The Q&A Session with the House GOP last week was, for me, a remarkable political event. I don't know if I have ever been more proud of my president. We all benefited from this. I hope they do more of this in the future.
If I had to create the perfect president it wouldn't be far from Obama on Friday. He was smart, eloguent, took responsibility for failures, assigned responsibility when necessary, displayed patience with long questions, responded to ridiculous accusations with amazing grace, was funny and personable, gave thorough answers with great examples and never hesitated throughout the entire event.
While doing all of that he stayed on his message of Republicans and Democrats working together for the good of the country. I was extremely proud of him and learned a lot about how to talk to my wingnut acquaintances.
More below...
It was obvious that the Republicans were committed to a theme of ridiculous assertions and how they have been ignored. Obama was committed to a theme of Republicans and Democrats working together and knocking down all of the ridiculous assertions hurled at him.
Obama's opening remarks contained an incredible 8 references to Republicans and Democrats working together:
But I don’t believe that the American people want us to focus on our job security. They want us to focus on their job security.
And I think your constituents would want to know that despite the fact it doesn’t get a lot of attention, you and I have actually worked together on a number of occasions.
These are serious times, and what’s required by all of us — Democrats and Republicans — is to do what’s right for our country, even if it’s not always what’s best for our politics.
Let’s do this together, Republicans and Democrats.
Surely, that’s something that we can do together, Republicans and Democrats.
...we’re going to have to do it together, Republican and Democrat.
Let’s do the people’s business in the bright light of day, together, Republicans and Democrats.
Bipartisanship — not for its own sake but to solve problems — that’s what our constituents, the American people, need from us right now.
The Republicans had many ridiculous assertions. I think I laughed out loud at every single one of these:
[The Stimulus Bill] was a piecemeal list of projects and boutique tax cuts, all of which was — we were told — had to be passed or unemployment would go to 8 percent, as your administration said.
The spending bills that you’ve signed into law, the domestic discretionary spending has been increased by 84 percent.
In our minds, [cap and trade, an aggresive EPA and the looming prospect of higher taxes] are job-killing policies
When you stood up before the American people multiple times and said you would broadcast the health care debates on C-SPAN, you didn’t.
You said you weren’t going to allow lobbyists in the senior-most positions within your administration, and yet you did.
You said you’d go line by line through the health care debate.
You said in the House of Representatives that you were going to tackle earmarks — in fact, you didn’t want to have any earmarks in any of your bills. But it didn’t happen.
But we’re concerned also that there are some lessons learned from public option health care plans that maybe are not being heeded.
Mr. President, multiple times, from your administration, there have come statements that Republicans have no ideas and no solutions.
Over the past year, in my view, that attribute [working with the other party] hasn’t been in full bloom.
And since that budget was ignored, what were the old annual deficits under Republicans have now become the monthly deficits under Democrats.
Obama easily slammed all of these assertions with ease. Here are some of what I thought were the best lines:
[The stimulus package] was tax cuts, and they weren’t — when you say they were "boutique" tax cuts, Mike, 95 percent of working Americans got tax cuts, small businesses got tax cuts, large businesses got help in terms of their depreciation schedules. I mean, it was a pretty conventional list of tax cuts.
Sabilizing state budgets. Are there people in this room who think that was a bad idea?
Infrastructure which, as I said, a lot of you have gone to appear at ribbon-cuttings for the same projects that you voted against.
And the notion that I would somehow resist doing something that cost half as much but would produce twice as many jobs — why would I resist that? I wouldn’t. I mean, that’s my point, is that — I am not an ideologue. I’m not. It doesn’t make sense if somebody could tell me you could do this cheaper and get increased results that I wouldn’t say, great. The problem is, I couldn’t find credible economists who would back up the claims that you just made.
The fact of the matter is, is that most of the increases in this year’s budget, this past year’s budget, were not as a consequence of policies that we initiated but instead were built in as a consequence of the automatic stabilizers that kick in because of this enormous recession.
