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George Packer’s essay on the U.S. Senate is a characteristically superb piece of reporting. He presents an institution paralyzed by a droning uselessness that depresses and demoralizes even the leading inmates.
In general, when senators give speeches on the floor, their colleagues aren’t around, and the two or three who might be present aren’t listening. They’re joking with aides, or e-mailing Twitter ideas to their press secretaries, or getting their first look at a speech they’re about to give before the eight unmanned cameras that provide a live feed to C-SPAN2. The presiding officer of the Senate—freshmen of the majority party take rotating, hour-long shifts intended to introduce them to the ways of the institution—sits in his chair on the dais, scanning his BlackBerry or reading a Times article about the Senate. Michael Bennet, a freshman Democrat from Colorado, said, “Sit and watch us for seven days—just watch the floor. You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing. When I’m in the chair, I sit there thinking, I wonder what they’re doing in China right now?”
Between speeches, there are quorum calls, time killers in which a Senate clerk calls the roll at the rate of one name every few minutes. The press gallery, above the dais, is typically deserted, as journalists prefer to hunker down in the press lounge, surfing the Web for analysis of current Senate negotiations; television screens alert them if something of interest actually happens in the chamber. The only people who pay attention to a speech are the Senate stenographers. On this afternoon, two portly bald men in suits stood facing the speaker from a few feet away, tapping at the transcription machines, which resembled nineteenth-century cash registers, slung around their necks. The Senate chamber is an intimate room where men and women go to talk to themselves for the record.
When I read Packer’s dispatches from Iraq, I feel a stab of envy at the enterprise and courage that allowed him to see more than I’ll ever see. As I imagine him sitting for hours in the Senate gallery watching the proceedings below I think: ”Better you than me, bud.”
But I want to dissent from Packer’s main thesis – which is that it is the defects of the Senate that have stalled the Obama agenda.
On July 21st, President Obama signed the completed bill. The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.
That seems wrong on 2 grounds:
1) A lot of the Obama agenda has passed, actually.
2) To the extent that the agenda has not passed, the causes are bigger than the slow motion of the Senate. Look again at George Packer’s list of stalled initiatives. On how many is the American public clamoring for immediate action? On how many is the Obama agenda on the wrong side of public opinion altogether?
Like all presidents who win a big national election, Barack Obama wanted to whip as many measures through Congress as fast as possible But it’s not “obstructionism” for the Senate to decline to act like the British House of Commons, enacting whatever it pleases the chief executive to propose. There’s a big difference between the Senate of the 1950s refusing session after session to consider civil rights legislation backed by the overwhelming majority - and the Senate of the 2010s declining to try for the fourth time in 10 years to shove through an immigration amnesty that Americans do not want.
Packer cites job creation as an area of inaction. I suppose he’s referring to the much-discussed “second stimulus” that dwindled into a tiny package of small-business tax measures. But surely the failure of the FIRST stimulus to deliver the promised results is the real culprit here, not the otiose procedures of the U.S. Senate?
Packer himself does not express this view, but many of the liberal blogs seem to take the view that once a president wins an election, his duty to persuade the country somehow adjourns for the next four years. That is not true, and it should not be true. If a president can mobilize the country behind an idea, it’s amazing how the filibusters will fade away. Look at how Republicans opted to step out of the way of the Sonia Sotomayor appointment or unemployment insurance extension. If the president cannot mobilize, he will fail. The Senate may be one of the more visible manifestations of that failure. But don’t mistake the manifestation for the cause.
Is the Senate to Blame for Obama’s Failed Agenda:
Your article tends to argue that obstructionism isn’t a main factor in why legislation hasn’t been passed even with large majorities but the filibuster has most likely been abused to some degree during these first 18 months. In addition don’t you find Republican’s desire to ‘break Obama’ with misleading heated rhetoric has caused some of his Agenda to become reflexively ‘bad’ to 40% of the population regardless of if it is on the merits? I came to your site after reading your blog post about Health Care reform and how Republicans made a mistake to ignore the legislation and just oppose it in an attempt to break him. I see that as a deliberate strategy which has slowed down the Senate in particular.
GOP breaks all time filibuster record. Votes against almost 100% of bills.
Maybe that’s what is broken.
