It is amazing to me just how quick rethugs have become enamored with the importance of governing from the center. You hear it on all the MSM networks, you hear it from all the pundits. It is the most used talking point used by the rethugs. The question I think should be asked is why should there be a rush to the center now? I think this quote sums up how Obama should deal with the rethug minority.
General Eric Shinseki:
If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less. [Chief of Staff, U. S. Army]
While we like the President-elect would love to move the country forward in a bipartisan fashion, the fact remains the biggest projects of this future administration is diametrically opposed to what most conservatives would agree to. This whole idea of bipartisanship repeated as a mantra these days flies in the face of how they governed for the last eight years.
Do we not remember how the Patriot Act was rammed down our throats, how SCHIP was vetoed; and the bane and gall of legislative chutzpah signing statements? What about torture? The shreddding of the constitution, the rethug machine has been relentless at ensuring that wealth was redistributed up, yet have the fucking nerve to threaten to fight tooth and nail to delay and obfuscate change, so things remain grid locked and this country falls farther into economic and financial shambles; all to set themselves up as the proverbial safety net. The republican hope is to grease the rails of failure nothing more; this seems to initially have taken the form of a call for bipartisan cooperation while going public with partisan rancor at every small step the new administration makes.
Minority Leader John Boehner released a one sentence statement, "This is an ironic choice for a President-elect who has promised to change Washington, make politics more civil, and govern from the center." Somebody needs to tell the Republicans that the election is over, and they lost. It is time to move on. They need to figure out a more effective strategy then to sit on the sidelines and play the role of the grumpy minority. However, it looks like they are already planning to define Obama as a president of broken promises
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The conservative editorials are chock full of these demands as if there was no election November 4th rejecting conservative/republican ideology and in doing so embracing a young charismatic african american liberal senator from Illinois.
David Brooks writes:
The administration of my dreams understands where the country is today. Its members know that, as Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center put it on "The NewsHour," "This was an election where the middle asserted itself." There was "no sign" of a "movement to the left."
Morton Kondracke:
In fact, the Democratic victory was not that great. Maybe there was a "wave," but a gain of fewer than 20 seats in the House and perhaps only five in the Senate is not a "tsunami," especially given the fact that 71 percent of voters told exit pollsters that they disapprove of Bush.
He won't even accept defeat or acknowlegde the largest and farthest reaching win in at least the last two presidential cycles which if you remember they were quick to call a mandate and de facto cause to subvert the constitution, deregulate more sectors of the economy, and double down on an unpopular war.
I'm curious what fears did these people have the last eight years?
Barack Obama was elected with a clear and overwhelmingly majority of both the popular vote and the electoral college. The fact that both houses continued to make gains given the dramatic cry of the perils of one party rule. The electorate has spoken resoundingly, and therefore expect the change it voted for. President-elect Obama should offer a concilatory hand to those moderates in the rethug party that want to get on board the engine of change, while those who seek to clamp down on the brakes of change can expect to get run over by the train and left for the american people to clean up the mess with voting them out next the election cycle.
We have waited long enough. We have been told to go slow for too long. We will accept nothing less than the change we need. We will be watching.
http://www.smh.com.au/...