Yes, it worked out so well the last time.
The premise of
this Roll Call article is that President Obama is being "aloof" in his dealings with Republicans, which is mean and and is hurting chances to make legislative progress. No,
really:
President Barack Obama's relationships with Congressional Republicans have withered in recent months, casting doubt on his ability to influence Congress during the election season next year as well as his ability to push an aggressive agenda if he wins a second term.
Though Republicans are in a good position to hold the levers of power in both chambers come 2013, several rank-and-file GOP Senators told Roll Call last week that Obama hasn't called them at all this year — and several said his standoffish relations have hurt his agenda in a chamber that is pivotal to any White House legislative successes.
Yes, yes. Obama is being mean, and he didn't invite them to come over to play Nintendo or play ball in his super cool yard. The article is filled with Republican moderates whining that they haven't had much contact with Obama of late, and saying that Obama should really be working with them more, and a few grumblings from Boehner and McConnell's offices about how he hasn't been calling them as much lately. Because heaven knows that worked out great previously. This year has just been full of productive conversations between Obama, Boehner, McConnell, Cantor and the like. You know, aside from the parts where the Republicans kept walking out of those conversations.
Here's what stumps me, however. What have the so-called Republican moderates actually delivered to Obama, in the past? Precious little. What might the Republican moderates deliver to Obama, if he spent his time constantly coddling them, wooing them, or arguing with them? Apparently, from recent history, precious little again.
Right now the House is governed by a set of ideologues for whom compromise is all-but-impossible. I don't mean they're being led that way: I mean the makeup of their current caucus is such that any negotiated compromise that a normal, nonpartisan observer might consider reasonable is dead in the water. They don't have the votes for it, regardless of what their own leadership might want or not want. The Senate, on the other hand, is held hostage to the 60-vote threshold; if a senator so much as wants to go eat a sandwich, DeMint or someone else is going to make damn sure it doesn't happen without maximum extracted pain and delays.
In that environment, it's not clear what Obama could gain even if he did spend large blocks of time wooing individual senators. What's the upside? Yes, people like Scott Brown (he counts as a moderate now?) or Olympia Snowe would like to have some quality time with Obama, but is there anything even on the calendar that they can come to agreement on—and can make a difference on, even if they did? Sure doesn't seem so. And if I'm Obama, the one lesson I would have learned from the debt ceiling debacle, as well as every other single debacle in the months prior and since, is that spending days talking to GOP leadership is worth a fat lot of nothing. All it provides is an avenue for petty demagoguery; there is no path there to any compromise that's better than the kind of execrable, make-work nonsense the House and Senate can come up with on their own. It was tried. It didn't work. And now it's election season, which means Republicans are spending every waking hour dreaming up new ways to call Obama the antichrist. I think the president can be forgiven for not wanting to wade into that morass again, at least not for the moment. If there does turn out at some point to be a measurable Republican appetite for, you know, doing something Not Insane, maybe it will be worth another try.
In the end, though, I hardly think you can blame a president learning the lesson that Republicans tried so very hard to drill into the national noggin for the better part of 2+ years, which is that they're not interested in compromise, not interested in talking, and will only use such talks as an avenue for further delay and carping and nonsense. Well, duh. Not wanting to fritter away hours talking to people you don't like about things they'll never agree on for the sake of a preordained outcome that will suck? I don't count that as being "aloof," I count that as just being efficient.
The underlying vibe is a bit like Newt Gingrich's famous tantrum after being supposedly "snubbed" on Air Force One: You're not paying enough attention to us. Sure, we hate your guts, we're doing everything in our power to destroy you, and our leadership has explicitly said it's more important to damage you than to do anything to actually fix the economy, but you're the asshole because you never call.
