Watch the Tone in Washington
By CHARLES M. BLOW
NYT
It took just two weeks for Washington’s Kumbaya experiment in bipartisan civility to explode in turgid rants, finger-pointing and re-entrenchment.
Tuesday night, Obama did a speed-dating circuit with television anchors at the White House, and repeatedly dismissed Republican objections to the stimulus bill as trifling. He told Anderson Cooper on CNN that if you add up all the programs that have been criticized, the total “amounts to less than one percent of the total package.” (That’s still quite a bit of money to those of us who don’t have the power to print it.) He also wrote an editorial in which he scolded “misguided criticisms.”
This must have been the glove slap to the face for Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
The next day, Graham went ballistic on the Senate floor. “This bill stinks. The process that’s led to this bill stinks.” He continued: “If this is the new way of doing business, if this is the change we all can believe in, America’s best days are behind her.” Later on Fox News, Graham said Obama has been AWOL on this bill, and then he went even further: “The president has not led. He has tried to campaign. The campaign is over. We have got to govern.” Ouch.
(More here.)
NYT
It took just two weeks for Washington’s Kumbaya experiment in bipartisan civility to explode in turgid rants, finger-pointing and re-entrenchment.
Tuesday night, Obama did a speed-dating circuit with television anchors at the White House, and repeatedly dismissed Republican objections to the stimulus bill as trifling. He told Anderson Cooper on CNN that if you add up all the programs that have been criticized, the total “amounts to less than one percent of the total package.” (That’s still quite a bit of money to those of us who don’t have the power to print it.) He also wrote an editorial in which he scolded “misguided criticisms.”
This must have been the glove slap to the face for Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
The next day, Graham went ballistic on the Senate floor. “This bill stinks. The process that’s led to this bill stinks.” He continued: “If this is the new way of doing business, if this is the change we all can believe in, America’s best days are behind her.” Later on Fox News, Graham said Obama has been AWOL on this bill, and then he went even further: “The president has not led. He has tried to campaign. The campaign is over. We have got to govern.” Ouch.
(More here.)
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