By the time this article appears, the United States will probably have elected a president to serve for the next four years. Regardless of who wins, there is one thing he should concentrate on: overcoming the gridlock in Washington, DC, that has brought our government to a standstill. I am sick and tired of the Democrats blaming the Republicans and vice versa. The president, whoever he is, needs to do something about Washington gridlock.
Oh, yes, I know that the Democrats blame the Republicans for Washington's governmental standstill: the Republican majority in the House of Representatives being hell-bent on having things their way, opposing any compromises whatsoever; their unwillingness to vote for any positive things that President Obama suggests; the lackluster leadership of the Speaker of the House, who is unable to control the more conservative wing of his own party; and the primary goal of the Republicans in both the House and the Senate from the very beginning to see to it that Obama's presidency is a failure.
The Republicans, on the other hand, say that from the very outset of Obama's presidency, when the Democrats had a majority in both the Senate and the House, the president and others from the White House, the Majority Leader of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House never practiced bipartisanism but, instead, shoved things down the throat of the Republicans; that they did whatever they wanted, including bringing up bills for votes before the members had the opportunity of reading them and telling them that they could learn what was in them after they were passed; that they took pride in publicly ridiculing the Republicans by saying such things as "elections have consequences, and we Democrats won"; and that they took pride in "sticking it" to the Republicans whenever they could.
Regardless of what the Republican or Democrats said or did to one another, the time has come for the politicians on both sides of the aisle to stop this blame-game they have all been playing and to begin working together to establish a workable bipartisanism that enables the United States Government actually to govern. And I believe without question that the person who must make this happen is the President of the United States. He must be a leader -- a person who takes the lead in bringing Republicans and Democrats together, paying no attention to the polls, or to the loud voices of the political partisans, or to the biased news broadcasts and the naysaying editorials of the various media outlets.
Quite frankly, I liked what Governor Romney said during the campaign about what he did in Massachusetts, when he was a Republican governor in a state with a Democrat majority in both houses of the state government: that is, that on each Monday morning he met with the leaders of both parties to discuss what they needed to get accomplished that week and how they were going to get it done. I am not suggesting that he, therefore, should be the next president. Nor am I suggesting that the President of the United States needs to set aside every Monday morning to meet with the leaders of both political parties.
But here is what I am suggesting. I am of the strong belief that the President of the United States, the most powerful and supposedly influential person in the world, needs, first off, to stay in Washington long enough to devise and implement a workable plan to bring political gridlock in Washington to a sudden and permanent death.
For whatever reason, in the first four years of his presidency, President Obama has failed to do that, which has been a great disappointment to most thinking people in the United States. Responsible Democrats and Republicans realize the need to have a government in Washington that can do what our Constitution calls for it to do, regardless of who the president is or which party he belongs to.
I submitted this blog knowing that it would probably not appear until after Election Day, so my purpose in writing it was not to influence the outcome of the election one way or the other. I am a grammarian who submits a blog to The Huffington Post on a regular basis, and even though many times I focus on current events, including how the elected should govern, I always try to relate my blogs in some way to grammar. In this blog, I have concentrated on four words: "blame," "gridlock," "bipartisanism," and "leadership." I don't think I need to point out the definitions of these words; we all have a pretty good idea of what they mean.
Now, let's see the President of the United States and the members of both houses of the United States Congress work together in doing away with the negativism of blame and gridlock and concentrating on the positive results of strong and fair leadership and bipartisanism. And if they do that in Washington, I would expect that the rest of the country -- politicians in state, county, and local governments, and the general citizenry -- will follow suit. And that's exactly what we, as a country, need.
Yes, we need a president who leads.