The problem is that the GOP has zero interest in governing even when they are in power. So they would not really care if the Democrats retaliated when heaven forbid the GOP get their corporate hands on power eventually. Government to the GOP is an evil, so why fight to be elected? Makes zero sense.
Rabiner
You talk about healthcare as evidence of obstructionism, but your example proves David’s point exactly. The reason the Republicans (and several Democrats) were able to hold up Obamacare as long as they did was because it was unpopular. If the numbers were flipped, and close to 60% of people wanted Obamacare passed, the opportunity to “break” Obama over the issue would not have even existed.
And this idea that poor Obama is defenseless against the GOP media machine is the biggest nonsense ever. He is the president. He has the bully pulpit. He is the only person who can schedule a speech and have every network in the country telecast it (as he has already done on more than one occassion). Not to mention the many sympathetic media outlets who are more than willing to spread his message and do his bidding.
Eugibs –
On the contrary, the healthcare “debate” is a very good example of the GOP obstructionism. Even an NBC/WSJ poll conducted last summer showed a 17% increase (to 53%) when respondents were told what was actually in the bill. It was painfully obvious that much of the public opposition was based on outright lies perpetrated in many cases by GOP leadership. Coburn telling seniors “You’re going to die sooner”, Chuck Grassley….”pull the plug on Grandma”, Randy Neugebauer to Bart Stupak “Baby Killer!”, I could go on and on. Republicans aren’t reflecting public opinion; they’re molding it to what their lobbyist overlords are telling them to.
eugibs:
It wasn’t unpopular, it was misinformation about the bill that drove ‘unpopularity figures’. It’s hard to have a real discussion when people are saying crazy things over and over and people believe them.
Rabiner and Martyb
The president always has the loudest voice. He held several primetime news conferences/speeches on the issue. He went around the country giving stump speeches in support of the bill. He has numerous allies in the media willing to get his side out. What are you guys talking about? If you really think the policy was popular and president simply lost a PR war, than that is his own fault. The President should NEVER lose a PR war to anyone – he has every built-in advantage in the book. It’s also somewhat telling about how stupid you think people are that you really believe that so many of them could be so easily manipulated.
Here’s a crazy idea, people didn’t want Obamacare and that is why it was held up so long in Congress (by Republicans AND Democrats). They held it up because not only could they hold it up, they benefited politcally by doing so. This is no conspiracy. It’s common sense.
Is the Senate to blame, as in, but for the Senate all would be rosy in Obamaland? No.
Would things have most likely proceeded in a much different manner if the GOP didn’t try to block every single thing that comes up? Heck yes.
One thing for certain, the Obama administration has had a very difficult time in getting its nominees appointed. As of today Obama has only had 45% of its nominees appointed. The average 18 months into an administration is around 80%…
As for Eugibs: the people don’t have a voice in the Senate and Congress proceedings. The reality of the current administration is that the opposition has been taking a categoric no holds attack of attempting to stop the administration in its tracks on all fronts. Not only NO, but Hell No! has become the rallying cry of the conservative movement.
On the contrary, the healthcare “debate” is a very good example of the GOP obstructionism. Even an NBC/WSJ poll conducted last summer showed a 17% increase (to 53%) when respondents were told what was actually in the bill.
I can’t speak to the specific poll you’re referencing, but I have seen the results of similar polls, and they’re actually pretty meaningless. They have provided profound nuggets of wisdom like – 1) people wanted to see the ban on preexisting conditions end (wow, what an epiphany!); 2) that they liked the idea of insurance exchanges as described (more choices for healthcare? whoopee!); 3) extending health insurance coverage to dependents 26 and older (oh seriously, people like that?!). What people don’t like, however, is the individual mandate, and they’re worried about potential cost increases coupled with reductions in quality. Once you factor those concerns in….support goes into freefall.
The bill was the sum of its parts. Just because people like some aspects of it doesn’t mean the whole thing is popular. If I offered you a deal where you could live in a mansion on the beach for free for a year…with your own butler…and your own free private cook….but the only catch is that at the end of the year we’d cut off your arms and legs – would you consider that a good deal? Of course not. But, if I asked you if you liked the idea of living in a beachfront mansion with a free butler and cook, you’d probably say yes. There’s the rub: your affirmation of those aspects of the deal I just offered really doesn’t tell us much about your attitude toward the deal as a whole. So what if you’d like to live in a mansion for free for a year? What’s really interesting is how your attitude changes once you learn what happens at the end of the year.
