Barack Obama at the AFL-CIO debate, describing why it took him so long to vote no on the Iraq supplemental, and making me wonder if he's really that naive:
My hope was that we would start seeing some progress among the Republicans, where they would begin to agree with us on a timetable to withdraw.
To continue the title lyrics, is someone fucking joking? Did he really think we could get enough Republican votes to end the war through some kind of bipartisan agreement? If so, he had no idea what the legislative state of play was, and he didn't understand the modern Republican Party.
The vast majority of Republicans in both houses of Congress aren't the sort of people you can reason with, or negotiate with in good faith. The Iraq War is only the latest issue on which the politics of hope will leave you disappointed. Remember all the Democrats who made compromises with Republicans, only to see their side of the deal get ripped out in conference committee? I don't doubt that Obama will be able to forge some useful compromises on low-profile issues that are relatively hard to demagogue, but attempting rational persuasion or good-faith negotiations on the Iraq War or health care reform or any of the major issues facing our country are just a lunch invitation for Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. The kind where you invite them to eat your lunch.
You don't negotiate with the contemporary Republican party or try to reason with them -- you use every bit of power at your disposal to crush them. Perhaps there will come a happy time in the future of our nation when we're dealing with a reasonable Republican Party, and then I'll really warm up to the idea of an Obama administration. But I don't see that time coming during the next presidential term.
