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Please stop trying
A lot of Obama's and Democratic success recently has (imo) been due to them finally starting to treat their relations with the GOP like the fight it actually is. Seeing Obama publicly calling out the GOP for obstructing a jobs program, and seeing him bash Romney over the head with Bain capital, is like a breath of fresh air.
The President is a smart man. By now he must know that what is broken about Washington's politics cannot be fixed by goodwill, common sense, heart-to-heart meetings, or a transformative charismatic figure.
Washington is broken because corporations can bribe and intimidate even good legislators with unlimited amounts of money, because the media is more interested in balance than truth, and because about 30-40% of the country truly believes that the government's primary job is to deliver the cosmic justice of divine punishment to those lesser humans who didn't work hard enough enough to be wealthy, male, or white.
Sure, people want to see leadership solve problems. But two halves of this country tend to have very different and diametrically opposed perceptions of what those solutions should be.
Nothing much can be done about that, so it would be nice if the President would stop trying. As the President proved with the Ledbetter Act and the Affordable Care Act, you don't need to fix Washington's culture to impose your will on it. You just need a bare minimum of legislators to pass the bills. All the attempts to achieve compromise with the other side of the aisle were functionally useless. A lot of nasty concessions had to be made to various corporate interests just to get to 60 recalcitrant Senators to pass the Affordable Care Act. We might even have been able to enact single-payer if all we needed were 50 Senators.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/please-stop-trying-to-fix-washington-by.html
Washington is broken because corporations can bribe and intimidate even good legislators with unlimited amounts of money, because the media is more interested in balance than truth, and because about 30-40% of the country truly believes that the government's primary job is to deliver the cosmic justice of divine punishment to those lesser humans who didn't work hard enough enough to be wealthy, male, or white.
Sure, people want to see leadership solve problems. But two halves of this country tend to have very different and diametrically opposed perceptions of what those solutions should be.
Nothing much can be done about that, so it would be nice if the President would stop trying. As the President proved with the Ledbetter Act and the Affordable Care Act, you don't need to fix Washington's culture to impose your will on it. You just need a bare minimum of legislators to pass the bills. All the attempts to achieve compromise with the other side of the aisle were functionally useless. A lot of nasty concessions had to be made to various corporate interests just to get to 60 recalcitrant Senators to pass the Affordable Care Act. We might even have been able to enact single-payer if all we needed were 50 Senators.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/please-stop-trying-to-fix-washington-by.html
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