It wasn’t GOP obstructionism that made healthcare reform unpopular – it was the fact that people didn’t like what they saw, and they didn’t believe Democrats’ claims about lowering costs, etc.
Moreover, Dems had a commanding majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate until February 2010 – so I’m not terribly sympathetic to them.
The idea that a president need only convince the people of the rightness of his policies ignores the huge impact lobbyists have on any Senate vote. The heathcare reform was a compromise between the people’s need and whatever the heathcare industry would allow. When the public option is explained in plain terms, a majority of Americans would choose to allow for such an option. But no one was interested in speaking plainly about anything in the healthcare reform. It is so sad that in the “Information Age” clear and truthful information is almost nonexistent.
Calmer and more sensible heads prevailed today…
AID TO STATES PASSES, “NO THANKS” SAYS THE GOP!
The Senate voted 61-38 on Wednesday to break a Republican filibuster of a bill that will provide $26 billion in aid to cash-strapped states for 290,000 teachers, firefighters and police officers. Republican lawmakers have opposed all previous domestic aid bills because of their deficit cost, even though they would reduce the deficit.
The Congressional Budget Office said it would reduce the deficit by almost $1.4 billion. But it wouldn’t reduce the deficit in a manner that appealed to Republicans?
The bill’s revenue offsets include $9 billion from removing a foreign tax credit loophole, $8 billion from spending cuts, $2 billion from tweaking Medicaid drug reimbursement formulas, and, controversially, more than $11 billion from cutting food stamp funding in 2014.
Republicans declined questions from reporters at a press conference after the vote…
Why could that possibly be…they don’t believe the services of our public safety personnel and teachers are irreplaceable; if and when, “heaven forbid”, it raises the taxes on the top 2 per center’s.
Absolutely…!
eugibs said… You talk about healthcare as evidence of obstructionism, but your example proves David’s point exactly. The reason the Republicans (and several Democrats) were able to hold up Obamacare as long as they did was because it was unpopular.
Uuuuuuuh, so now all legislation that doesn’t pass with 58 votes is “unpopular”?
BTW, you completely missed the polls made on each of the bill’s major provisions. They proved to be quite popular, as in over 60%. You also missed the fact that a fair chunk of the people who did not like the bill were angry that it had no public option. You make the error of believing in that everybody who disliked the bill disliked it for the same reason.
But why would a bill that consisted of measure that were popular end up as “unpopular”? Because a segment of the population was against the bill without knowing what was in it. Instead, they either believed or were confused by the lies of the GOP who misrepresented the bill continually. Remember death panels? The gov’t would get between you and your doctor and make medical decisions? You couldn’t keep your private health plan or a plan from your job? All lies spread by Republican Senators and Representatives, not just talking heads.
“But surely the failure of the FIRST stimulus to deliver the promised results is the real culprit here,”
Only in the sense that it didn’t go far enough, just as one Nobel economist predicted.
Oldskool // Aug 4, 2010 at 6:47 pm wrote:”… Only in the sense that it didn’t go far enough, just as one Nobel economist predicted.”
So, you’re an advocate of Professor Joseph Stiglitz’s, economic theories?
J.S…was once Bill Clinton’s senior economic adviser, is now professor of economics and finance at Columbia Business School…
Those in the trickle down camp would brand both you and him theoretical heretics…
I stand firmly in no-man’s land…
Gramps, That makes two then, incl Paul Krugman.
Oldskool…
My thought might be…
Cum byaa yah…..!
Off topic question for anyone who owns Hitch-22. The long excerpt I read recently wasn’t terribly interesting but his piece on cancer certainly is and I wonder which one the book most resembles.
“In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.”
That one sentence blew my mind.
My take is this: that the tone of the GOP members of the Senate and House was made clear when President Obama arrived for his first visit, expecting to talk about important issues. Before the new president had even arrived in the chamber, Boehner announced to a press conference that he would vote no to whatever Obama suggested and would encourage the Republicans under his leadership to do the same (an early version of the famous “Waterloo” strategy).
What struck me at the time as particularly peculiar about this strategy is that these officials were elected to govern, not to play games, not to put winning the next election above the current time and lives of their constituents. However, their leadership and the actions of all those GOP members who fell into lockstep sadly indicated that they had forgotten why they were elected in the first place and what their responsibility was in terms of sharing the burden of governing — regardless of who is in majority.
