Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is following up on Republican midterm election gains with an aggressive appeal to make Barack Obama a one-term president. McConnell already is calling for Republicans to oust Obama in 2012 and spreading word that the Republican agenda can’t go anywhere until Obama is gone.
Translation: The Tea Party promises to oust any Republican who cooperates with Democrats (buh-bye soon, Lindsey Graham), so the GOP is now more vested in partisan gridlock than it was in Obama’s first two years in the White House. Republicans intend to block Democrats from passing any of the president’s agenda. The newly Republican House, led by Speaker John Boehner, will strip from appropriations bills every dollar of funding for implementation of health care reform. The GOP will grind the old axes of tax cuts, small government and deregulation, with a few red-meat issues thrown in to satisfy the raving lunatics.
So why does the president humble himself as having orchestrated the “shellacking” of Democrats, when the best defense against the Republican horde is a a good offense? More than ever, this president needs a spinal transplant.
It is past time to rattle the GOP cages. The debunking of right-wing lies is long overdue. Can Obama finally start putting the Republicans in the hot seat to justify their stupid ideas and their lack of any realistic ones? Shouldn’t the president start pushing an agenda that actually does overreach, so that he has room to negotiate without bargaining away core principles? Can’t Democrats find a few hot-button issues the electorate will favor at the expense of conservatives, who routinely throw such ideas on the wall until something sticks? Where is Democratic ingenuity and populism when you need it?
Offer up to the American public a grand design of the principles and poetry Democrats should have fought with in 2009 and 2010: infrastructure spending that would make every Joe Sixpack drool, a package of job creation that would make FDR blush at his lack of imagination, deep cuts in wasteful military programs (especially where contracted in red states). And pay for it all without raising taxes. Beat the GOP at its own game by making them fight on our turf.
And stir the Democratic base by becoming the living, breathing incarnation of this passage from Ezekiel (and Pulp Fiction): “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”
Work with the Republicans, Mr. President? No sir, you’ve tried that already, and everything we both care about has taken a shellacking for your efforts. For they will not work with you but have declared political war at any cost.
Mr. President, make them pay.
Once Upon a Paradigm 
…spinal transplant.
No question.
What a stark difference between the way power was wielded in the Bush WH vs. the Obama WH. Bush had nothing and Obama had the world by the ass. Crazily enough, they achieved outcomes the opposite of what might have been expected. Go figure.
I love the idea of it, but I have two questions. One, when you say “And pay for it all without raising taxes”, how then will it be paid for? Me, I’d love to see us cut back on Defense spending to pay for it, but I’d like to hear your ideas.
Second, do you not think it would be better to wait a few months before Obama were to put this plan in action? Let him try first to work with the new Republican House and – of course – get proof that they won’t work with him…and THEN do this? I do.
It would give us time to prove that the Republican House won’t do squat diddly to help Americans.
By waiting a short while, Obama will continue to look as though he’s trying to compromise with and reach out to Republicans first. A conciliatory gesture, if you will. And then, like I said, when the Republicans turn around and give Obama the finger, we can then turn around on them and say to America, “See? We tried to work with them – they won’t budge a finger to help us help YOU! These are the Republicans you voted in to the House…now look at their inaction and tell me why you’d want to vote Republican in 2012.”
Just my two cents.
There is definitely some merit in Obama being conciliatory at first, but he can’t be conciliatory on basic principles–which, btw, he needs to forcefully articulate in relation to the best interest of average Americans.
But I do not think the Republicans will give him much room to be conciliatory. They are forcefully telling Obama he must move right. He’s caught in the classic squeeze between his base and the far right. He needs to define the center and live there, not farther right.
Good point. Ah, you still have to explain how we’ll pay for the infrastructure boom without raising taxes.
😉
Obama tried working with these guys for almost two years already and they’ve flipped him off. Just as they’re in front of podiums laying out exactly what they want to do and have made no secret of their agenda, Obama needs to tell them to take a hike. The compromises they’re demanding aren’t compromises for Obama. They’re compromises for the entire country. Obama can’t do that and retain any credibility. That’s what they want. They’re effectively calling Obama out. He has no choice except to strap on his six gun and get with it. He has to be on the tube 24/7 for the next two years in Matt Taibbi style, hammering these people in terms that everybody understands.
100% correct.
He, or he + surrogates.
Where is his James Carville?
Take the wars back off the books, a la the Bush budget process. Cut spending on the military by a trillion over the next decade, starting with stupid weapon systems of high value to Republican districts. Punish the Republicans with their own medicine: spending cuts that benefit rich white trash.
Amen. Thanks for the answer. I’d like to see us do that and also not allow the tax cuts for the top 1 or 2% — but I stress that the Defense spending should be cut first. And somehow I doubt that the House Majority will allow the tax cuts for the rich now. But, we shall see how it all plays out.
Lis, I may have misunderstood you or you, me. I do indeed think we should raise taxes on the wealthy, but if taxes have to go up for the whole country, so be it, if Republicans won’t budge.
I am talking about ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, of course.
Perfect. Hang it right around their necks. They want cuts? Let’s give ’em to them. If needed, appoint a panel of experts such as Grayson, Carville, and maybe Colin Powell to sign-off on ex-billion in Administration-proposed defense cuts.
If they’re serious, BTW, they’ll cut NASA and hopefully close it, too. But they won’t, an I’ll stick with the fallback of stripping the Republican districts of needless defense spending since that’s what the Founders wanted.
There is one other great big elephant in the middle of the room that Obama could make hay with.
The single biggest element contributing to our economic engine is the design and manufacture of weapons of war. Obama could throw a big wrench in the works if he forcefully pointed this out and made the obvious historic comparisons. It’d make a very big wave and make reps quake in their boots if the precise details of how this typically plays out were to be made clear to the American people.
How many Americans have knowledge of the fact that we produce more weapons, by a huge margin, than the entire rest of the world combined? Or that their tax dollars are the major source of funding for this obscene imbalance of the design and manufacture of these weapons. There is undeniable historic precedent that informs us where this leads. Were Americans to have a grasp of this ugly little detail of our economy they might no be so happy to understand all their jobs making stuff we want have been replaced by jobs making stuff we never want. The only person who can inform America of this is the president.
This country is rigging the decks for war but nobody in this country seems to be noticing. Rest assured the rest of the world is.