“Let’s not focus on what’s possible or doable. Tell me what our goal should be, and let me worry about the politics.”
Erick Erickson
RedState
1/23/2013
Barack Obama was able to get Obamacare passed largely because he had a group of Democrats in Congress who were not running for re-election and thus had no fear of the voters. They overreached and the Democrats were swept out to the minority in the House of Representatives. In fact, the voters in 2010 wrecked devastating losses on the Democrats nationwide.
When politicians, regardless of party, are no longer accountable to the voters they tend to do extremely arrogant things, they tend to overreach badly, and they tend to collapse.
Barack Obama is, going into his second term, already one of the most arrogant politicians in America. Remember how his team told the public unconvincingly that Barack Obama was “among the most sophisticated consumers of intelligence on the planet’? Remember how Obama viewed himself all the way back in 2008?
“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
Couple that with the amazing admission from Dan Pfeiffer, the White House Communications Director, “that we don’t have a political system or an opposition party worthy of the opportunity.”
Forget the part about the “opposition party.” Dan Pfeiffer (and kudos to Daniel Halper for catching it) states on the record that the United States does not have a political system “worthy of the opportunity” to work with Barack Obama. It’s not just the Republicans, but the system.
That arrogance indicates an intention for overreach. In fact, the whole Washington Post article suggests Barack Obama intends to stretch his legs to the limits of Presidential power to secure a legacy. They want big things. They expect big things. He himself will worry about the politics of achieving those big things…
The article continues at RedState.
Related: At Instapundit:
A READER EMAILS: “If the RNC had any clue whatsoever — and I assume they don’t — then they’d be ruthlessly organizing a ‘homegrown’ grassroots movement to force Al Franken into supporting a scary, scary assault weapons ban. (Axelrod would.) The fact that they haven’t already demonstrates that national Republican leaders are a buncha frakkin’ dilettantes.”
Update: What makes Barack Obama competent to discuss, much less determine, national gun policy?
“…Actually, it’s not so much from ignorance for most of these fascist swine, Bob. It’s from awareness: of what the 2A means and does, and of what the rest of the Constitution forbids them to do, which is: pretty much everything they intend to do anyway, in direct violation of the oath they swore to if.”
Obama reads the Constitution like a Chinese menu
…As feared, the speech devolved into a laundry list of leftist initiatives disguised as Constitutional obligations through an Orwellian prism…Barack Obama’s inaugural couldn’t have been less like JFK’s. We weren’t urged to ask what we can do for our country. We were being sold a country that solves all our problems…