We can’t operate the coal industry in the United States as if we’re still in the 1920s or the 1930s or the 1950s. We’ve got to be thinking what does that industry look like in the next hundred years.
We didn’t have earmarks in the Recovery Act. I was confronted at the beginning of my term with an omnibus package that did have a lot of earmarks from Republicans and Democrats, and a lot of people in this chamber. And the question was whether I was going to have a big budget fight, at a time when I was still trying to figure out whether or not the financial system was melting down and we had to make a whole bunch of emergency decisions about the economy. So what I said was let’s keep them to a minimum, but I couldn’t excise them all.
In terms of lobbyists, I can stand here unequivocally and say that there has not been an administration who was tougher on making sure that lobbyists weren’t participating in the administration than any administration that’s come before us.
The component parts of this thing [the health care package] are pretty similar to what Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Tom Daschle proposed at the beginning of this debate last year.
You know, Mike, I’ve read your legislation. I mean, I take a look at this stuff — and the good ideas we take.
If there’s uniform opposition because the Republican caucus doesn’t get 100 percent or 80 percent of what you want, then it’s going to be hard to get a deal done. That’s because that’s not how democracy works.
Jeb, with all due respect, I’ve just got to take this last question as an example of how it’s very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we’re going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign.
When you say that suddenly I’ve got a monthly budget that is higher than the — a monthly deficit that’s higher than the annual deficit left by the Republicans, that’s factually just not true, and you know it’s not true.
Here are all of the complaints about being ignored. Cry me a river:
[The Republican Stimulus Bill] cost half as much as the Democratic proposal in Congress, and using your economic analyst models, it would have created twice the jobs at half the cost.
I have a proposal with my home state senator, Russ Feingold, bipartisan proposal, to create a constitutional version of the line-item veto. (Applause.) Problem is, we can’t even get a vote on the proposal.
And there were six of us, including Dr. Phil Roe, who sent you a letter and said, "We would like to take you up on the offer; we’d like to come." We never heard a letter, we never got a call. We were never involved in any of those discussions.
Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you for acknowledging that we have ideas on health care because, indeed, we do have ideas, we have plans... And if those good ideas aren’t making it to you, maybe it’s the House Democrat leadership that is an impediment instead of a conduit.
But my specific question is, what should we tell our constituents who know that Republicans have offered positive solutions to the challenges that Americans face and yet continue to hear out of the administration that we’ve offered nothing?
the summary document you received is backed up by precisely the kind of detailed legislation that Speaker Pelosi and your administration have been busy ignoring for 12 months.
House Republicans that sincerely want to come and be a part of this national conversation toward solutions, but they’ve really been stiff-armed by Speaker Pelosi.
[Last year] the Republicans proposed a budget...I believe that budget was ignored.
Obama said over and over again how he had read their ideas, even used many of them, but they just kept going on and on about being left out. What Obama did so well is that he gave examples of an idea that he had used. Then he assigned responsibility right back to them. This was, to me, his best line of the day:
So all I’m saying is, we’ve got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality.
You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to destroy America.
Obama ended the Q&A with a wrap up of his theme for the day and called all of the questioners out. This was brilliant:
That’s why I say if we’re going to frame these debates in ways that allow us to solve them, then we can’t start off by figuring out, A, who’s to blame; B, how can we make the American people afraid of the other side. And unfortunately, that’s how our politics works right now. And that’s how a lot of our discussion works. That’s how we start off — every time somebody speaks in Congress, the first thing they do, they stand up and all the talking points — I see Frank Luntz up here sitting in the front. He’s already polled it, and he said, you know, the way you’re really going to — I’ve done a focus group and the way we’re going to really box in Obama on this one or make Pelosi look bad on that one — I know, I like Frank, we’ve had conversations between Frank and I. But that’s how we operate. It’s all tactics, and it’s not solving problems.
The SOTU was great, but this was just awesome. We all criticize Obama, but noone is perfect. He may not become the greatest president ever, but he has the makings of one.