Via Greg Hengler, give the man credit: Amid the cacophony of dreary, rote Democratic excuses for the election — “messaging” is and forever shall remain my favorite — he’s got something novel going with this one. On the basics of it, that somehow Republicans thwarted Obama’s burning desire to be the post-partisan pragmatist of David Brooks’s dreams, here’s a little reminder from Day Four of the Obama presidency about just how serious The One was about compromise:
The top congressional leaders from both parties gathered at the White House for a working discussion over the shape and size of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The meeting was designed to promote bipartisanship.
But Obama showed that in an ideological debate, he’s not averse to using a jab.
Challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”…
With those two words — “I won” — the Democratic president let the Republicans know that debate has been put to rest Nov. 4.
Even assuming that he desperately wanted to craft bipartisan bills with the GOP and not just grant them a few token concessions in hopes of winning RINO votes as political cover (and I don’t assume that at all), it’s not Republican recalcitrance that “forced” him to the left, it’s the fact that he had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a heavy majority in the House. Imagine that that happened to Republicans — Chris Christie, say, is elected president and ends up with 60 Republican Senate seats. And then imagine that Christie came out and announced he wanted to work on truly bipartisan legislation with the Democratic majority, notwithstanding the fact that he had the power to ram through whatever conservative agenda items that he liked. Would there be a single member of the righty base happy with that plan? If you’ve got the numbers in Congress, why not make your legislative dreams come true? That was my point yesterday in this post, that in an age of fleeting majorities your best bet is to bank whatever wins you can and then take your chances in November. In fact, despite betting the farm on ObamaCare, the lefty base still whines at O to this day for not making the plan even more liberal and sticking in a public option. Thanks to his big wins in 2008, he had no excuse not to do the progressive thing in any situation where it was politically feasible to do so. And so he has. (Except for gay marriage, of course.)
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