If Robert Gibbs hadn't said last week that Democrats may lose the House in November, then House Democrats might not have been so infuriated that the president himself had to travel to Capitol Hill to let them vent.
And if Obama hadn't personally heard how enraged they are by Senate Republicans, and how galled they've been by the White House's clueless kumbayas, then he might not have come to his senses at last in his weekly address on Saturday, when he drove a stake through the heart of the post-partisan vampire that has possessed him since his election.
It wasn't an angry talk. He used the same level voice that has enabled the "professorial" put-down to be attached to him by his critics. Nevertheless he made a merciless, convincing case that cynical filibustering by Mitch McConnell's disciplined minority is the enemy of economic recovery.
He hammered Senate Republicans for using procedural tactics to block up-or-down votes on his plans to boost lending to small businesses, and to give them tax incentives to hire workers, buy equipment and expand their companies.
He nailed Republicans for standing in the way of extending unemployment insurance, and for retailing the canard that a few hundred dollars a week will transform jobless Americans into welfare queens.
He drove home the point that people out of work will spend unemployment benefits quickly, which will do more to boost local economies than the Republican answer to everything: more tax cuts for the rich.
It was so simple and effective a take-no-prisoners case that it raises the question, What took you so long, Mr. President?
If you listened to Joe Biden on ABC's Sunday show This Week, you'd think that the White House's real difficulty has been that wheezy workhorse, a communications problem -- their message's inability to break through to the beleaguered American people, who "don't know a lot of what's going on." Yep, we have to do a better job telling our story: the universal faux mea culpa of low-polling politicians.
To be sure, this Administration could be doing a way better job touting successes like health care and Wall Street reform. Whatever those acts' shortcomings are -- and the ones on my list aren't trivial -- they still represent historic accomplishments.
But I have no doubt that Obama and Senate Democrats would have had to bargain away much less -- would have split differences from a position of strength, in the middle, instead of on the far right where they'd permitted the Republicans to drag the center -- if only the White House had had the guts back then, instead of just now, to label McConnell's tactics for what they really were, and if only Democrats had enforced a comparable discipline on the hapless ersatz statesmen in their own caucus.
The alleged desire of independent voters to "get beyond the partisan bickering" is a fairy-tale, promulgated by chin pullers who have never worked in a campaign and by pollsters whose survey questions are worded to make it as impossible to profess skepticism about the dream of a peaceable political kingdom as to say you dislike apple pie.
I'd argue that if Obama and Senate Democrats -- instead of effectively inviting Olympia Snowe, Chuck Grassley, Joe Lieberman and Max Baucus to grab them by the short hairs -- had lived up to their 2008 mandate, exercised their power, drawn a line in the sand around core principles, and given their partisan base something to bark and bite about, their legislative achievements would have been more impressive than the record they have now, and their success (or even their lack of it) would have warranted the political price they're already paying anyway.
In a throwaway line on This Week, on his way to explaining the Administration's frustration, Biden referred to Senate Republicans as "a bunch of guys, who are good guys, but...." That's the animating folklore of the Senate: the collegiality of good, serious people who at the end of the day simply want to do right by the country. In truth, it's less a mythology than a pathology, and both Biden and Obama had ample opportunity to drink that Kool-Aid when they served there.
I hope that Biden's saying that was no more than a courtly flourish, or at worst an atavism he's working to overcome. And I hope that Obama's Saturday address turns out to be more than a one-off.
The bum hand he was dealt when he took office accounts for some of what's pulling Obama down. So does some bad luck, and what chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel calls "the G force" -- the oil spill in the gulf, the debt crisis in Greece, and the aftermath of Israel's attack on a flotilla determined to break its Gaza blockade. But it's not bad advice that's been hurting Obama. With presidents, it never is. His standing, and his party's prospects, will depend on how tenaciously he can hold on to what he seems to have learned from the House Democrats riled up by his press secretary: that he can do more for the country not by holding hands with Mitch McConnell around the campfire, but by taking names and kicking butt the way FDR did.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and e-mail me there if you'd like.
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On the contrary, Obama came to the table with a winning hand -- and folded.
Excitement, expectation, majorities in both houses, all squandered. Why?
Being President of all the people is meaningless if you do little for so many. More than anyone in recent memory, he has (had?) the ability to talk the country into bold moves and talk himself out of trouble if need be, but the fire that animated him on the campaign trail was banked. Why? What scared him?
It's not that he's accomplished little, but that he's accomplished little of what he might have done.
There's a price to cowardice and it's dear.
The number of examples is mind boggling, ... Blanche Lincoln, ... Mary Landrieu, ... Ben Nelson, ... and Max Baucus, ... Christopher Dodd, ... take your pick. Healthcare Reform, ... Financial Reform, and Unemployment Assistance extensions.
It is disingenuous to say the circus sideshow of McConnell and Boehner are the cause of Obama's woes. As Democrats we bring more woe upon ourselves and this president than anything the GOP clowns could concoct!
Mr Obama's lot will improve when those blue dogs learn to hunt with the pack again.
And I admired President Obama for trying to "reach across the aisle" and attempts to unclinch fists. For awhile. That was worthy - but now it's pointless. The GOP couldn't be clearer that they are enemies of not just his administration, but enemies of this country. They couldn't be clearer about their nefarious agenda if they rode into congress on tanks.
Enough with the bipartisanship. It's not going to work. It might have if we had a Republican party in place. We don't. We have a Republicanesque mob led by thugs and little brains. When a party can be held hostage by the likes of Sarah Palin - then assume that that's the wattage your dealing with across the board. Mean and stoopid and you cannot bipartisan with that. You can only conquer it.
Corrupt America is use to the slee zy, extra marital, scandalous, back biting, wire tapping, usual nasty, dirty, ad filled ways of governance.
What is in it for me - an attitude, especially by the media.
When the sensation is not there, the interest is not there for general public too.
The polls are for fools, who weight themselves every day rather than being healthy.
Polls are for Yo Yo dieters .
What President does is a thoughtful analysis of things with facts, figures, science & technology.
To add to that, a kind of compassion and kindness. He has a faith of his own.
He is not a reckless man as the nation is or as the nation was used to.
He has done things that others couldn't or wouldn't do.
He and his wife will have no problem finding a job any where in the whole universe, if he decide not to run for a second term.
His polls will rise if he goes in a campaign mode, that is when people really like him.
He inspires the nation like no one.
At large campaign style meetings, he excels.
Every one wants a piece of him, but, he is human too.
He is born for a purpose. He has the fortitude and the capacity to fulfill that.
He is a historic President whether you admit it or