For Obama, too soon for another partisan battle
Written by admin on April 4, 2010 – 3:12 am -For Obama, too soon for another partisan battle
After a bitter fight on healthcare, the White House has shown little appetite to engage aggressively on immigration and energy initiatives as congressional elections near. President Obama’s victory on healthcare gave him some much-needed political momentum. But he seems disinclined to ride that into another all-in battle this year on his keystone domestic agenda items of climate change and …
Instead, the White House is planning to focus on narrower efforts to pump up the economy, rewrite financial regulation, amend campaign finance laws to limit corporate donations and impose new fees on banks to repay federal bailout funds.
The White House is careful to say that it remains strongly committed to overhauling immigration and limiting greenhouse gases. But so far, the Obama administration has shown little appetite to engage aggressively in crafting legislation and rounding up votes on Capitol Hill for what would probably be deeply partisan fights over those issues as congressional elections near.
Significantly, regardless of the specific issue, Obama so far is following the same playbook he used in the early phase of the healthcare fight: deferring to Congress and giving lawmakers wide latitude in writing legislation and plotting strategy.
“Our approach is to lay out the parameters and to challenge the Congress” to pass bills, said White House senior advisor David Axelrod, adding: “There’s this myth that if the president arrives on the steps of the Capitol with stone tablets, people will bow and vote accordingly. I think that’s a naive view of how laws are made.”
The prospect that the administration will not go all in this year on its signature initiatives alarms several Democratic interest groups. They say a firmer White House hand is needed for the bills to have any chance of passing before November’s midterm elections.
Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, which advocates for a new immigration system, said that with healthcare, “the mistake [the White House] made was to wait too long and leave Congress in charge of the process for too long. And quite frankly, they’re on the verge of making a similar mistake with immigration reform.”
Similarly, environmentalists want to see action in the Senate on the energy bill that would establish a controversial emissions cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases.
Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said the White House and Democratic congressional leadership “should not . . . move anything that shows gridlock or Democratic division.”
Nevertheless, he said, “I would move on energy. If it’s a bipartisan bill and you bring in nuclear and offshore [drilling], the Republicans are not going to be able to vote against an energy bill that has that.”
The president “has implemented a lot of Republican ideas and goals into broad energy policy,” said Joshua Freed, clean-energy policy director for the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. “It’s even bigger than saying, ‘I want this in the bill.’ It’s acting.”
With the midterm elections approaching, however, Obama’s hope may be to demonstrate a level of support just high enough to placate immigration and environmental activists. That way, he need not make the all-out commitment that might further erode his approval ratings just when reelection-minded Democrats in Congress need him to be popular.
“Either one of these two items would evoke a long, divisive debate in the Congress,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton administration domestic policy aide. “There’s also the question of how much more division and bitter argument the American people are in the mood for right now.
“My own judgment is that people have had about as much partisanship as they can bear and would not welcome a plunge into a new, emotionally charged issue.”
The downside to such an approach is the likely disappointment among blocs of strong Democratic voters.
“At the end of the day, he’ll be judged by whether he delivers change and fights to deliver change,” Sharry said. Blaming the lack of bipartisan cooperation “won’t work well with Latino immigrants. They’ll think Obama promised them and didn’t do enough.”
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Tags: another, battle, Obama, partisan, soon
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Bold question, will America become a dictatorship soon?
Written by admin on March 5, 2010 – 8:15 am -I hate to say it, but I think democracy is a disaster. The majority of the general public is stupid. If they aren’t crazy, they are self-centered. We can have people debate what’s best for the country, or we can have someone decide for themselves, instead of ignorantly talking about it for years.
I think both Republicans and Democrats are doing themselves a disservice. The Republicans have the wrong idea, and many of the Democrats have an agenda.
We’re probably going to become a dictatorship soon. I’m sick of all the garbage that goes on in politics, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I think the vast majority of the general public are ignoramuses that have no business commenting on politics.
What I’m hearing from Republicans that support Rush is pure lunacy and not beneficial to America. Some Democrats are just crazy too, and totally anti-business. I don’t think either party supports my largely centrist views.
I don’t like what I’m seeing. I’m wondering if we’re currently observing the end of a democracy, probably not much different from how it ended the first time.
I think a lot of people have these impressions of what a dictatorship and socialist state are like, but have the wrong idea. What I’m trying to say is, they’re dismissing aspects of those political systems, imagining them at their most extreme, and yet embracing another system at its most extreme too! None of it, ironically, is productive!
This is when I think you will start to see the elites of this country start to wonder whether or not the masses should have any voice in the political process.
Do the political experiment, and I’m sure this is the result that will occur every time. It’s why democracy has been relatively rare throughout world history; when it exists, it’s a question of how long it can be tolerated before it’s eliminated, its demise is simply inevitable every time.
Tags: AMERICA, become, Bold, dictatorship, Question, soon
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