Could You Have Imagined Bush Holding ANY Kind of Summit With Democrats?

[berni_mccoy]

President Obama actually had studied and knew the facts and held strong command of them during the discussion. This is what kept Republicans in check and unable to shut down the merits of the current bills that have passed the House and the Senate. Each time one of them tried to stage a stunt, it was shut down with facts, many times from the President himself.

Bush would never have been capable of such a discussion, let alone debate or even mastery of the facts. And he would never have had the courage to face his opponents directly, at the table. Bush was a coward who couldn't even face the mother of a fallen soldier who came to see him on his ranch.

[tanyev]

1. He'd write some notes.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. I can see it.

Bush would tell them to shut up and listen to the way things were going to be.

[Fumesucker]

3. He could have held a "Dems are pushovers" summit ..

And the Dems would have tripped all over themselves to be bipartisan and agree..

[ashling]

4. uh ? Easter Egg Roll?

that's kind of on a summit ... well, a hill actually.

[LiberalFighter]

5. He would be snickering and giving everyone nicknames.

[ThomWV]

6. I find it hard to immagine that what was done yesterday could be called a "Summit"

Looked a lot more like a circle jerk to me.

[berni_mccoy]

7. Not only must you not have watched the summit...

But your offensive response shows your ubridled hate for the President

[ellenfl]

8. during dubya's reign . . . did repubs allow dems to play in

their reigndeer games? iow, were dems allowed to join repubs in crafting bills or did the repubs do so behind closed doors? i'm getting tired of the meme that dems do everything without repubs, like repubs treated dems so well. please tell me that was the way repubs did business?

ellen fl

[Igel]

9. It depends.

Kennedy was navel-deep in NCLB, for example.

It works sort of like this.

If both sides see that they can work on something, they usually do; if not everybody, then sufficient numbers work together.

If one side pushes hard for something too far right or left, then the other side digs in and says "no"--and the side doing the pushing complains about the obstructionists not letting elections have sufficient results. It usually takes some seasoning for this to happen; the key is to not completely poison the well in the first year or so after a power transfer.

If there's sufficient political advantage, then the "obstructionist" side adopts that virtually as a party platform for political gain. Dems did it sometimes under *. Repubs do it frequently--but not consistently--under Obama. Making this trend harder to see is when one side insults and belittles the other, esp. in the Senate; there's a limit and style that's generally accepted, but past that line the political, alas, becomes personal.

If there's sufficient personal outreach and chemistry between the prez and the Congressional opposition, or between the majority and minority leaders, this can be defused. When one or both sides are on a jihad or crusade, this tends to not happen. We tend to forget that ultimately legislators are people and not robotic agents.

If there are sufficient "turncoats", centrist minority folk who can work with the majority party, it can shatter party unity and yield more cooperation; the minority party stalwart usually consider cooperation good because it's power-sharing, the majority party stalwart consider it bad because it reduces their power--and all to often the common good is defined simply as "whatever I want" and the just use of power is deinfed as "whatever I do." Cooperation usually means some significant compromises from the majority and lots of significant compromises from the minority--compromise being the coin of the realm in trying to form a consensus. In the current Congress there aren't many turncoats as I've defined them: Few liberal repubs made it because those seats mostly went to conservative dems thanks to Rahm "God-with-us", but this has the consequence that the repub cohort is farther right than has traditionally been the case. More of the majority leadership, however, is farther left by most tallies, making compromise harder and more redolent of ideological or partisan perfidy.

When this happens we tend to hear that "government is broken." This usually means, "I'm not being allowed to do whatever I want, so things have to be changed to let me do what I want." We hear it from the right when they can't rule unilaterally, and we hear it from the left when they can't rule unilaterally. Unilateralism is a wonderful idea, as long as it achieves "our" ends, and bilateralism and multilateralism is a wonderful idea, as long as it achieves "our" ends. Whoever "our" is--sometime you have to figure out the group boundaries involved for the positions to make sense. Both are nasty when they stand in our way. Although the best bilateralism is when it functions exactly as unilateralism--true bipartisanship is when everybody marches in lockstep behind me and my party. We hear that a lot.

Some of this is, no doubt, cynicism. A lot of this is just from watching American politics dispassionately and disinterestedly for 35 years. I don't do "rah-rah" politics and partisanship in any event, and I'm aware of a lot of my own confirmation bias.

Moreover, many of the dem leadership are pissed that they can't do all the things that they complained were so evil, while the repubs are saying the same kinds of things that dems used to say about repubs. There's also not just a small amount of ego and vanity involved. The rhetoric is, consequently ratcheted up.