I had been slightly encouraged to hear more Republicans speak out explicitly to this issue — most recently Lindsay Graham for which he was burned in one of the most hideous effigies I have ever seen (encouragement evaporation).
So, personally I do not believe one can overestimate the result of the GOP’s purposeful obstruction where the goal is not to govern but to win.
People like to say that such abuses of power occur on both sides of the political spectrum but as David Frum so correctly pointed out many months ago (circa his Waterloo piece), it is the Democrats who are trying to govern, not the Republicans.
Perhaps the cure is for the people who elected these individuals to demand that they do what they were elected to do which is govern effectively.
What I find hard to understand with this argument: that I think it’s impossible to prove what people think of Obamacare both because of the distortions disseminated which created false reactions and because how do we really measure what the general public thinks? We know that the results of polls are subjective in nature depending not only on who you ask but how you ask the questions and then how you interpret the answers.
Where does this idea that the majority of people were against Obamacare come from, or maybe the better question is how can someone prove this assertion? Aside from my gut reaction — that it simply does not match my experience based on what I read and hear people say — I know of no empirical evidence to prove the assertion that is evidentiary. Perhaps the only proof comes in national voting.
I’m willing to be convinced with the right evidence but so far, I do not see it.
Rabiner – I too came here due to “Waterloo.” I was under the impression that Frum got it.
America wanted Health Reform with the Public Option.
Survey USA Question #2 appears in the June 2009 NBC poll and in the WSJ poll as Question #34A.
“In any health care proposal, how important do you feel it is to give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance–extremely important, quite important, not that important, or not at all important.”
Extremely Important 58%, Quite Important 19%.
77% of the people were disappointed when the Public Option was removed. Calling it something the people currently do no want can be traced back to the destruction of the bill by the obstructionist of our current Republicans congress.
The Republican party stated they would participate in the debate IF THE PUBLIC OPTION WAS REMOVED. It was removed on Sept 9, 2009…two months after the majority of citizen indicated that is what they wanted. They wanted the Public Option yet the Republicans made sure it was taken out, and then broke their commitment to participate.
Frum, you had a better grip on the subject of obstructionism with your “Waterloo.” Here I had to check twice to make sure it wasn’t a reprint from April 1st.
I can’t believe the revisionist history regarding public opinion on Health Care Reform. HCR was hugely popular until the summer of 09 when the Republicans systematically lied to the American public as to what would happen under the bill (i.e. death camps, health care for illegal immigrants, reduced medicare bennefits, etc.)
Here is a poll of polls showing all of the polls on Health Care Reform over time. You’ll see when the support began to go South and it was based on Republican lies. You’ll also notice that after HCR passed opposition seems to be dropping steadily. Perhaps when people find out about what really is in HCR they aren’t so much against it. Lets see a poll or two in a couple years.
http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/healthplan.php
Oh, and let me go on record in saying that I agree with everything that msmilack said regarding the GOP’s obstructionist approach to governance. I often look to her comments because I sense she doesn’t have a partisan bone in her body and is less influenced by the tribal bias that many of us (myself included) struggle with to see things completely objectively.
for some reason FF is eating my posts. But I posted this link to a poll of polls which shows quite clearly that Health Care Reform was very popular. Until the GOP began a concerted effort to lie to the American public about what HCR would do. You remember right? Death Panels? Medicare cuts to the elderly? Taking away choice of medical providers? Illegal immigrants getting free health care? Government bureaucrats deciding if “special needs” babies should live or die? It was outrageous, unpatriotic and quite reprehensible. But it worked, it drove down support for HCR (which btw is re-bounding since the bill passed.
http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/healthplan.php
Reality check:
http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/healthplan.php
Rabiner: It wasn’t unpopular, it was misinformation about the bill that drove ‘unpopularity figures’. It’s hard to have a real discussion when people are saying crazy things over and over and people believe them.
In our society,
the PEOPLE are sovereign.
Sometimes you’re going to believe the PEOPLE are misled, stupid, crazy, or racist.
But the price of living in a free society is you don’t get to overrule them “for their own good.”
Liberals like you want America to be some kind of benevolent despotism, where the Federal Government hands down edicts for “the people’s own good” and force the people to comply with them even if they strongly oppose them. That is your vision of America, right?
