Excerpts from POLITICO
By Carrie Budoff Brown and Jonathan Allen
January 17, 2012
“Candidate Barack Obama promised to transcend Washington partisanship.
“President Obama plummeted into it.
“As the House returns Tuesday for the final session of his first term, Obama’s failure to fulfill this central claim of his 2008 campaign has never been more glaringly obvious.
“The hard truth is that Washington next year will look indistinguishable from the one Obama warned against during his election-night victory speech, when he called on Republicans and Democrats to ‘resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.’
“His relationship with Republican lawmakers is broken, the victim of grand expectations and hardball political tactics, irreconcilable policy differences and perceived personal snubs.
“Obama’s early promises to invite lawmakers to the White House for weekly cocktails and congressional leaders for monthly meetings sound oddly quaint. His days of personally courting rank-and-file Republicans for votes are long gone. The broad majorities that senior Obama aides once predicted for major legislation never materialized.
“The degree of dysfunction may not matter much through November, but it will in a second term if Obama wants to build on a legacy that hasn’t racked up a major legislative achievement since his first two years in office. At that point, Obama may very well find himself with a more Republican Congress than the one he struggles with now.
“‘I don’t see anything changing,’ said Jim Manley, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)…‘Long term for the president, it is going to be very tough going’…
“Obama issued the divorce papers to Congress this month when, in an unprecedented institutional snub, he unilaterally installed a new consumer watchdog and new appointees to the National Labor Relations Board over the objections of Senate Republicans. Obama already had decided to lash Congress from the campaign trail for the next year, and his aides made clear that the president has essentially given up on wringing any major legislation out of the place until after the election…
“Republicans counter that Obama never tried hard enough to understand Congress or build a relationship with its leaders, not during the first two years when his party controlled both chambers and not beyond the first six months of the 112th Congress with the House in GOP hands…
“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) didn’t get his first one-on-one meeting with Obama until August 2010, almost 20 months into his presidency. A freshman House Republican was told by White House staff that he would need to ‘behave’ if he appeared with the president in Michigan. A senior Senate Republican learned on the Sunday talk shows that the administration had targeted him as a possible vote for the consumer watchdog head — and didn’t hear directly from the White House for three more days, via email from a legislative liaison…
“But nobody expects bipartisanship to break out this year. Maybe not even next year, when the presidential campaign is over and when it should be easier to govern without so much political risk.
“Obama acknowledged last month that he hadn’t changed the tone in Washington — and he may not be able to.
“‘It was gonna take more than a year,’ Obama told CBS’s ‘60 Minutes.’ ‘It was gonna take more than two years. It was gonna take more than one term. Probably takes more than one president.’
“This wasn’t his line four years ago. He said it wouldn’t be easy, but there was no talk then of a two-term proposition, or longer.
“In introducing Joe Biden as his vice presidential nominee in August 2008, Obama said: ‘After decades of steady work across the aisle, I know he’ll be able to help me turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington, so we can bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda that works for the American people’…
“Days after Republicans won control of the House in November 2010, Obama pledged to return to the bipartisan principles of his 2008 campaign.
“‘I neglected some things that matter a lot to people, and rightly so: maintaining a bipartisan tone in Washington,’ he said. ‘I’m going to redouble my efforts to go back to some of those first principles’…
“But after the debt ceiling debacle and the failed efforts to forge a ‘grand bargain’ on deficit reduction, the Obama experiment officially collapsed…
“A frequent complaint is that Obama did little to build relationships with Boehner and McConnell during the first two years of his presidential term, when he didn’t need them because Democrats controlled both chambers.
“Obama has frayed nerves and relationships by seizing power from a Congress unwilling or unable to stop him: a Libya operation for which he neither sought nor waited for congressional approval, an endless stream of ‘We Can’t Wait’ executive orders and the president’s relentless criticism of Republicans on jobs.
“He stunned Republicans with the recess appointments, but they were only the latest aggravation.
“‘He already doesn’t have a relationship. It is like cheating on the girlfriend you never visit,’ said a senior Senate GOP leadership aide…
Click Here To Read The Article: http://politi.co/zSl9yr
###
Republican Party Stanislaus
Take action
