Posted on 09/16/2013 7:00:37 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
GOP House speaker John Boehner is making a strained effort to check House Republicans in their hell-bent charge against President Obama on the budget, continued government funding and their pet loathing, the Affordable Care Act. His effort is fruitless for one simple reason. The Tea Party, which backed House Republicans loudly, and the GOP establishment quietly, will never shed their obsessive dream of making the Obama presidency a failed presidency.
GOP leaders in and out of Congress have been relentlessly hectored, harangued, badgered and even politically threatened by GOP ultra-conservatives to not give an inch on any issue that Obama proposes. This applies to issues that in years past they would have led the charge to approve. This was plainly evident in the noisy GOP protests over Obama’s threat togop-logo attack Syria. Who, in their wildest fantasies, would have thought that Sarah Palin, of all people, would pithily say “let Allah sort it all out” in opposing a Syrian attack.
This was no aberration or accident. Palin spoke for the hard right faction in the GOP that controls the House and a big chunk of the GOP’s base. If it had been President Bush making the identical attack proposal, with the exception of possibly a handful of libertarian leaning GOP backers, they almost certainly would have cheered the prospect of a strike. But it wasn’t Bush. It was Obama. There is undoubtedly a racial edge to much of their fury against Obama. From time to time, a GOP official, top backer, or anti-Obama protestors will show their hand by regaling Obama with border line racially insulting name calling, and depictions of him. But even if they did not race bait, and confined themselves solely to hitting Obama on political issues, it wouldn’t change another fact.
The GOP has read the political tea leaves and knows that for now there is little chance of taking back the White House in 2016. And though the likelihood is good they’ll retain their majority rule in the House, the Senate is no sure bet to take back in 2014. The one possible game changer is to continue to paint Obama as inept, indecisive, and ineffectual. The hope is that this relentless negative typecasting will fire up GOP supporters, dispirit enough Democrats, and anger enough voters to sow doubts about Democrats. The GOP got some traction out of the Syria crisis, when the overwhelming majority of Americans voiced strong opposition to an attack. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll even found that the GOP had gained some ground with the public at the expense of Democrats on the public’s perennial worry about America’s direction. They even had an edge over the Democrats on foreign policy handling, and of all things the economy and health care.
The GOP will ride this gust of more favorable public opinion to dither, delay and obstruct even more intensely the implementation and funding of health care reforms, tax and budget proposals, and regulatory reforms that still need bipartisan cooperation to pass. This is crucial since Obama needs to strike deals and make compromises with the GOP to get anything done in Congress. That necessity is even more compelling given the coming, potentially rancorous battle over the debt ceiling, immigration reform, spending cuts, and reforms of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A prolonged war with the GOP that results in the White House getting little or none of its legislative agenda through Congress runs the risk of souring public opinion not just on the GOP but the White House. This has been the bane of other presidents during their second term and has marred their legacy.
Then there’s the power of money. The GOP still has plenty of it. Its Super Pacs and mega funders have bankrolled ads on the Fox Network blasting the Affordable Care Act. No other issue is intimately tied in the public mind to Obama as closely as is his health care act. Though the GOP stands almost no chance of defunding the Act, its ferocious targeting of it drives home the point that this is a measure that many want to see scrapped, and that the only thing supposedly standing in the way of that is Senate Democrats and Obama. In any case, it’s another fail safe ploy to tar the administration.
The GOP’s greatest weapon is the frozen political divide in the country. Nearly 50 percent of the nation’s voters not only did not support Obama in 2012, but expressed total contempt for his policies and his administration. The GOP banks that it can swivel this divisiveness into sustained opposition to those policies, and that it can buy enough time with that until the 2014 midterm elections and further boost its numbers in the House and especially the Senate.
The notion that the GOP was well on its way to becoming a non-entity in national politics was delusional thinking. Its cynical mix of money, political one-upmanship, set-in-stone ideology, and racial bigotry toward an African-American president, insures that the GOP will continue to come at Obama with its political guns blazing. The aim never changes and that’s to make Obama’s presidency a failed presidency.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a journalist, author, sociologist, and media critic.[1]
Hutchinson is the author of nine books about the African American experience.[2] He is the director of the National Alliance for Positive Action,[3] and is a contributor to a variety of news outlets and websites on varying topics concerning politics and race,[4][5][2][6] and is often interviewed for various print and broadcast outlets.[7][8] He is the host of The Hutchinson Report on KPFK-FM.[9]
His 1996 book Betrayed: The Presidential Failure to Protect Black Lives contributed to publicizing the 1964 murders of two African American teenagers by Ku Klux Klansman James Ford Seale.[4] Seale was eventually tried and convicted, and in August 2007 he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms.[10]
His father, Earl Hutchinson Sr., is the lead author of A Colored Man's Journey Through 20th Century Segregated America. His daughter Sikivu Hutchinson is a feminist atheist activist and author.
Hutchinson has taken part in the controversy about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, accusing the former pontiff of being complicit in the crimes of the Nazis and opposing his sainthood.[11]
Hutchinson is also the founder of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable (LAUPR), which sponsors community forums and provides grant funding to nonprofit grassroots organizations. The LAUPR's Impact Micro Awards are made to support organizations and individuals that have a proven track record of commitment to building community sustainability projects, activities, and service. Grantees have included the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, Eso Won Bookstore, Korean American Historical Society and Centro Latino for Literacy.
Fixed It For You ™
Hey Earl, Obummer doesn’t need any help at all from the GOP to make him a failed president, he’s done it on his own.
No, seriously, this guy didn't just write this, did he? Really? I mean, REALLY?
The GOP vacillates between apathy and trying to cover for the man.
Obama's doing this all by himself.
Exactly. But to the blindly loyal Maobamist, their leader can “never be wrong.” It always has to be the GOP’s or somebody else’s “fault”.
Lot of adjectives could be appropriately used to describe this man’s racism and stupidity. Take your pick.
Good reading if you want proof that Obama was put on the ticket for no other reason than he is [or at least appears] black.
Also, solid proof that the effort on the part of the left to incite racial violence is still running full steam. Stay alert & carry.
News flash from “The white man”: Barack Obama is hell bent on making me responsible for all the woes in the world while he asks my wife for a kiss, and undermines my authority over my children.
Black men need to stop being such whiners.
and your point is?
Failed president? Obama has no problem doing that for himself. Is it tee time yet?
The GOP can’t make Obama a failed president. Obama is doing that all by himself.
Translation: Obama’s pathetic presidency and leadership is the GOP’s fault. Solution: take another vacation, Barry!
Great. A multi-generational feeder at the racist trough, waiting for their next heaping helping of slop.
Not that I believe it is true, but how about if the “author” attempts to put together a list of how and when the demoncrats tried to help Republican Presidents be successful.
Where’s the photoshoped pic of Bambi on the back of a horse holding on to Putin? This thread needs it.
Someone send it to this chucklehead
Translated from Ebonics?
Giving GOP too much credit...
The GOP can’t make a paper airplane.
Obama doesn’t need the GOPs help, and they don’t even try to stop him.
obama is a failed president in spite of the GOP
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