The 55 mile per hour speed limit was one of the most egregious examples of this.
Now in THIS case, there is not ONE piece of legislation being held up by the Senate that polls show is highly popular with the people.
The ONLY reason why the Senate has failed to pass Obama’s sweeping liberal legislation is that he doesn’t have the votes LBJ did in 1965.
LBJ had a 68 seat majority in the Senate, overwhelmingly liberal. If Obama had that kind of majority, we would have had at least a public option on health care and maybe even single payer. The public wasn’t sold on single-payer. But liberals have made it clear that when it comes to social engineering, they simply don’t give a tinker’s damn what the majority of the American public thinks. Liberals think the American public are mostly just stupid backward ignoramuses, easily misled, anyway. (That’s what they say on their own liberal blogs when they don’t think conservatives like me are lurking there, reading everything they say.)
Obama did have a 60 vote Dem majority in the U.S. Senate. That was enough for cloture to end any GOP filibuster. But some Senate Dems balked. Why? Because their own constituents in their own states were telling them that they didn’t like everything Obama was doing.
THAT is the real reason why the GOP filibusters were successful: Some Dem senators knew that if they voted for cloture and passed everything that Obama wanted, their constituents who detested Obama would take their revenge on them (cf. Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, which just voted down ObamaCare by 2 to 1.)
Now let’s compare the CURRENT composition of the U.S. Senate to past senates:
http://i35.tinypic.com/okmx4w.jpg
Notice how there used to be significant political overlap between the two parties’ senators. That is, we had liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits, and conservative Democrats like John Stennis.
But the decimation of the GOP in the North, and the switch of the Solid South from Dem to GOP, has caused a sorting out of the two parties. Now even the most moderate of the GOP senators still votes in a slightly more conservative way than the most conservative of the Dem senators.
That ideological sorting-out has made it next to impossible to get compromise on anything. But it accurately reflects the sorting-out that has taken place with the American people.
Back in 1960, you could have found folks in Manhattan NY who said they were center-left Republicans (e.g., John Lindsay). And you sure could have found strongly conservative Dem voters in the South. Now those cohorts are nearly extinct.
A Broken Senate, or an Unpopular Agenda? - Ross Douthat Blog - NYTimes.com // Aug 5, 2010 at 10:34 am
[...] the country. I recommend reading the whole thing — but I’d also associate myself with this comment, from David Frum: To the extent that the [Obama] agenda has not passed, the causes are bigger than [...]
Ultimately, Democrats held up passage of Obamacare, not Republicans. The fate of the bill was ALWAYS in the hands of the Ben Nelsons, Joe Liebermans, and Bart Stupaks of the world, not the Jim Demints and John Boehners. They are the reason it took so long to pass the bill. Sorry that this little inconvenient truth doesn’t play into the narrative of the crazies on this site.
Secondly, for all of you who make this argument that the individual parts were popular, you’re only fooling yourselves. A bill is always the sum of its parts. There was indeed something for everybody in Obamacare, and people can certainly like certain parts without thinking its an overall good policy. Your argument is like saying, even though my team lost a baseball game 6-5, we actually won because we scored more runs than the other team in 5 of the 9 innings.
And for the wingnut who says that 77 percent of the population supported the public option, and the biggest reason that the bill was unpopular was because of the lack of a public option, you have taken the koolaide drinking to a whole new level. You need to put down the Paul Begala DNC emails, and join reality.
The best I’ll say for Frum’s argument is this: if the Democrats don’t have the cajones to lower the threshold for the filibuster they deserve what happens. There is no dispute that the Democrats, constitutionally, have the ability to change the rules (ie. the threshold has been lowered before, the “disappearing quorum” in the House was done away with, etc.).
Would it be smart for the Dems to change the rules? Yes. There is no infinite parade of Ben Nelsons and Joe Liebermans. If the threshold had been lowered to 55 votes Obama probably could have gotten everything he wanted. It’s possible Republicans, in this scenario, might have come to the table and brokered compromises in exchange for their imprimatur. If not, so be it. Ultimately, the public would have based their votes on what had occurred.
