NEW YORK TIMES: ….The ferocious Republican opposition to Obama’s agenda, Draper says, inflicted real damage to his presidency. At the same time, Draper shows the startling speed with which these conservative revolutionaries grew frustrated and disillusioned. Almost immediately upon arrival, they learned that their own party’s leaders thought the huge budget cuts on which they campaigned were unrealistic. At one point the House majority whip, Kevin McCarthy, explained to them that politics is like baseball. You can’t always swing for the fences, he said. “Sometimes you bunt.” But the freshmen considered themselves sluggers. They pressed the Speaker of the House John Boehner to leverage the debt vote into a demand for spending cuts on a scale that Obama and the Democrats considered unthinkable.
The debt limit crisis was ultimately resolved in a way that satisfied no one. Boehner and Obama briefly tried to negotiate a “grand bargain” to address long-term debt reduction. But Boehner’s House caucus adamantly opposed any deal that would raise taxes, and the president refused to accept a deal that only cut spending. So the hard questions got punted to a deficit supercommittee that failed to reach an agreement, and the whole drama, sorry to say, is soon to be replayed…
Mind you, Mann and Ornstein are hardly partisan polemicists. They have studied the federal government for decades from perches at starchy Washington research organizations (the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, respectively) and are considered straight shooters. So their key argument is striking: the Republican Party is mainly to blame for what’s wrong with Washington. It has lurched several degrees right of the political center, they say, while Democrats hew closer to the mainstream… (more)
