Liberals still debate whether President Obama should have focused on health care or the broader economy during his first year or so in office, but Esquire political blogger Charles Pierce argued in a Monday post that however Obama prioritized those matters, he also should have “constantly” reminded Americans that congressional Republicans were guilty of “lushly funded vandalism.”
Pierce claimed that longstanding GOP obstructionism has made the rest of Obama’s presidency close to irrelevant, and that, in a throwback to the Clinton years, “the Republican party in Congress has determined that no Democratic president will be able to govern as a Democratic president, no matter how many votes he gets, how many times he gets elected, or how dire the state of the country is.”
From Pierce’s post (emphasis added):
[T]he Republican plan to cripple yet another Democratic presidency has achieved its goal. Nothing much is going to get accomplished in the next two years…because, as a minority or as a majority, the Republican party in Congress has determined that no Democratic president will be able to govern as a Democratic president, no matter how many votes he gets, how many times he gets elected, or how dire the state of the country is…
I fault the president for only one thing in this regard - his painful delay in realizing the true nature of what he was up against. It should have been his issue from the first day in office. Americans understand the concept of poor losers. They understand the concept of lushly funded vandalism. They just have to be reminded, constantly, of the source of that vandalism, or else the (occasionally laudable) distrust of government curdles into cynicism that enables the kind of both-siderism that seems now to be the resting pulse of our politics. The system has been sabotaged. Both sides are not equally guilty. Both sides have not done the same things.
The Democratic opposition to George W. Bush didn't truly begin until after he'd been re-elected, and his war had gone sour, and he made a clumsy attempt to privatize Social Security. Before that, Democrats had helped him get his lunatic tax-cut passed - Hi there, John Breaux! - and, later, they helped him get his lunatic war started. Hell, they even treated the dubious way that C-Plus Augustus had come into office as more legitimate than the Republicans have treated either of the elections of Barack Obama. Al Gore even presided over the certification of his own questionable demise. It is unimaginable that Dick Cheney, or Mitch McConnell, or any of the wild children of the House majority, would have done the same thing in the same circumstances...
All things considered, I wish the president had announced his executive actions on [immigration reform this past] Sunday. I wish he had put the fanciful conservative conceit that executive actions are dictatorial right in the face of the people who traffic in it. I wish he'd put on a uniform and declared his actions from a balcony. What's the point of being called a tyrant if the rest of us don't get the theater of it to enjoy?
