Posted on 12/11/2010 2:06:06 PM PST by re_tail20
Nearly 200 cartoons hang on Sen. Mitch McConnell's office wall, each lampooning him for backing big money politics, vexing his foes and getting slammed through a basketball hoop by an airborne President Barack Obama.
At the halftime of Obama's first term, McConnell is the one soaring. Last month's elections that gave Republicans control of the House, more seats in the Senate and blew the Democrats into glum disarray gave McConnell, R-Ky., almost as much power over the government's direction as the president himself.
The looming expiration of tax cuts provided an early opportunity to exploit that clout. The White House came to McConnell for a deal. Quietly, McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden, colleagues in the Senate for decades, hashed out an agreement balanced with big victories, tough concessions — and heartburn for all concerned.
"We have the deal," McConnell told Biden.
"We are on," Biden responded.
No player benefited more than McConnell.
Whatever its fate, the agreement moved the 68-year-old Senate minority leader beyond the agenda-blocking role that defined him the past two years. There's now a fragile nexus between the Obama White House and congressional Republicans where there had been scant communication, a precedent for making policy together rather than standoffs.
The "Obama-McConnell" deal, as Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., derided it, put McConnell at the table with the president he has vowed to turn from office.
If the relationship holds, the Obama White House will be dealing with the Republicans' most agile negotiator, stone-faced, governed by discipline and swathed in Southern gentility. McConnell is a conservative ideologue at heart who operates as leader with cold pragmatism and a lawyerly approach to persuasion.
"I don't want the president to fail. I want him to change," McConnell says in almost every public forum.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
They have indeed failed the first test. This is why the incumbents have to go. Apparently they learned nothing from the TEA success in the election.
McConnell has a lot of power...for now. In January that power shifts to Boehner.
Is anyone able to pick up a scent on the DREAM ACT?
Oh yeah, then how come the WSJ is reporting that Obama has his 67 votes to get ratification of that pathetic START treaty. The 67 votes include 6 or 7 Republican senators.
Why do I believe the WSJ? Is it because Republicans have consistently snatched defeat from the jaws of victory so many times in the past?
How come McConnell can't marshal his forces to send this treaty packing? Exactly what is Obama promising these Senators that can induce them to leave the plantation?
Why is it so important to have this worthless treaty ratified before the swearing in of the new Senate, just after the first of the new year? Why are these Senators so willing to help this loser to the detriment of the security of this country?
I am deeply depressed.
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