Posted on 08/26/2009 12:24:20 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
After a rough week for health care reform, Democratic leaders appear to be pulling back on their demand for a public option. It remains to be seen whether liberal Democrats, especially in the House where they are more numerous, will go along with this. But this is still a step in the right direction to get something passed this year.
The public option was an overreach. The White House's erroneous belief that it could get it through the legislature - or at least that it could let four out of five congressional committees push it - was a misinterpretation of last year's election results. It has already made a similar mistake with cap-and-trade, backing a House bill that appears to have no chance of success in the Senate.
Bismarck once commented that politics is the art of the possible. So far, the White House has not exhibited a good understanding of exactly what is possible in this political climate. It has been acting as though the President's election was a major change in the ideological orientation of the country.
A lot of liberals certainly saw it as such. All the strained comparisons of Obama to Franklin Roosevelt were a tipoff that many were talking themselves into the idea that the 2008 election created an opportunity for a substantial, leftward shift in policy. Yet the election of 2008 was not like the 1932 contest. It wasn't like 1952, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1980, 1984, or even 1988, either. Obama's election was narrower than all of these. FDR won 42 of 48 states. Eisenhower won 39, then 41. Johnson won 44 of 50. Nixon won 49. Reagan won 44, then 49. George H.W. Bush won 40. Obama won 28, three fewer than George W. Bush in his narrow 2004 reelection.(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
His mandate was to be the first black president. That’s it.
His policies never polled well and he ran to the center during his scampaign when talking to flyover country. Privileged audiences on the coasts got to hear him speak out against the mushheads who cling to guns and religion and tradition.
He did win by a margin of 2:1 and presidents with lesser margins of victory have claimed a “mandate.”
mandate
A noun
1 mandate
the commission that is given to a government and its policies through an electoral victory
Well, "Hope and Change" was in there somewhere too.
But that didn't stop it from happening last time.
That would mean that President Bush had a mandate in 2001. Do you think the Democrats would’ve agreed with you at the time?
I liked this guy’s analysis. He wasn’t just jawboning; he laid out stats from which he drew his conclusions.
Too bad that no one took the few minutes to do a similar analysis at the WH.
You're not wrong.
And he's not doing that so swell, either.
“His mandate was to be the first black president. That’s it.”
This irratates the hell out of me because he’s mulatto not black so he’s use to caliming something he is not, he’s probably not a natural born citizen but we’ll never know, he’s a socialist, a marxist and above all an idiot.
Due to the uproar connected with the resolving of that election and the closeness of the race, I would think that they wouldn't agree. I believe that most people think that a mandate is predicated on the size of the victory instead of, as the definition states, the victory itself.
The problem (one of many) with this president and his thugs Axelrod and Emmanuel is they still think they are in Chicago and can threaten everyone to get what they want.
Elected officials in Washington know any president can serve for a MAX of 8 years while they can spend their lives as Congress critters. In the end they are not at all likely to do anything to help him that will in any way cause them a disadvantage in the next election they must participate in. This is why so many on the Left are running away from the clown and his thugs.
David Copperfield's ingratiating scoundrel fits Rahm Emanuel to a tee. Uriah Heep was notorious for wielding undue influence, a manipulative bounder who was always planning and plotting, ingratiating himself into the confidence of others. Uriah Heep was obsequious, manipulative, and wormed his way into positions of influence. Uriah was a consummate con man, and not to be trusted.
Translated into the language of the popular culture, Uriah Heeps, like Rahm, position themselves as amenable to American qualities of compassion, but are insincere in these feelings; Emanuel uses important issues to advance his hidden agendas and political ambitions.
Like Uriah Heep, power-hungry Rahm feeds on others, and deploys self-serving strategies for his own self-absorbed purposes.
We conservatives are on to this. Conservatives are aware of Whom they serve and watch carefully to see if government promises made to them are empty.
We know this-----Rahm evinces an utter contempt for our culture and is obsessed with party politics. Watch Rahm closely---he speaks softly--so as not to alarm. He coyly soeaks the language to appeal to American values, but he is not a true believer, he is a calculating conniver----a latter-day Uriah Heep.
EXCERPT Republicans are once again ascendant—and for this they can thank Rahm Emanuel. John Batchelor gets the scoop from gleeful conservatives on the trail of Democratic destruction left by Obama’s bullying enforcer.
