Chris Matthews Show Panel Predicts GOP House Will Make Obama 'Look Good'
On the syndicated Chris Matthews Show, over the weekend, CNN's Gloria Borger predicted that incoming House Republicans will overreach and make Barack Obama "look good" in comparison and allow the President to become the "grown-up." During a segment in which host Chris Matthews asked his panel to predict how Obama will deal with the GOP, New York magazine's John Heilemann suggested Republicans would "work with him" on issues like deficit reduction and education, which prompted Matthews to ask Borger if this meant Republicans could no longer call him a "socialist."
CHRIS MATTHEWS: So, you're shaking your head. Is one of the advantages of cutting deals with Republicans, they can't call you a socialist anymore?
GLORIA BORGER, CNN: Right! They can't call you a socialist anymore. Although there will be some Republicans, in the new Congress, who are not gonna like the deals that the other Republicans cut. So he's still gonna have those problems. But they will make him look good, by the way. And he will be able to triangulate and to look like the grown-up which is-
MATTHEWS: Oh my favorite word!
BORGER: -what people want.
A little bit later on in the segment the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan insisted a GOP House will allow Obama to become the "President he wants to be" because, as he insisted, "he's not a big spending liberal, never was!"
The following exchange was aired on the January 2 edition of The Chris Matthews Show:
CHRIS MATTHEWS: What's his biggest challenge, though? Holding the center as he began to do, at the end of last year, with his deal or keep the left, which is a bit unhappy with him lately?
JOHN HEILEMANN, NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Well that's the easiest question that you've asked me in a long time, Chris.
MATTHEWS: Thank you.
HEILEMANN: I mean he needs, he needs to, he, he already - forget the, the Democratic- congressional Democrats are mad at him for various reasons. Who cares about those people? He has a huge, he has huge support among the actual members of his base, African-American voters, Latino voters, self-described liberals. Actual people in the country, they like the President, he's got a very high approval rating with them. The base is not his problem. His problem is winning back all those independent voters who shifted to the Republicans over in the 2010 elections, and he can do that. The unemployment rate is obviously important over the course of the first year, of this next year. But he's got a bunch of big agenda items that are perfectly tailored to getting back independents. He wants to deficit reduction, he wants to do education, he wants to do trade. He wants to do tax reform. Those are all things can get Republicans to work with him on and in the process do himself a world of good politically and get himself well set up for the election.
MATTHEWS: So, you're shaking your head. Is one of the advantages of cutting deals with Republicans, they can't call you a socialist anymore?
GLORIA BORGER, CNN: Right! They can't call you a socialist anymore. Although there will be some Republicans, in the new Congress, who are not gonna like the deals that the other Republicans cut. So he's still gonna have those problems. But they will make him look good, by the way. And he will be able to triangulate and to look like the grown-up which is-
MATTHEWS: Oh my favorite word!
BORGER: -what people want.
...
MATTHEWS: Andrew you're quiet. Left or center? Where's the left? Where's the action for him?
His third year is the critical year. We've seen it with Reagan, we've seen it with Carter. Carter didn't have a good third year. He couldn't put it together. What adjustments does he have to make to hold the center?
ANDREW SULLIVAN, THE ATLANTIC: I think he has to remain the President that he has always been. Unfortunately the left kept projecting stuff on to him that he wasn't and the right projected stuff on him that he wasn't. The great thing about having a Republican House is that you see Obama's greatest strength, which has always been from Harvard Law Review on, talking reasonably with conservatives. He's actually temperamentally, he likes that. He's actually really good at that. And he exudes reason in that. And this, the tax deal that he cut at the end of last year was, was the new Obama. And he was the old Obama but the new one. Because finally he was liberated, it seemed to me, in being the President he wants to be. Remember he didn't really want the stimulus package. He didn't expect, when he ran for president, he'd have the worst depression in the world. He had to spend that money. The healthcare reform, in that context, [he] could be skewed as a big spending liberal. But he's not a big spending liberal, never was! And he wants tax reform and debt for reasons he's always said. Now the key thing is that he owns it. The State of the Union will be his moment.
BORGER: Oh huge!
SULLIVAN: It'll be his moment. If he puts debt first and tax reform second, simplify your taxes and reduce the debt, and has Republican support he defuses all the demonization of him from the right and he knocks out the left.
