Saturday, June 8, 2013

Matt Miller: Both parties are bad, m'kay

So says Matt Miller:

A Republican House doesn’t explain why President Obama’s last jobs plan only proposed to put 1 to 2 million Americans back to work when at least ten times more need a full time job. Republican madness can’t explain why Obama artfully slams the GOP on student loan interest rates while touting a plan that would leave tuitions and debts still higher a decade from now. Republican lunacy can’t explain why the White House often brags about having enacted universal health coverage, a goal aides boast has eluded presidents for a century, when Obama has done no such thing — at least 20 to 30 million people will still be uninsured when the dust clears (from a law I support).

In short, Republican nihilism and intransigence — huge problems, so please don’t arrest me, false equivalency police! — can’t explain the Democratic ambition gap. In fact, it’s not clear that anything in my depressing inventory above would be meaningfully different if the GOP had vanished or capitulated. Rare instances aside, this means Democrats aren’t offering ideas equal to the magnitude of our problems. Republicans, meanwhile, can’t even see what the problems are.

"False equivalence?"  He said it, not me.  Methinks the pundit doth protest too much.  

Nothing "would be meaningfully different if the GOP had vanished or capitulated?" What is the point of that ridiculous hypothetical sentence?  

Democrats need to be more "ambitious?"  OK, with that I agree.  But such ambition starts at the top, with President Obama.  In Congress there are guys like Bernie Sanders, Alan Grayson, John Conyers, Barbara Lee... and many, many more.  Obama has his activist base from 2008 and 2012 that after the election he's promptly forgotten, twice.  He has troops to rally but he ignores them.

Instead, Obama would prefer to seek compromise with GOP Congressmen who hate his guts and, thanks to natural migration and unnatural gerrymandering, "The average Republican district is 75 percent white and GOP congressmen overall represent 6.6 million fewer minorities in 2012 than they did in 2010."  District by district, state by state, the GOP Congress has no motivation to compromise with our Compromiser-in-chief.


By Matt Miller
June 5, 2013 | Washington Post

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