The best bit of Klein's post is down at the bottom:
Perhaps my favorite moment of last night’s debate was when Newt Gingrich fielded a question on health-care reform and warned that electing a president wouldn’t be enough. Republicans would also need Senate and House majorities to make change. It was a bucket of cold water tossed on the CNN promise-fest, and the other candidates promptly ignored it. But it was true for them and it’s true here. Our problem isn’t that our leaders don’t want to govern ambitiously. It’s that, in most cases, they can’t.I'm wondering whether it's an Iron Law of Politics that any time someone says some variation of "nobody supports..." it will turn out that someone is, in fact, supporting that thing, or proposing that bill, or promoting that program. And I don't mean someone as in some yahoo on the intertubes somewhere; I mean someone as in a governor, or a Member of Congress, or even (as was the case here) the President of the United States of America.
Oh, and there's a corollary: whenever anyone complains that if only the president would say [X] then all his problems would go away, the odds are high that the president has, in fact, already said [X].
And -- nice catch!
Posts
The GOP thinks that if they go against everything Obama wants (or in this case mix words to pretend they are against it) they stand a chance at winning. But people are smart, and even political wonks like us know that simply isn't the case.
ReplyDeleteI've been finding this a lot lately, a self-identified moderate conservative will accidentally get behind something the President has been doing or something the movement conservatives in the GOP mainstream have rejected as out of hand.
ReplyDeleteThe best thing we can do for American Politics is to point out to these people that without changing a single idea of their own, they've become Democrats. The sooner they realize that the Tea Party has the bridge and the only logical conclusion is to abandon ship and swim over to our side, the sooner a new and more moderate and reasonable Republican party will emerge that someday even someone like me could be tempted to vote for.
Despite what David Brooks thinks, his Republican party is long gone, I'm not sure it ever existed in my lifetime. He should try running for office and see if he can win a republican primary in any state outside California or Massachusetts
Gingrich said the Republicans would need twelve new senators to repeal the health care law. I don't buy it. If Republicans win the White House, hold the House, and win the Senate, Blue Dog Dems in the Senate are going to run from the Obama legacy faster than you can say "wedge issue." Save the health care law with a filibuster? Of unified Democrats? No way.
ReplyDeleteWell, the Dems only need 41. And if they lose the majority in '12, it's gonna be because AT LEAST Nelson, Conrad, Webb, and Tester/McCaskill are gone. None of whom were the most reliable on the Obama Agenda anyway. I think all of those people would fold- along with Landrieu, maybe Prior, a few others- but I think 41 of them would hold firm.
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