Really? In fact, there are many potentially-open
avenues available provided Republicans stop creating parliamentary
roadblocks. Indeed, Obama's reelection
should considerably reduce the likelihood of four more years of legislative
gridlock that a Romney victory might have created. It seems unlikely that many Congressional
Democrats would feel inclined to work in a bi-partisan manner with a party that
employed non-partisanship as a means of re-gaining power -- particularly with
Democrats like Harry
Reid
still in command of the Senate; the presence of other shrewdly political incumbents
like Nancy Pelosi; and the return
to Congress of Florida's Alan Grayson. Human nature suggests that a Romney victory is
likely to have resulted in a renewed cycle of deliberate legislative gridlock
--- only this time by Congressional Democrats.
But since Obama won, it's now up to Republicans to become more accepting
of the bi-partisanship needed to both move the nation forward and maintain
their party's political legitimacy.
Suppression
Obsession
It now appears that the end of
the Republicans' dream of a one-term Obama presidency actually began in 2010 starting
with the way the GOP dealt with the aberrational factor of the whoop-ass it put
on the Democrats during that year's mid-terms.
Rather than an indication of an electorate that leans overwhelmingly
conservative, the GOP takeover of the House via the election of 87 new
Republicans was in fact the outcome of a comparatively low-turnout election
comosed mostly of voters who identified as conservatives joined by a few
independents. For
the most part, non-conservatives stayed home. With so many younger,
liberal voters having essentially self-suppressed, the GOP
gains of 2010 couldn't be interpreted as a gauge of the electorate's
ideological preference, a fact probably noted by GOP strategists, which perhaps
got them to thinking about ways to create a 2012 turnout similar to the niche
turnout of 2010.
If that was the thinking, it led
to a 2012 GOP campaign strategy that turned out to be disastrously
misguided. The analogy I'd use would be
a guy who grabs a T-square for a job that requires a slide ruler. Exhibit A would be the underlying philosophy
that drove each campaign's approach to voter contact. For nearly two years, while the Repubs spent
their time in back rooms cooking up voter-suppression schemes designed to keep
certain voters at arm's length, the Obama team spent its time the ground embracing,
engaging, and registering a veritable pastiche of potential voters from
hundreds of field offices set up in battleground states; activism that enabled the Democrats to
increase its base.
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