3.4.10
More than anything else, Barack Obama’s political rise was defined by the promise that he would usher in an era of post-partisanship after the bitter divisiveness that scarred Washington during the Bush years.
“The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states,” Obama famously lamented when he burst onto the
national scene during his speech to the 2004 Democratic National
Convention.
On the night he was elected Senator that November, when Republicans retained control of all branches of government, Obama said that his “understanding of the Senate is that you need 60 votes to get something significant to happen, which means that Democrats and Republicans have to ask the question, do we have the will to move an American agenda forward, not a Democratic or Republican agenda forward?”
In 2006, he tried to disabuse his “fellow progressives” of the “notion that we should function sort of like Karl Rove where we identify our core base, we throw ’em red meat, we get a 50-plus-one victory.”
While running for president in 2007, he told the Concord Monitor that “We are not going to pass universal health care with a 50-plus one strategy.”
Instead, candidate Obama talked about building a “movement for change” in which citizens get organized and take an active role in agitating their lawmakers.
But any chance Obama had of living up to his well-honed image as a post-partisan leader was tossed aside on Wednesday, as the president urged Democrats in Congress to disregard public opinion and ram through his health care bill using a parliamentary maneuver that doesn’t require bipartisan support.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE!
No comments:
Post a Comment