Suddenly the disgraced and demoralized Republican Congress has an unearned future, thanks to the superhuman clumsiness of a man who has made himself indispensable to the Obama admin and insufferable to the Democratic Congress, COS Rahm Emanuel.
The GOP always knew that Emanuel was a problem that could not be solved and could only be endured while he served three tempestuous terms in the House.
But now the beleaguered Democratic majority is learning painfully that Emanuel’s talents for bullying, whimsical favoritism, cheerful power-grabbing, and self-congratulatory earthiness have transformed the first 100 days of the Obama admin’s seamless accomplishment into a second 100 days of blame and gloom.
First, Emanuel used frontman Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont), the Finance Committee chair, to ditch the health-care public option, while sending Pres Obama to speak softly at dinner at the home of prickly Senator Charles Grassley (R-Grant Wood).
The latest Emanuel co-authored ploy—forcing health-care legislation through in the fall with Democratic-only votes—underlines that the White House has become as deaf, daring, and driven as the fabled Democratic machines of Tammany Hall or Emanuel’s own Cook County, where he was a once and future fundraiser for the Daleys.“We suck,” a blunt Republican partisan reports, “but they suck more right now.”
Trusted touts like Charlie Cook speak of a Democratic loss of at least 20 seats in the House. Republican Party fundraising is up, Republican recruitment is up—even in blue NH, where a potential loss of Judd Gregg’s US Senate seat is now a likely win with the recruiting of the popular AG Kelly Ayotte—and the GOP’s cheeks have a glow not related to shame.
“It’s Rahm,” a Republican partisan tells me. “The cowardly, brain-dead Republicans are claiming they’ve done something. But it’s Rahm. If Rahm goes, the Dems will not do worse. But it might be hard to undo the damage.”
Like the gifted and overwrought Maximilien de Robespierre once upon a time, Rahm Emanuel has taken control of a revolutionary movement he did not help create nor much contribute to while it was gathering strength under the oppression of the ancien régime of George W. Bush. And just like Robespierre,
Emanuel has turned the president’s kitchen cabinet of trusted ex-campaign workers, led by David Axelrod (whose ex-PR firm has enjoyed $12M in fees so far from fronts controlled by the administration-directed DNC, Mark Lippert, and Denis McDonough (a dynamic duo of hatchetmen on the National Security Council), into a Committee for Public Safety that terrorizes Washington’s royals willy-nilly.
“I saw one [Democratic] member walk up to him and ask, ‘So how did you make $18 million in an afternoon sitting at a table in Chicago?’ And Rahm just turned and walked away. It gets to him.” Just now, Emanuel’s unusually good fortune in Chicago in making $18 million in a very short time may be the only thing on the planet that gets to him.
A twist of fate is that as Emanuel’s authority and ambition grow, reaching for swift closure to foreign commitments, staging bipartisan fantasy cruises, then reaching to construct Democratic-only laws that turn the theory of checks and balances into an unlimited credit card on the Treasury, the polling points not only to a rising tide of facedown Republicans but also to a sinking approval rating for a president who entirely controls Emanuel’s fate.
Is there a lesson in the detail that the French Revolution waited too long to turn on Robespierre’s ruthless genius, and by the time the guillotine fell, the ludicrously reactionary aristocracy had rallied throughout Europe and led a counterrevolution that swept liberty into the ditch for another lifetime? John Batchelor is radio host of the John Batchelor Show in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
SOURCE http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-25/how-rahm-is-reviving-the-gop/
Did that margin analysis factor for the ACORN, Prison, Illegal Alien, Bus Tour, Dead, and Comatose votes?
Simple, you think people voted FOR you when they were actually voting AGAINST the other guy.
Dear Leader came by his nickname SNOBama honestly.
It is incredible to me that more people could not believe just how much of an arrogant elitist he truly was, given the words he spoke in “unguarded” periods of time. Perhaps in the future at least some will think more carefully, and realize that there are a whole load of liberals who honestly believe they can determine how your life should be lived better than you can.
“How do you misread something that doesn’t exist?”
The question should be: “Why did the ‘electorate’ vote for ‘hope and change’ when no-one knew what it was and no-one could explain it?
(Those who voted for “hope and change” have a lot of ‘splainin to do.)
IMHO
How did you calculate that margin? To me two to one means he got twice as many votes.
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