There are a lot of things I like about Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia but I’m not going to miss him. He says too many stupid things. I can understand what he means when he argues that Obama took too passive of a role in the construction of his health care bill. We wound up with five different bills produced by five different committees, and the momentum basically stalled-out. But you can’t really say he lost his credibility as a leader when he actually got the bill passed against the longest of odds. And this is just ridiculous:
Webb also said that if Obama had opted for a smaller measure, he would have stood a chance of winning the support of a significant number of Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Jim Webb has to know better than this. Obama’s bill wasn’t opposed because it was “big.” It was opposed because it was his bill. It was supposed to be his Waterloo, remember? Obama was never going to get any support for the bill from Republicans, and pretending otherwise is one of the reasons he didn’t get a better bill a lot sooner in his administration. And what would we have now? A smaller bill? Millions less covered? Less consumer protections?
It’s this kind of ridiculous analysis that is crippling our country’s ability to face up to the reality of the modern Republican Party. Nitpick the president if you must. But he’s not the problem. In fact, in so many ways, he has been the solution. Because our government would be so bereft of common sense and basic morals if McCain, Palin, McConnell, and Boehner were in charge that you would never mistake that country for this one.
this mofo here didn’t even have enough balls to run again…
he can go somewhere and sit down.
POTUS did what every President since TRUMAN wanted to do, but didn’t.
f’em
But, but, but, the bigger bill did pass, last I heard. Is there a point here?
Webb seems to be bi-polar in his loyalties. Has he endorsed Tim Kaine yet?
Wasn’t he originally a Republican?
Yes.
Webb, Kaine, or both?
Webb
Well put.
To the extent that politicians like Webb actually believe that Republicans could have supported any health care bill put forward by a Democratic administration, it’s because their own skin wasn’t in the game. They’d never have such unfounded expectations of Republican fairness if they were negotiating with them for their salaries or their children’s access to college.
One of my most stinging recent regrets is all the hours I spent in a crummy MoveOn office phoning for Webb’s election. He’s been a PITA about 90% of the time since then. Good riddance. His one useful legacy is that he, along with the likes of Nelson and Blanche Lincoln, finally showed outfits like MoveOn and ActBlue the futility of wasting resources on DINOs just to get a “D” after their name on the Congressinoal rollcall.
On the bright side, you helped save us from Senator Allen.
Maybe you can, but I can’t. A major complaint by Congressional Democrats — perhaps the major complaint — about the 1994 HCR effort was that it was just handed to Congress de haut en bas by Mrs. Clinton and Ira Magaziner.
Obama took considerable pains to avoid this recurring — and now is blamed for doing it.
And that middle ground was that once August 2009 rolled around the White House went to Democrat caucusing Senators holding out and said what would it take get your vote for this bill. Okay that is it. Let’s make a deal. That is where I think the administration messed up. They were right to let the congress take the lead but once it started stalling they should have stepped in as the dealmaker and got it done.
We’re still arguing about health care? Maybe we can take the stimulus out for another test drive.
nice! I like your comment!.
while we’re reminiscing about summer of 2009, I loved seeing all those giant wind propellars blades being trucked around on the highways as I did an 18 state drive-around of the US. (later saw many of them had sprouted along Rt 80 in Iowa) Also saw the stimpak being put to use on many highway improvement projects.
Interesting to compare this with Jonathan Chait’s piece in the current issue of New York magazine:
“It seems overwhelmingly likely that the wall of conservative rage and distrust would have been built almost regardless of what Obama did, and that conservatives would have interpreted almost any agenda he put forward through a lens of paranoia.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/04/why-did-obamas-bipartisanship-fail.html
Really, everything was doomed from the start. I’m surprised he got anything done with the filibuster, faithless Democrats, shitty economy, conventional-wisdom spouting media, etc, etc. I never believed that the bipartisan stuff was going to work but that’s the platform he was elected on.
W was “elected” on a platform of compassionate conservatism. Did that tie his hands?
And if any one word defines Obama’s platform, it was change. His reticence was his own.
Wow, a politician who tries to honor what he said in his campaign. How dishonorable!
ranger11, you are forgetting, Obama is just like Bush.
Strawman argument aside, my comment made two defensible points: Obama was elected with a primary mandate for bold change, not bipartisanship. And if we even concede to your characterization of his mandate, Presidents in the past haven’t used the circumstances of their elections to limit their agenda.
I believe that President Obama made huge mistakes in pursuing his fetish of bipartisanship despite evidence to the contrary that many of us saw at the time. You can disagree with that, but snark about my associating campaign honesty with being dishonorable isn’t persuasive.
Obama was elected with a primary mandate for bold change, not bipartisanship.
