Happy Labor Day

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

How we got here

Partisan politics has brought this country to its knees and delivered us The Most Notable Loser for a president. This 2012 Time article reminds us how evil Mitch McConnell is, and what a disappointment Obama was, the main reason being that he kept trying to work with and appease the Republican party when he knew there was no chance of success.

TIME just published “The Party of No,” an article adapted from my new book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era. It reveals some of my reporting on the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.”

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Centrists and big-spending appropriators from Obama-friendly districts would be sorely tempted to break ranks [to vote in favor of the 2009 stimulus bill].

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David Obey, then chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, met with his GOP counterpart, Jerry Lewis, to explain what Democrats had in mind for the stimulus and ask what Republicans wanted to include. “Jerry’s response was, ‘I’m sorry, but leadership tells us we can’t play,’ ” Obey told me. “Exact quote: ‘We can’t play.’ What they said right from the get-go was, It doesn’t matter what the hell you do, we ain’t going to help you. We’re going to stand on the sidelines and bitch.”

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White House aides were buzzing about the insult. And they didn’t even know that Cantor had vowed to whip a unanimous [GOP "no"] vote — which, ultimately, he did.

“It was stunning that we’d set this up and, before hearing from the President, they’d say they were going to oppose this,” Axelrod says. “Our feeling was, we were dealing with a potential disaster of epic proportions that demanded cooperation. If anything was a signal of what the next two years would be like, it was that.”

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Vice President Biden told me that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any bipartisan cooperation on major votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators who said, ‘Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ ” he recalled. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was, ‘For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’ ” Biden said.

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“So I promise you — and the President agreed with me — I never thought we were going to get Republican support,” Biden said.

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Republicans recognized that after Obama’s big promises about bipartisanship, they could break those promises by refusing to cooperate. In the words of Congressman Tom Cole, a deputy Republican whip: “We wanted the talking point.

  Michael Grunwald @ Time

In other words, they didn't give a shit about what was good for the country, or the people who put them in office. They simply meant to take back the reins of power in government. And Obama knew it. Yet he still made a show of cooperation. Perhaps he was gambling that the public would see the GOP for what it was and turn against them. If so, he sorely misjudged the American voting public.

I don't know how many times during Obama's tenure I posted a picture I'd cobbled together of the famous cartoon where Charlie Brown runs to kick the football and Lucy pulls it out from under him at the last minute, pasting Boehner's head on Lucy and Obama's on Charlie Brown. All that time, I didn't realize that Obama knew what the game was from the beginning. He could have done so much more if he'd played the game acknowledging the new rules.

And, at this point, we have two parties in politics who play the same game, country be damned.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

h/t Marty

Is Brat's Victory a Wake-Up Call to Washington Insiders?

We can hope so. But they're pretty isolated in their decades-long bubble of privilege.

From what I’ve observed, [David Brat, the college professor who defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Tuesday,] has not talked like a forty-seven-per-cent conservative complaining about how tax dollars are being shovelled to the undeserving poor (although maybe he does believe that and didn’t emphasize it in the campaign). He comes across, instead, like a ninety-nine-per-cent conservative who sees the real villain as corporate America and its addiction to government largesse. One of his biggest applause lines is about how bankers should have gone to jail after the 2008 financial crisis. Brat is the Elizabeth Warren of the right.

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I’m an economist. I’m pro-business. I’m pro-big business making profits. But what I’m absolutely against is big business in bed with big government. And that’s the problem.

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Instead of lecturing the most vulnerable about the moral beauty of the marketplace, Brat targets the most well off. “Free markets!” he declared in Hanover, like a teacher about to reveal the essence of the lesson. “In a nutshell, what does it mean?”

It means no one is shown favoritism. Everyone is treated equally. Every firm, every business, and you compete fairly. And no one, if you’re big or small, is shown special attention. And we’re losing that.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the kind of rhetoric that Ralph Nader, and even Noam Chomsky, have used for many years to pillory the government for protecting the rich and the well connected from the vagaries of the free market.

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Cantor was oblivious to the wave that was building back in his district, in the suburbs of Richmond [Virginia]. On the morning of the election, he was at a Washington coffee shop raising money from lobbyists.

  New Yorker