In a Friday post, Esquire blogger Charles Pierce claimed that the main goal of congressional Republicans is “to undo everything [Barack Obama has] accomplish[ed] until [his] presidency…vanishes from history as a kind of failed experiment.”
Pierce argued that anti-Obamacare lawsuits, as well as a provision in the so-called cromnibus that would weaken regulation of derivatives, are examples of how “the slow, steady and inexorable campaign to render this president a non-person in the long sweep of history continues apace.”
Obama, of course, supports the cromnibus, but Pierce lauded perhaps its most prominent opponent, Elizabeth Warren, for “her native ability to explain complicated things simply, and with obvious credibility.”
From Pierce’s post (emphasis added):
[T]hanks to some impressive arm-twisting by a Democratic administration hell-bent on helping out a Republican speaker, the Unleash The Hounds derivatives provision sailed through. And the slow, steady and inexorable campaign to render this president a non-person in the long sweep of history continues apace.
They will be doing some of it in order to curry favor with the oligarchs. They will be doing some of it just because they're mean. But the derivatives scam is the first step to unravelling financial reform, just as surely as the Halbig case is the last chance to unravel heath care reform. The basic goal of the political opposition in Congress…and the stated goal of the newer, more radical Congress that will be assembling in January, will be to undo everything [Obama] did accomplish until [his] presidency…vanishes from history as a kind of failed experiment. It is important to these people that the country not remember that it elected (twice) an African American Democratic president. It is important to people who have spent 40 years constructing their own private American history that their own private American history not include him.
I give Senator Professor Warren and the rest of them enormous credit for trying to remind the president, and the country, of this obvious fact…The problem that [Warren] gives to the usual suspects in Washington is her native ability to explain complicated things simply, and with obvious credibility. This presents a particular difficulty for the people who have rigged the system with euphemism and Luntzian doublespeak. She refutes, clearly and directly, the notion within the elite political press that tactics should be judged on their effectiveness rather than on their effects. And she knows it, too.
Scott Brown learned this to his increasing dismay. What the Senator Professor doesn't know, she learns very, very quickly.
