Some believe this vote will nail the coffin shut on the GOPer attempt to keep a House majority in 2012. It does appear to be unpopular already--and the more people learn about it, the more they dislike it. Without a creditable opponent so far, President Obama now has an issue to use as central to his campaign. This analysis is interesting: that it allows him to return to meta-themes of 2008, this time centered on "compassion."
Before GOPers overwhelmingly passed their budget in the House on Friday (which will have no effect except politically), they were busy bleating about President Obama's speech. Was Obama's Speech Too Fiery? the CS Monitor asked, responding to copious GOPer leaders' expressions of hurt feelings. But Joe Klein at the Time blog called it Wounded Elephants Screeching." "Republican World has become a very self-referential place, only vaguely in touch with reality," Klein writes:
Here is the reality: the Republicans have spent the past 30 years creating deficits and the Democrats have spent the past 30 years closing them. The unimportance of deficits became an article of faith during the second Bush Administration: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney famously said. It has been rather hilarious for those of us with even a minimal grasp of recent history to watch these folks pull fierce 180-degree turns on the issue--and it is even more hilarious to watch them accuse Obama of hyper-partisanship after the dump-truck full of garbage they visited upon his head these past few years.
"Indeed, the sheer hatred that Republicans have for Obama has led them to overreach, to latch onto Paul Ryan's well-outside-the-mainstream budget plan," Klein continues, but it's a particular kind of hatred. In her blog piece about "Pouty Republicans" responding to President Obama's speech, Joan Walsh at Salon noted the remarks of Senate GOPer leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, "he sounds like a headmaster correcting an errant schoolboy about "not only his tone but his direction." He's actually the president, Senator, not a schoolboy...
Other GOPers were dismissive in a particular way. My favorite such response to the President's speech was from a House leader from Texas: "I missed lunch for this?" These remarks owe something to payback for the disrespect many expressed for President GW Bush, although no Dem leader was ever as utterly dismissive of Bush as these GOPers are of President Obama. In this regard, they owe a lot to racism. There's really no getting past that. They can't help themselves. It must be hard for them not to call him boy in public.
So even if President Obama wins re-election and Congress returns to Democratic control in 2012, there's no reset button in life, history or politics. We're losing precious years. There may be benefits--perhaps some purgation of mean spiritedness and racism, though that's a lot to hope for. There may well be changes that won't be reversed, so that the corporate bosses running this party will have gotten what they really want, perhaps at the level of law, particularly state law. But in any case we're losing precious time and wasting resources for the fight of the future as the Climate Crisis takes hold, and all the current projections for the next 20 years of budgets or anything else become vain fantasy.
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