MISSION CREEP -- Now that his mission to prevent Obama's re-election has failed, what's plan B? by photo: Reuters/Jim Young
"Our
top political priority should be to deny President Obama a second term" -- Mitch McConnell
Take that, Mitch!
It's another four years of
Presidential shot-calling for Barack Obama meaning that as far as the GOP is
concerned for the next four years -- life's a Mitch.
Okay, so Mitch McConnell
probably won't be giving props to the
President for prevailing after four years of playing Moby Dick to McConnell's Captain
Ahab in an endurance test of squalid politics that began
the day Obama was inaugurated. But now that the grand bargain McConnell
reached with his GOP brethren to focus entirely on denying Obama a second term turns
out to have been a fool's errand, will Mitch and the rest of the Republican
party come to their senses?
If so, the definitive winner
won't be Obama or the Democratic party.
Nor would it be Republicans if it so happens that a return to
bi-partisanship helps them re-gain the White House in 2016.
The ultimate winner will be
America.
The decisive re-election of
Barack Obama means that America is headed for a period of further
revitalization, not some goofy era of Marxist socialism. Most importantly, more people will have
jobs. Those "12 million new jobs" Mitt
promised are hardly jeopardized by Romney's defeat because Mitt's total
precisely matches the number of jobs analysts
forecast will be
added by 2017 regardless of which party has held the presidency.
But in addition to more jobs,
more Americans will be healthier thanks to Obamacare; fewer American soldiers
will be deployed in war zones after the 2014 Afghan withdrawal; and the economy
will receive a boost resulting from tax and economic policies that favor the
middle, instead of the upper class. All
this is set to occur unless -- like their "Obama
Take-Down" meeting held back in 2008 -- Republicans decide to meet again to
tweak their strategy of hard-partisan, no-compromise politics.
"Takers
and Makers"
It's impossible to take
seriously the accusation by his critics that it was Obama who was unable or unwilling to work cooperatively with
Congressional Republicans. Although few
would deny that bi-partisanship during Obama's first term was as apparitional
as Romney's tax returns, it was the GOP that played legislative stall-ball for
four years in pursuit of McConnell's goal.
Republicans mucked up the process with a record-shattering
number of filibusters and the Captain
Ahab-esque stubbornness of its lockstep opposition to every Administration
policy initiative earned the GOP a derisive nick-name: " The
Party of No."
But that was then. Now, after Obama's decisive victory, is the
GOP ready to make with the bi-partisanship?
Judging by his immediate post-election remarks, House Speaker John
Boehner seems to be prepared. "We're
ready to be led; we want you to succeed," he said.
But the same won't be said of
McConnell whose congrats came out a bit like what the groom in a shotgun
wedding probably sounds like when he says "I
do."
"The voters have not
endorsed the failures or excesses of the president's first term," sputtered
McConnell. "They have simply given him
more time to finish the job they asked him to do together with a balanced
Congress."
And joining McConnell on his
premature fit of morning-after monomania were several crestfallen pundits --
influential within the GOP -- who spat out nearly every Fox News-aggregated bit of facile
anti-Obama agit-prop to assuage what seemed a horribly abused
psyche.
Former Bill Clinton adviser and
Liberace
look-alike Dick Morris, who somehow dream-weaved a set of dour Romney
polling numbers into a prediction
of a Romney landslide , bewailed over four more years of Obama's "socialist
agenda."
