This worries and pisses me off - if Republicans get rewarded for this type of behavior, America is

Pirate Smile

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Fri Oct-21-11 11:08 AM
Original message

This worries and pisses me off - if Republicans get rewarded for this type of behavior, America is

Edited on Fri Oct-21-11 11:33 AM by Pirate Smile

screwed:

@ThePlumLineGS Greg Sargent Voter tells AP: I support Obama's policies, but he can't get them passed, so I may vote for Romney: http://wapo.st/nf0NoR

Republicans are essentially telling the public that unless they are in power they will refuse to let the government function.

Why GOP benefits from blocking jobs policies the public supports

By Greg Sargent

The Associated Press, in a story about the new AP poll, interviews a voter who captures the dynamic perfectly :

“If Romney and Obama were going head to head at this point in time I would probably move to Romney,” said Dale Bartholomew, 58, a manufacturing equipment salesman from Marengo, Ill. Bartholomew said he agrees with Obama’s proposed economic remedies and said partisan divisions have blocked the president’s initiatives.

But, he added: “His inability to rally the political forces, if you will, to accomplish his goal is what disappoints me.”

And there you have it. This voter agrees with Obama’s policies, but blames the failure to get them enacted on generalized partisanship and Obama’s inability to roll over the GOP — and is prepared to vote against him as a result.

I don’t know if this voter is representative of broader sentiment or not, but I suspect he is, and his reaction to what’s happening is important to flag as a clue to a dynamic we should be watching. Voters either don’t understand, or they don’t care, that the GOP has employed an unprecedented level of filibustering in order to block all of Obama’s policies, even ones that have majority public support from Dems, independents and Republicans alike.

-snip-
Indeed, if the GOP’s strategy is to deliberately create government dysfunction out of a belief that the public will blame Obama for it and lose faith on government in general, turning to GOP ideology instead, it very well may be working. The new AP poll finds that only 41 percent say government can do much to create jobs, a finding that’s borne out in other polls.

What’s probably exacerbating this situation is the truly awful reporting we’re seeing from multiple news orgs on what’s happening here. Jed Lewison rounds up a whole bunch of headlines this morning that only tell readers that the “Senate” rejected the $35 billion in state aid to protect the jobs of teachers and firefighters. Again: News orgs that don’t clearly report that Senate Republicans filibustered the overall jobs bill, and are doing the same with individual pieces of it, refusing to allow a straight up majority vote on any of them, even though they have broad majority public support, are simply misleading their readers and viewers.

This comes after news orgs widely blared the news that the Senate GOP had introduced its own jobs plan without soliciting the views of independent experts on whether that plan would actually ... create jobs. These epic media pathologies, as Kevin Drum has termed them, benefit Republicans, pure and simple.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/why-gop-benefits-from-blocking-jobs-policies-the-public-supports/2011/10/21/gIQAzYCY3L_blog.html

Democrats need to focus on going after the Republicans and making them responsible for what they are doing instead of fighting each other.

edit to add - The voter quoted needs to know that Romney is not going to get those Obama policies he agrees with enacted.

Romney and Republicans will enact the policies that created the financial calamity we are trying to dig our way out of - tax cuts for the rich and funneling more money and resources to the top 1%, oil companies, banks, wall street, etc. along with massive deregulation of everything - getting rid of Dodd Frank, EPA, etc. NOT the Policies the voter AGREES WITH!