Am I the only one who feels like the withdrawal of Judd Gregg as Commerce nominee represents the last nail in the tiny, infant coffin of Obama's hope for bipartisanship? Is it really much of a secret that once he was told he would not be able to manipulate the census in order not to count minorities (denying big, liberal cities the additional representatives they deserve in Congress), the Republican from New Hampshire lost his taste for the job?
In my opinion bipartisanship may have been--maybe still is--a dream Obama actually believes in, and it sure helped him get elected (many Americans continue to imagine they are "one").
I am glad he reached out some, if only to prove the GOP is run by dead-enders.
America is not "one". The divides are deep. The general profile of belief and custom in America's Northeast, its West Coast and some better educated places in between are more different from, say, a place like Tennessee (rapid apologies in advance to the educated and reasonable folks therefrom), than Switzerland is from Italy. The differing political and social climates between these regions are not going to permit much bipartisanship, if any (my pet theory is that fundamentalist Christianity is a major culprit, but that is another subject).
The GOP is, by all appearances, determined to see the nation fail under a Democrat. The reason for this is because each elected GOP politician seems to believe that a Democrat-led failure may at some point lead to a re-establishment of the neo-con Caliphate. This quixotic notion has rather more currency than the hopes and dreams of the Bourbons in Spain, but not that much more. The feisty behavior of the Republican party in these opening days of the Obama administration is, using a market term for a stock headed permanently south, nothing more than a dead-cat bounce.
For their part, elected Dems tend to be chickenhearted apologists for the regime (status quo benefits them too).
Who knows--maybe Obama wears everyone down with constant likeability and gets the GOP, still fiercely in denial of its own disgrace, to sing with him 'round the campfire. But I kind of doubt it.
--Renaissance
Friday, February 13, 2009
