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- It strikes me that rather than being an educational moment to teach the public about obstructionism, continued "outreach" to Republicans on policy issues they are constitutionally opposed to is playing a game only Republicans can win. Democrats and the president will say they extended an olive branch, only to have it swatted away, and Republicans will claim that their ideas were never taken seriously by the opposition. The public sees partisan bickering and legislative gridlock, and Republicans double down on anti-incumbency sentiment and bad economic conditions to sweep them back into office. I agree that Republicans are overconfident if they think their chances of taking back Congress are strong, but what have they got to lose?
- "House Democrats," The Hill reports, "say leadership has their work cut out in convincing the public to support a tax increase on those making more than $250,000." The reason for this, we're told, is that concerns about the deficit makes raising taxes risky. Short of the fact that raising taxes on people earning over $250,000 is one -- but by no means the only -- way of reducing the deficit, what are these Democrats afraid of? A fraction of the population going Galt? Other no-brainer policy proposals meeting serious resistance include reforming federal student loans and the president encouraging healthy eating.
- Steve Clemons has become the latest leftish political commentator to diagnose the path to failure for the Barack Obama presidency, relying on the reporting of Edward Luce noted here by Mark Schmitt on Friday. What stands out for Clemons is that the theory of management embraced by this president -- relying on a tight inner circle of trusted advisers -- has corrupted the promise of the administration. This has the luxury of being both impossible to prove or disprove, which is to say it's more useful at this point to look at what has and has not been accomplished, and focus on the more tangible institutional barriers that affect the shape of the president's agenda.
- Pollster Scott Rasmussen has a theory about the American public: "Americans don't want to be governed from the left, the right or the center. They want to govern themselves." I don't know what this means in practice (direct democracy?) but I assume Mr. Rasmussen has data to bolster this claim, data that probably reaches a different conclusion than this Rasmussen poll, subtitled "Republicans Still Trusted More on Most Key Issues." Emphasis mine, as in "the Republican position is still the default for our center-right nation."
- Howard Kurtz would like to inform you that the White House press corps is feeling neglected by the president, who has been spending all his time in the unaccountability zone of YouTube, instead of taking questions from professional reporters. Meanwhile, we learn that the editors at Kurtz's newspaper went out of their way to solicit a piece on why liberals are condescending. Perhaps someone in the White House press corps could ask Mr. Obama this very question next time there's a press conference and get some answers for the American people.
- Weekend Remainders: Harold Ford Jr. wants to shake up the liberal establishment and we should not stand in his way; a debate between Ford and Michael Steele predictably results in astute observations about being in touch with the bulk of the American people; Annie Lowrey take you on an adventure in alternative Senate seat disbursement; Zbigniew Brzezinski appreciates that even though the president has primacy in foreign policy, he is still very much constrained by domestic politics; Republicans discuss the superiority of last year's GOP budget proposal, ignore their current proposal; and opposition to climate change legislation becomes easier to understand when viewed in its most unhinged form.
--Mori Dinauer
