maybe just maybe President Obama learned his lesson during his first year.  And now is ready to take the fight to the Republicans, so he can get some of his actions items passed into law.

Just a thought.

As Sam Seder said on MyDD blog talk radio: yes, 6 months ago we'd be ready to believe that.

 I hear about the Republicans' obstructionism, ridiculous accusations, and demonization of Obama when I watch Comedy Central, or way back before the Kill-Billers killed HCR, I saw it in the hearings. But my reaction to Josh's reaction to the Presidents words is simply:

(LAUGHTER)

because the ultimate responsibility for that particular failure falls upon those who I have for so long considered to be the people I shared a common set of beliefs and values. Among those values, practicality and pragmatism, realism and maturity. It turns out that I'm much more lonely than I thought. Without the (LAUGHTER), I'd have nothing to console me but my useless tears.

 You wrote a powerful defense of passing the Bill on Dec 27, 2009. Substantively and Politically, you made a strong case for passing the Senate Bill, if that were to come out of a Conference Committee. The Progressives' hissy fits frightened the Democratic Legislators and accomplished the goal of the Bill-KIllers. I still agree with your X-Mas argument, do you?

Whether they'll compromise is not unknown. They won't.

the prospects for compromise with the Taliban are better than they are with the Republicans, who, unlike the Taliban, want to destroy Obama's Presidency and represent the real long-term threat to our democracy.

The presence of Frank Luntz at the front table yesterday was telling.  We have a collection of people masquerading as a serious political party, totally preoccupied not with public service but with winning messaging wars and polluting our discourse with lies and demagoguery.

 

A most cogent and moving set of arguments indeed! And there is virtually no one who would deny the genius and extraordinary rhetoric of President Obama. But from the outset, what those of us who strongly supported Hillary Clinton in 2008 feared most about a President Obama has come to pass. He was simply too inexperienced nationally, and much too naive about the real objectives of GOP opposition. Bill and Hillary have been for so many decades veritable GOP punching bags that they well knew what would be thrown at a Hillary presidency, particularly as pertaining to health care reform. Never permit your enemy to define you. It is a war we are fighting with our opposition, the enemy every bit as lethal as the worst of Nazi SS troopers. But just as effective as those Nazi SS troopers were on a bankrupt German people in the afermath of World War I, so too are the GOP guerrillas in fighting every conceivable national social reform. FDR wasted no time on taking office in March 1933--drastic measures were called for, and he didn't give time to any set of "tea baggers" to tell the nation that a bank holiday on their money was a terrible thing. No, FDR fought the fires of Depression with fires of his own--he had the 1932 mandate to back him up. President Obama was mandated to create big change in 2008. There was no necessity to confer with the defeated opposition. A national health care bill, as well as a national recovery bill, should have been steamrolled through the Congress, even though there was no sixtieth Senate vote at the time. Reconciliation was perfectly fine; and if not, then by God, change the crazy filibuster rule. And he need not have wasted one moment while the GOP and the insurance lobby teamed to become a false "We the people are fighting you" power. President Obama in early 2009 had the bully pulpit--define those potential enemies first, and hit them hard by both words and deeds, and make certain that those hits leave them fatal. It was a Civil War the United States was undergoing, like the Depression battles of 1933, and every bit as politically bloody as was the American Civil War itself. We will never know now, but I believe that President Hillary Clinton, long ravaged with political scars, would have permitted the GOP no slack. She would have been an Iron Lady, and steeled herself from every shot from across the aisle. I am now fifty-six, and I am among the forty million Americans without health care. I do not expect to have it in my lifetime. Even if I ever suffer a stroke or should become terminally ill, so long as I have yet my mental faculties, I shall think twice before ever considering any treatment that can leave any of those close to me saddled with a debt they can never hope to pay for. Yet our banking institutions, freely given trillions of taxpayer dollars by both Presidents George Walker Bush and Obama, so that they might remain solvent, never blanch when torturing taxpayers to make good on their credit card debt with usurious 39% fees. Under such circuimstances, an FDR in office in 2009 would have surely stated: "The banks will have their debt forgiven by taxpayers only if taxpayers are also forgiven at least part of their debt by bankers." That would have made perfect sense to all but usurious bankers, and it wouldn't have mattered what they thought. There would have been no taxpayer giveaway money until the bankers surrendered. And in early 2009 the bankers, still desperate for government aid, would have had no other choice. America by the close of 2008 was on the way out. Too many years of Ronald Reagan-inspired GOP absolute rule 2001-2007, had all but wrecked the system. And even when the Democrats had the Congress after 2007, without a President's signature on bills enacted to create national recovery, such a Congress would have been impotent. To the brilliant and charismatic President Obama was given every gift--from a citizens' mandate in November 2008 to a world imprimatur by way of the Nobel Peace Prize in the autumn of 2009. Still, President Obama, perhaps heady with the love all around him, allowed himself to be lulled into inaction by those GOP stealthy veritable Nazi SS "tea-baggers." Now, even with huge majorities in the Congress, National Health Care in the United States is a dream only once more, killed by of all people, the citizens of Massachusetts whose forty-seven year Senator Ted Kennedy made National Health Care the cornerstone of his political career. Those of us now forever uninsured will never forgive the disloyalty of those Massachusetts citizens, blessed in their own state to have such health care. Someday, a higher power may inflict on those Massachusetts citizens the horror of also being forever without health care that they now have inflicted upon others. But what is certain is the fact that Massachusetts, once regarded as the most enlightened of states--the only not to support President Richard Nixon's reelection in 1972--has become a laughable jackass state, as easily manipulated as the worst of Southern racist states of the 1950's and 1960's. Oddly enough, it took the national mourning over the assassination of JFK and the political resolve of President Lyndon Johnson, once "The Master of the Senate," to create Medicaire. But like his mentor FDR, LBJ wasted no time. Truly strange is the fact that the GOP led "tea-baggers" argue for the protection of their Medicaire and Social Security, when both programs were openly reviled by the GOP. Today, GOP voters are the first at the trough to collect their Social Security checks and enjoy their Medicaire benefits. Now, there would have been a condign cure! Proclaim no known "tea-bagger" any longer eligible for either program! But that would have required an Iron President. Surely an FDR or an LBJ. And I believe that Hillary Clinton would have shared that great appelation had she come to the Presidency as well.  As it is now, the GOP "tea-baggers" are the ultimate Pyrrhic victors.  Flushed with their political triumph, like their opposition counterparts in the Soviet Union twenty years ago, they cannot understand that such a bulwark against absolutely necessary change only guarantees the inevitable extinction of the nation itself.

