Posted on 03/31/2010 1:03:50 PM PDT by seanmerc
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is learning to be a strong president. Yes, he can.
When Obama took office, it wasn’t clear whether he had any firm principles. This perspective grew when he seemed oblivious to the harsh reality that Republicans weren’t going to sign on to his health care plan, no matter what.
Obama became the Great Compromiser when he watered down his original concepts in a vain effort to appease his opponents, even though they had zero interest in working with him.
The president had a light-bulb moment, at least publicly, earlier this week when he was interviewed by Matt Lauer for NBC’s "Today Show."
Lauer, emphatically noting that not a single Republican in Congress had voted for the health care bill, asked Obama how a new law could be good for the American public if it failed to win any bipartisan support.
Obama replied that he thought the "Republican Party made a calculated decision, a political decision, that they would not support whatever we did. There was a quote by a well-known Republican senator who said, `This is going to be Obama’s Waterloo. . . We’re going to bring him down just the same way that we brought down Bill Clinton, by making sure that health care fails.'"
Well, yes, Mr. President. Mindless Republican obstructionism has been blatantly obvious for many months. You are a late-comer to this realization.
In the closing weeks of the national debate over health care, Obama ended up using his powers of persuasion with his own wavering Democrats by making it clear that their political future was at stake, too. And it paid off.
I’ve often observed that there is no such thing as an "instant president." Obama has been a good model for that rule, as were so many of his predecessors.
With his health care reform victory, Obama seems newly energized. Last weekend, with Congress away on its two-week spring break, the president for the first time used his constitutional power to bypass the Senate and make recess appointments when he appointed 15 people to their federal posts. The White House said the 15 nominations had been awaiting Senate confirmation for an average of seven months.
"The United States Senate has the responsibility to approve or disprove of my nominees," Obama explained. "But if, in the interest of scoring political points, Republicans in the Senate refuse to exercise that responsibility, I must act in the interest of the American people and exercise my authority to fill these positions on an interim basis."
Then the president hopped on Air Force One for a quick trip to Afghanistan where he sternly lectured our puppet ally, Hamid Karzai, about his corrupt and feeble leadership.
Obama is fired up and ready!
Now the president needs to use his political muscles to change our financial regulatory system. It’s astonishing that two years after the financial meltdown that sent this nation into the Great Recession, the same regulatory framework is still in place that allowed it to happen.
Congress dithers and Wall Street has signed up armies of lobbyists to try and work their way with lawmakers.
The nation’s financial institutions have shown no remorse or given any signal that they learned something from the current economic debacle.
The taxpayers bailed out some banks that were deemed too big to fail, all this at a time when thousands of people were losing their jobs and their homes.
Get tough, Mr. President. Don’t let stupid greed ruin our country.
Yoo-hoo, Helen Thomas ping list members! Here's this week's liberal lunacy. FReepmail me to get added to the list.
Thanks for posting but I can’t read that drivel and there are no posts to read yet. I’ll check back later.
We all wind up with the face we deserve.
Don't you just love unbiased reporting in the media? Personally, I think the obstructionism makes sense because the policy doesn't. But then, the MSM also thinks Helen is a beauty queen, too.
“Mindless Republican obstructionism has been blatantly obvious for many months.”
Yoo hoo, Helen! Mindless Dim-o-crat obstructionism was blatantly obvious for the entire presidency of George Bush. I suppose THAT doesn’t count for anything, though, does it? Foolish question, I know.
That opposition he had to "appease" was in the Democrat Party. So much for "objectivity" in reporting, evil witch.
Nobody in their right mind thinks Helen Thomas is a beauty queen.
do you smoke crack-cocaine?
He is learning to be strong? Does this not imply that we have elected a very weak leader?
She’s got that nose thing going on like Streisand. I don’t know why, but I find that attractive.
i dated mainly jewish chicks in high school, but THAT schnoz and what’s connected to it? ewww!
Are you smoking Crack? She looked like an old hag then too.
“do you smoke crack-cocaine?”
Howl! My first good laugh of the day.
She looks like the emperor in “Star Wars”.
If I was the Emperor, I’d take that as an insult!
To each their own, my FRiend.
They're so cute when they are this age. He reminds me of Stalin as a young man. Learning to purge, imprisoning those with whom you don't agree, appointing like-minded communists to important positions.
Sure a mistake or two along the way; killing twenty million people who don't agree with you tends to put a dent in your voting block.
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