Normally I would agree with Dr. K’s thesis, however Obama is no mainstream Democratic politician as JFK, LBJ, and Bill Clinton were. Giving him a majority in both the House and Senate was a damn foolish thing to do.
by Charles Krauthammer
As the Afghanistan War intensifies — Marja, soon Kandahar, and the steady arrival of 30,000 new American troops — it has come to be seen as Obama’s war.
Not so. It’s become America’s war. When the former opposition party — habitually anti-war for the last four decades — adopts, reaffirms and escalates a war begun by the habitually hawkish other party, partisanship falls away, and the war becomes nationalized.
And legitimized. Do you think if John McCain, let alone George W. Bush, were president, we would not see growing demonstrations protesting our continued presence in Iraq and the escalation of Afghanistan? That we wouldn’t see a serious push in Congress to cut off funds?
Why not? Because Barack Obama is now commander in chief. The lack of opposition is not a matter of hypocrisy. It is a natural result of the rotation of power. When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That’s its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, it adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born.
In this case, the anti-war party has followed the Bush endgame to a T in Iraq and has doubled down in Afghanistan. And there is no general restiveness (at least over this).
The rotation of power is the finest political instrument ever invented for the consolidation of what were once radical and deeply divisive policies. The classic example is the New Deal. Republicans railed against it for 20 years. Then Dwight Eisenhower came to power, wisely left it intact, and no serious leader since has called for its repeal.
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Read the rest: In Praise of the Rotation of Power
Rich Lowry makes a point that I myself have mentioned many times. The irony being that Obama’s best hopes for reelection in 2012 would be for a GOP congress which could rein him in. Quite the conundrum!
by Rich Lowry
The undertakers of Bill Clinton’s political doom showed up in Little Rock, Ark., in 1992 for a meeting with the president-elect two months before his inauguration. They were the leaders of the Democratic Congress, and they might as well have been draped in black crepe.
“You can trust us,” House Speaker Tom Foley told Clinton, in an assurance as false as it was sincere. “We all want to make this administration succeed.”
Two years later, Clinton stood among smoldering political ruins. Democrats had lost both houses of Congress. A Republican upstart had defeated Tom Foley. In trusting the Democratic leadership in Congress, Clinton had nearly destroyed his presidency.
He learned a bitter lesson in the perils of trying to govern a center-right country in league with a left-wing Congress. It’s not an accident that the most sustained period of political success for any of the last three Democratic presidents, outside of their initial honeymoons, came after Clinton lost Congress. Only then was he forced to govern from the center.
If Pres. Barack Obama is ever going to regain the ground he’s lost as a bipartisan healer determined to transcend ideological divisions, he’ll need to have Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Majority Leader Harry Reid or both shunted back to the minority. For Obama, a Republican Congress could be a counterintuitive political boon.
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Read the rest here: Obama’s Best Hope: A GOP Congress
Tags: Charles Krauthammer, Rich Lowry