—Geoffrey Dickens is the Senior News Analyst at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here
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Comments
Sorry, but
Submitted by Iron Tigers Vet on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 1:35pm.
no chance in anything making Obummer look like a "grown up".
Maturity politically or mentally just isn't there.
OK, Sullivan,
Submitted by UpNorth on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 1:36pm.
put down the crack pipe and step back... Good grief, the guy is delusional, on a scale only matched by Matthews himself. Not a "big spending liberal", my a$$.
As for "talking reasonably with conservatives", Sullivan seems to have forgotten "I won", and "republicans can ride in the back" and, one of the really golden quotes from the "reasonable" TOTUS, "punish our enemies", while speaking of American citizens. Yeah, he's about as reasonable as one of Fidel's firing squads.
The only
Submitted by NDanielson on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 1:39pm.
thing that could make 0bama look good is an orange jumpsuit or stripes. I hope Mathews is right on this one.
The State of the Union...
Submitted by KyWriter on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 1:40pm.
...will be Obama's moment? He certainly had one last year, shredding a couple hundred years of decorum by dissing the Supreme Court in its face. Since he has Sotomayor and Kagan now on the bench, he might be a bit more circumspect, especially since Obamacare is headed there and he would like to see it survive. Of course, according to these clowns, it was "projected" on him by the left and he is a centrist, so if it goes down in flames it won't be that big a deal. I just want to know what these libtards are smoking.
This woman...
Submitted by Ogundipe S.O. on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 1:44pm.
... Gloria Borger, is one of the dumbest nominal analyst parading themselves as 'experts', she appears regularly on CNN Int'l and has never for once given any insightful analysis. She doesn't even know if Fiji is a noun. There's nothing the Government gives the citizens that has not already being taken from the citizenry.I'm thinking
Submitted by hbnolikeee on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 1:46pm.
that BO could blow his nose in his hand while giving a speech and these lemmings would stand in line to lick it up like nectar.
Prissy's panel has a point, but not for the reasons they think
Submitted by Dave. on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 2:25pm.
The House repubs will be wading out into a veritable mine field two days from now. They, and particularly the conservatives among them, are going to have to explain very vocally, and very often, exactly what it is they are doing, and why they are doing it in order to blunt much of what the Ministry of Statist Misinformation is going to be throwing at them - and that will be everything including the kitchen sink.
Don't forget, we who are "plugged in" to what is really going on in America today are in the extreme minority, as most of the dumbMasses out there have their attention turned elsewhere, and even when they are paying attention, they are still mostly getting their "news" from the MSM.
And then there are the moochers, leeches and ticks, whose only real concern is that their government checks keep coming, and to Hell with the rest of America. These people make up the largest percentage of the U.S. population they ever have, and we are stupid enough to continue to allow them to vote in national elections.
And never, ever underestimate the short-term memory of the average American sheep.
Should the repubs blow this, even a little bit, and the dems re-take the House and Obama gets reelected in 2012, then America, as we know it, will go riding off into the sunset once-and-for-all.
-Dave
Vote for the American in November
This false Obama the ficscal
Submitted by eaglewingz08 on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 3:19pm.
This false Obama the ficscal conservative meme has been predicted on the rightwing blogs for the past year. However Obama has always been a socialist sheep in moderate verbiage clothing. His whole life is dedicated toward slavery and biggest government. He has no other working framework to actually deal with cutting budgets.
Obama is still a socialist,
Submitted by Barack_must_go..... on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 4:27pm.
Obama is still a socialist, as well as a rat who knawed his own leg off for political expediency, not in the spirit of bipartisanship by any stretch of the imagination.
So far Obama has spent more of America's money ( actually most of it borrowed ) than the first 40 or so presidents combined.
His predecessor George W. Bush was far & away the biggest spender of all time, causing the tidal wave that swept Republicans from office in 2008.
Now only two years into his presidency, Obama has spend more than two times what Bush did in eight years, with nothing to show for it.
Yet Obama sycophants and or America haters like Sullivan still state ( with a straight face ), Obama is not now, nor has he ever been a tax & spend liberal, even with all the irrefutable proof to the contrary.
All that really matters is the American people don't believe these blatent lies, no matter how often they repeat them......or how stupid Bill Maher tells them they are.
Barack_Must_Go.....
so now they gotta put lipstick
Submitted by donabernathy on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 5:18pm.
on that mashed-up sack of meat.
roflmao
if obama
Submitted by ron on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 6:04pm.
isn't a big spending liberal i hope i never see one