Obama vs. Congress: The politics of ‘no’

Will President Obama and the Republicans find common ground?

“The gloves are off,” said Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times. “Hope” and “change” may still be part of President Obama’s rhetorical arsenal, but there’s a new message emanating from the White House, aimed directly at Republicans who have methodically blocked his ambitious agenda: “No more Mr. Nice Guy.” In his State of the Union address last week, Obama pointedly told Senate Republicans that if they are going to insist that 60 votes are needed in the Senate to get anything accomplished in Washington, “then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well.” Two days later, meeting with House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore, Obama accused his hosts of practicing “the politics of no” and of being more interested in partisan warfare than in solving the nation’s problems. “Let’s start thinking of each other as Americans first,” he said in yet another speech this week. “I don’t want an attitude, ‘If Obama loses, we win.’”

But why would Republicans want to find common ground with Obama? said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. For all the talk about Obama’s “pivoting to the center,” he’s a liberal ideologue who’s wedded to a Big Government, big deficit agenda. It’s not just a handful of Republican congressmen who aren’t buying health-care “reform” and bogus “stimulus” spending—it’s most Americans. “At the core of Obama’s trouble is a misreading of the 2008 election,” said Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard. America is still “a center-right country,” but Obama thought his victory was a mandate for “sweeping initiatives” bringing massive deficit spending and costly caps on emissions, and expanding government bureaucracy. He was wrong, and his plummeting poll numbers prove it.

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