For those still clinging to the notion that Obama is more liberal than Bill Clinton, he just refuted you, substantively, on health care, energy and the budget.

I agree with you on strategy, that was one part of why Obama was not my choice in the primaries. But as dark as things seem now I'm not prepared to count Obama out. That Q&A showed Obama (and the Republicans) in a better light. All Obama has to do is convince a handful of Republican Senators to be flexible, and if this kind of interaction changes the dynamics of their caucus then he has opened that opportunity.

 

My cynic side has struck again. It occurred to me watching the Keith O / Rachel / Matthews 2 hour special on the president's smack down of the Repubs that maybe, just maybe, the following happened:

At the start of the term in 2009, the Repubs all got together and modeled what would happen given various scenarios and Republican actions. You know, like Nate Silver running all these models on his fivethirtyeight site. Well, every time they run the model, the tactic that shows them getting the most pay back in 2010 is to simply obstruct at every turn.

And this notion of Hatch declaring war if the Dems use reconciliation for HCR when Hatch was a major practitioner of reconciliation during Bush's reign -- well, it will be interesting to see if the Dems have the spine to press forward. 

…it's in neither parties interest to compromise, but the weird thing is that last year Democrats did so when it was completely unnecesary and lost control of the healthcare debate. Last year, Republican obstructionism was pretty much symbolic—they just didn't have the votes—but this year it's different, which is why it was good for Obama to get out front of everything and call them on hyperbole and demonization. It's the kind of messaging that's especially necessary when the electorate wants (or better, needs) results. I'm not sure it can save the current healthcare reform bills, though, because running on questionable plans will not score Democrats any points. Isn't that the lesson of Scott Brown?