Victorious Democrats, when you're finished savoring the fall of Karl Rove via whiskeytown's excellent diary, please take another moment to relish how Mitch McConnell must be feeling right now - you know, the ass-hat who, repeatedly over the last four years, was up-front and downright boastful about the legislative strategy of the Republican congressional caucus he helps lead:
"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
There has not been a single day in the last 2 1/2 years I haven't thought about that quote.
It has been the lens through which I've processed all the dysfunction of Washington:
-The endless filibusters
-The most unproductive Congress in recent memory
-The reckless brinkmanship over a once-routine debt limit increase, a fiasco so large it almost plunged the entire world into a second recession and caused Moody's to downgrade US credit (they explicitly cited the dysfunction of Congress in their explanation)
-The countless appointments to the judiciary, the Federal Reserve Board (!), and of course Elizabeth Warren's appointment to Consumer Protection (that backfired spectacularly didn't it Republicans?) that were left to flounder.
-The almost maniacal refusal to compromise ever on anything, even when the President is offering you a debt deal that is FOUR to ONE spending cuts to tax increases.
-The refusal to pass the President's 2011-2012 jobs bill, even when he broke it up into bit size pieces so they could just pass the parts they like. One would guess a tax cut (payroll tax cut) would surely fall into that category, but no.
It made me look back even to the first two years of Obama's tenure with more clarity:
-How in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the entire Republican caucus gave the president all of THREE votes for a stimulus bill that was 1/3 tax cuts.
-How they gave him zero votes for a healthcare bill whose main components were first crafted in conservative think tanks; whose first backers on the national stage were Bob Dole and Howard Baker (back when they were offering it as an alternative to Clintoncare); and of course whose legislative birth came in Massachusetts, signed by their own 2012 nominee.
Yep, that quote has given me a lot of clarity the last few years. It's made it abundantly clear that Congressional Republicans don't give a shit about the country, or the millions of people in it who are hurting thanks in large part to a mess Republicans helped create. No, all they cared about was beating this black Chicago liberal who could somehow (unbelievably to them) win in places like North Carolina and Indiana and one electoral vote in Nebraska (2008). It was widely believed no Democrat could win if he wasn't a southerner, yet here's Barack Hussein Obama winning in Iowa, Nevada, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, and Colorado. He was the worst nightmare come to life, an existential threat, so they threw everything they had to bring him down, the good of the country be damned.
And they failed.
Miserably.
Please stop for a moment and savor that on this glorious day.
And as for Mr. McConnell, you have a giant slice of humble pie in front of you. I'm going to give you two pieces of advice:
1. Eat it. Don't leave a crumb you sad sack of shit.
2. When you're done, take a long, hard, soul-searching look at your legacy. You failed to bring down the president. Now you can either decide to cooperate and help him finish the job of bringing this country all the way back. Or you can flush what precious little is left of your legacy down the toilet and be remembered throughout history as one of the greatest villains in the history of American politics.
The choice is yours, Mitch. Because at this point, there's nothing you can do to change the fact that for four more years the President's name is:
Barack Hussein Obama.