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Friday, August 10, 2012

If Obama Was For It, We Had To Be Against It

Did you think Republicans would set aside their political desires in order to help working class households with the struggles they face because of the recession? If so, then think again:

Biden: McConnell decided to withhold all cooperation even before we took office, by Greg Sargent, Washington Post: I’ve got my copy of Michael Grunwald’s new book on the making of stimulus, The New New Deal, and ... it may shed new light on the degree to which Republicans may have decided to deny Obama all cooperation for the explicit purpose of rendering his presidency a failure — making it easier for them to mount a political comeback after their disastrous 2008 losses.

Grunwald has Joe Biden on the record making a striking charge. Biden says that during the transition, a number of Republican Senators privately confided to him that Mitch McConnell had given them the directive that there was to be no cooperation with the new administration — because he had decided that “we can’t let you succeed.” ...

Biden, of course, has a history of outsized comments. But two former Republican Senators [Bob Bennett and Arlen Specter] are confirming the gist of the charges... Meanwhile, former Senator George Voinovich also goes on record telling Grunwald that Republican marching orders were to oppose everything the Obama administration proposed.

“If he was for it, we had to be against it,” Voinovich tells Grunwald. ... “He wanted everyone to hold the fort. All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”

A Republican aide sheds some more light on McConnell’s strategizing just after the 2008 election. Page 148:

“People were pretty demoralized, and there were two totally opposite thoughts on how to approach the situation,” a McConnell aide recalls. “One was, `we don't like the president, we ought to pop him early.’ The other was, `he’s really popular, we should work with him, because that’s what people want us to do.’ The boss’s take was: Neither." McConnell realized that it would be much easier to fight Obama if Republicans first made a public show of wanting to work with him.

... It seems pretty newsworthy for the Vice President of the United States to charge that seven members of the opposition confided to him that their party had adopted a comprehensive strategy to oppose literally everything the new President did — with the explicit purpose of denying him any successes of any kind for their own political purposes — even before he took office.

Unless you have enough money to help them with their campaigns or in other ways, Republicans in Congress don't really care about you and the struggles you face. That the rich might pay another dollar in taxes is far more important than a struggling household facing another day without a job.

    Posted by on Friday, August 10, 2012 at 12:24 PM in Economics, Politics | Permalink  Comments (22)


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