This Isn’t Obama’s Malaise, It’s GOP Intransigence
by Robert Shrum May 3, 2013 4:45 AM EDT, The Daily Beast
It doesn’t matter what the president says or does or whom he drinks with—Republicans are bent on opposing it all. That may be good news for Democrats in 2014 and beyond.
There is a malaise in Washington that’s spreading across the country. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll, “Americans [do] not give Mr. Obama high marks for his handling of issues”—even though they largely, at times overwhelmingly, agree with his positions on background checks for gun sales and a combination of tax increases and spending cuts to rein in the federal deficit.
The disconnect is sharp; the frustration, the sense of ennui palpable from Capitol Hill to California. You could fairly call it the Obama malaise, but it’s not his fault. It’s his very existence, his presence in the Oval Office, that fuels a nihilistic opposition, driving obstruction and seeding an increasingly disillusioned national mood.
That mood is distinctly different from the malaise that prompted Jimmy Carter to his self-pitying crisis-of-confidence speech in the summer of 1979. The crisis he identified then was not merely doubt about national leadership, but something “deeper, deeper”—a “loss of faith” on the part of the American people. He seemed to be saying that they had let the country, and him, down. He urged his fellow citizens “to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying”—to stop whining and to “say something good” about America.
The speech was the profound misdiagnosis of a faltering presidency—a misdiagnosis that is decidedly not the problem today. It’s government that’s failing the people, and not the other way around. Dysfunction in Washington—and the resulting disillusionment that reaches far beyond—are rooted in the animating enmity of a Republican Party that resents Barack Obama’s rule and would ruin him at almost any price.
(More here.)
It doesn’t matter what the president says or does or whom he drinks with—Republicans are bent on opposing it all. That may be good news for Democrats in 2014 and beyond.
There is a malaise in Washington that’s spreading across the country. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll, “Americans [do] not give Mr. Obama high marks for his handling of issues”—even though they largely, at times overwhelmingly, agree with his positions on background checks for gun sales and a combination of tax increases and spending cuts to rein in the federal deficit.
The disconnect is sharp; the frustration, the sense of ennui palpable from Capitol Hill to California. You could fairly call it the Obama malaise, but it’s not his fault. It’s his very existence, his presence in the Oval Office, that fuels a nihilistic opposition, driving obstruction and seeding an increasingly disillusioned national mood.
That mood is distinctly different from the malaise that prompted Jimmy Carter to his self-pitying crisis-of-confidence speech in the summer of 1979. The crisis he identified then was not merely doubt about national leadership, but something “deeper, deeper”—a “loss of faith” on the part of the American people. He seemed to be saying that they had let the country, and him, down. He urged his fellow citizens “to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying”—to stop whining and to “say something good” about America.
The speech was the profound misdiagnosis of a faltering presidency—a misdiagnosis that is decidedly not the problem today. It’s government that’s failing the people, and not the other way around. Dysfunction in Washington—and the resulting disillusionment that reaches far beyond—are rooted in the animating enmity of a Republican Party that resents Barack Obama’s rule and would ruin him at almost any price.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home