You mean the “There are no red states and blue states, only the United States?” The candidate for whom the term “post-partisan” was invented? The guy who kept telling the story about Republicans whispering when they said they supported him?
I think you’re memory is failing you here: the promise of bipartisan comity and elevating solutions above polarized antagonism was the biggest change on which Obama’s support was based.
that wasn’t a strawman rebuttal. It was exactly on point.
Now, you’re correct that Obama paid a price for playing the cuckold for all of 2009, but he would have paid a price for not doing so. Don’t forget that.
You may be taking a simplistic approach to what got Obama elected. Yes, on the one hand, he used the words hope and change a lot. They were central to his campaign. But he also campaigned as an unorthodox Democrat who would change the partisan bickering in DC. He even wrote a book largely dedicated to the idea that we can govern another way by working on the things the two parties agree about. Page through The Audacity of Hope today and you’ll see it as hopelessly naive. But you can’t discount its appeal and the centrality of that appeal to Obama’s success as a candidate.
McConnell decided prior to the inauguration to pursue a strategy of delay and obstruction not seen since pre-Civil War days. That decision made Obama’s message naive, but also presented him with a problem. How to demonstrate the Republicans’ bad-faith at the same time that he kept faith? How to get things done in the face of total opposition?
His grade as president must be measured against these realities.
Right, he faced an extremely difficult political situation no matter what he did, and they let him know it from day one. Yet somehow — look at what he’s accomplished — and what have they accomplished?
http://www.editedforclarity.com/2012/02/09/politics-and-poker-why-the-gop-keeps-getting-backed-into-
corners/
We agree on a lot, one of them perhaps being that we have more pressing things to debate than Obama’s mandate in 2008. I’d just note that if on November 5th, 2008, a Republican wrote an op-ed saying that Obama and Democrats were elected without a mandate for boldly changing our policies but instead with a mandate for compromising with Republicans, I would have disagreed just as strongly then.
Actually, the change has been immense, particularly considering the constraints of endlessly obstructionist republicans and too many conservaDems.
The logic of an alert 5-year old is an immense change from Bush.
Without getting into an endless and repetitive debate, I can’t agree that there’s been the reasonably hoped-for change in even the statements by the administration on economic policy, civil rights, or the urgency of environmental regulation.
The logic of an alert 5-year old is an immense change from Bush.
Indeed.
Which is why your insistence that only the passage of your preferred agenda in its entirety could represent “change” is so wrong-headed.
This is just silly. My comment referenced statements, not passage of an agenda. And you have no reason to believe that I’m demanding my “preferred agenda in its entirety”. As you seem to be discussing these topics with a caricature of me, I’ll say good night.
My comment referenced statements, not passage of an agenda.
Is this supposed to be a defense? That when you were talking about “change,” you only mean some pretty words, not an actual agenda?
If I “caricatured” you, I did so by making you look better.
W was “elected” on a platform of compassionate conservatism. Did that tie his hands?
Yes, actually, until 9/11 Changed Everything.
Before that, he was pushing a Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit and working to get Ted Kennedy on board with his education bill.
It was doomed from the start because it had to go through Max Baucus. Guess whose legislative aide (former VP-Government Relations of Wellpoint) wrote the legislation that was marked up? It t’weren’t the Gang of Six.
But remember Hilliarycare got stopped by Daniel Patrick Monyihan, who was a previous chair of the Senate Finance Committee.
Progressives hold these cards in Congress when progressive members of Congress have enough seniority and chutzpah to get beyond the HELP committee and the environment committee to get on Budget, Finance, Rules.
Well, Barney Frank said very similar things recently.
Why Barney?! Why?!
Simple answer—because 2010 was such a disaster.
It couldn’t be Congress’s fault, eh Barney?
Scott Brown carried Frank’s district.
A whiff of grapeshot…
because he has to account for his cowardice and his prediction that health care couldn’t pass.
I can’t understand where people who criticize Obama’s political performance in actually passing comprehensive health care reform, after so many decades of Democratic Presidents trying and failing, are coming from. If his approach was so flawed, why is he the only one who was able to succeed?
Webb’s comments are like saying, “Sure, Roger Marris hit 61 home runs in a season, but why didn’t he hit 75? I’ve never actually played professional baseball, but if he’d fixed his batting stance, he would be a lot more respected as a power hitter.”
Met him my freshmen year of college in 2006, hated his guts from the get-go.
His only redeeming moment in Congress was taking on the prions and trying to reform our criminal statutes. Kaine’s not going to be much better, but he’s more of a team player. That means he’ll work to protect other Establishment Dems from a primary — but it also means he’ll vote for the president’s agenda without too much of a kerfuffle.