Because we have the current system, 1) the Ben Nelsons and Joe Liebermans did control the process; 2) Obama was left looking very weak; 3) those opposed to health care reform were able to pit the extremes against the middle (the fictive alliance which joins those opposed to any Dem-sponsored reform with those who want a universal system–that’s the bogus statistic which underlies every claim that a majority of the public opposes reform); 4) even with the passage of a bill the public perceives that their views don’t matter all that much.
The public is right. Having passed health care, the Democrats are now relying upon the armor of the filibuster to thwart all attempts at repeal or even modification. The GOP will need 60 votes to change it–they’re not going to get it–game over. Here is the problem–and it doesn’t surprise me that elites in both parties don’t get it.
Unless the public has the ability to empower legislators in the first place (which they clearly did in 2008) and then vote again on what they’ve done, they’re not going to feel as though they own the process, because, erm, they don’t. In this environment governance becomes unpleasant and reform impossible.
Maybe there is hope….
H.R.5808
Title: To amend the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to establish a public health insurance option.
Sponsor: Rep Woolsey, Lynn C. [CA-6] (introduced 7/21/2010) Cosponsors (128)
Latest Major Action: 7/21/2010 Referred to House committee. Status: Referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
CBO thinks this is great for our deficit…Public Option Proposal That Will Reduce the Deficit by $68 Billion per the CBO…
Our history with the Republic Senate predicts another fight…The people want the Public Option but the Republican don’t….And I hope this fact will show up in the next election.
Per David Frum….”And in every country on earth except the United States, they have demanded that sickness not expose people to economic ruin.”
I try to think what Republicans picture America to be…Just the Wild West? Health Care a privilege? What policies produced this “Self Serving” ideology. We know who to point fingers to, but I cannot understand why one person would follow such an agenda. The “We the People” is a country, and completely opposite of the sink or swim Republican philosophy.
I’m amazed that anyone would attach their name to such views.
How does Frum know whether or not the American public clamoring for immediate action on anything other than his biases? He doesn’t make a case for his opinion. I would ask is that the same American public that thinks Obama wasn’t born in the US and/or thinks that Affordable Health Care act originally had death panels or thinks that the sun revolves around the earth or thinks that tax cuts increase revenue and pay for themselves or that Reagan never raised taxes? Talk about crazies.
It seems like to Frum and other Republicans the only thing that Americans want are tax cuts and wars. Do you seriously believe that Americans don’t want anything in the way of: “immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management?” Perhaps there may be policy disagreement on immigration and job creation but certainly there could be some kind of compromise. But you’re telling me that Americans don’t want campaign finance reform? They don’t want better pilot training? They don’t believe in caring for veterans? How about transportation security and mine safety? I suppose the majority of Americans are managers at or stake holders in mining companies. I suppose the people of California like wildfires. I suppose that in a country where the wages of the working class have been falling in real dollars for almost 40 years, most people don’t want tougher labor laws. The Republicans are telling a bold-faced lie when they claim to be obstructing for the benefit of the “People.” They obstruct for money to finance their campaigns where they portray their opponents as unpatriotic or abettors of criminals. Obviously the Democrats are not above taking dirty money – Obama took tens of millions from Wall Street – but they still have the heart to bring relief to the unemployed and they don’t hide behind political posturing while they spit on them. The Republicans have no excuse.
Mr. Frim writes, “many of the liberal blogs seem to take the view that once a president wins an election, his duty to persuade the country somehow adjourns for the next four years.”
I will not call this sophistry for one reason: I only just registered (so am a new member) and I didn’t join to throw stones inside the tent. (Did I say one? Oh … sorry.) I’ve been following Mr. Frum since “axis of evil” twisted my knickers. In fact only last month I picked up used copies of two of his books; “How We Got Here”, and … I forget. It’s in my bedroom. But it’s notable for having a very well known co-author, a man who upsets me even more deeply and more often than Mr. Frum.
So … let’s call this rhetoric.
Mr. Frum, are you saying that President Obama has not made efforts to persuade? that he has as though rested on his laurels?
What I note is that you don’t say so. Nowhere in that paragraph do you state your view.
If there was obstrucitonism then it would surely be evident in efforts to de-rail Obama’s persuasion. This isn’t addressed, so I can’t compliment this analysis for being forensice.
glad to be here
@bentrem
p.s. not 30 minutes ago I passed this URL to an American friend who was lamenting the state of republicanism and commented on how often I have called, from my position on the left, for the strong voice of clear conservatism.