Wall Street profitability, leverage etc., and concluded that it’s only a matter of time before everything blows up again. If you do a bit of reading you’ll actually find endless similar views.
DEIT: here’s the link:
FWIW, I’m pretty sure that putting all bankers on trial would result in a financial crisis. So, I may be with you on that.
Besides, what are the odds that you can find someone in the financial industry predicting disaster? Has that guy successfully predicted 12 of the last one financial crises?
Elizabeth Warren is setting up an agency to protect consumers. That concept pisses off bankers so much they have exerted huge pressure on the admin to get rid of her. It appears they have been successful. She will set up the agency and leave because the Repubs would never approve her as permanent head.
Any effort to inform or help the consumers must be defeated by the Republicans. We know who they work for.
I want Obama to publicly fight for her. I want him to force the Repubs to show their colors.
It will not happen.
On the other hand, what could be more socialist than mass arrests and show trials? Perhaps Obama could talk a bit about liquidating the [del]kulaks[/del] bankers “as a class” to round things out.
Regards,
Shodan
You mean,“not at all”? Compromise doesn’t work when one side demands absolute compliance with their dogma, or when they aren’t interested in compromise under any circumstances.
Yet oddly enough Republican Presidents can get all sorts of right wing laws passed. It’s only the Left and the Democrats that somehow magically have to “compromise” to the point of futility.
Nonsense. As we saw with health care “reform”, Congress and Obama are further to the Right than the American public. And as we saw with the last election, the Democrats are willing to flee so far to the right that they lose elections rather than stand up in any way to the Almighty Republicans. This has little or nothing to do with what the American public wants. Sucking up to the Right is more important than anything else to them, including their own careers much less what the people who voted for them want. This has to do with what the right wing, and only the right wing wants.