[lbo-talk] Why Obama doesn't suck

Marv Gandall marvgand at gmail.com
Wed Nov 10 18:29:23 PST 2010


On 2010-11-10, at 7:43 PM, SA wrote:


> On 11/10/2010 7:23 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
>
>
> Oh, give me a damn break, Marv. If compromise is motherhood and apple pie, why are the Republicans in this poll opposed to it?

What incentive do they have to compromise? It is the Obama administration which has given way on each occasion, and progressively emboldened the tougher-minded and more politically savvy Republican leadership, backed by it's crazed base, to keep demanding concessions and refusing to deal. Why not? How many schoolyard bullies have you seen "compromising" with someone who piously says they will not fight back?

Or if you don't like metaphors, I know from my own experience that employers have no incentive to compromise with unions who telegraph from the beginning that they prefer compromise to confrontation.

At least, the unions can plead with some justification that the relationship of forces in the industrial arena is now so adverse that the strike threat, their only source of bargaining power, is no longer credible.

What Charles, Woj, and perhaps yourself and others, don't seem to grasp, however, is that the relationship of forces immediately after 2008 favoured Obama. He was swept into power with a huge congressional majority. The Republicans and Wall Street were discredited and on the defensive. The country was in crisis, and the people, including those who would never before have voted for a black man, put Obama into office because they wanted change, not weak compromises which left the status quo largely intact, or worse. Armed with that kind of mandate, what I earlier described as "a bourgeois politician with gumption" - a Roosevelt or a Reagan - would have gone for the jugular. Instead, this 98 pound political weakling extended a helping hand to the bully on the mat and earnestly said he hoped they would be friends.

Obama has fortuitously been handed an issue which can powerfully help to undo the grievous self-inficted damage of his tenure to date in the White House. Even congressional Democrats who went along with his earlier surrenders urged him to exploit the Bush tax cuts to reactivate his own base and win back the many independents who typically vacillate between which appears to be the stronger of the two parties. The perception of weakness can be as fatal in politics as in the schoolyard, as in life.



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