When I read the Mitch McConnell quote that’s been getting so much attention:The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
my immediate concern was whether it was taken out of context. And if you read the full National Journal interview [subscription required], the nuances are a bit different from those you might take from the quote in isolation. But not in a good way.
If you read the whole thing, what you get is that McConnell is taking a very different lesson from the events of 1995 than the one most pundits take, and expect Republicans to take. The whole attempt to bully Clinton into slashing Medicare by shutting down the federal government was a political failure for the GOP; but McConnell doesn’t see this as evidence that Republicans were too confrontational.
No, he sees it as evidence that they weren’t confrontational enough; they were too focused on their policy agenda, and neglected the necessary work of destroying Clinton:
We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being reelected, and we were hanging on for our lives.So this time around they won’t bother much with trying to get actual legislation passed; they’ll focus on the important thing: undermining the man in the White House.
As I look back over the last two years, several things are clearer to me. The Republicans had enough residual power to stop Obama and the Democrats from doing very much. President Obama was correct last night on the Daily Show in touting what he has succeeded in doing. The gradient against him has been focused with a singleness of purpose – thwarting the Democrats in general and Obama in the specific. They succeeded in turning the Left into a bunch of complainers. Obama’s attempts at reconciliation have been interpreted as weakness. And Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have kept their fold in the obstructionist mode the whole way. The "attack ads" are actually indicative of the Republican platform. As McConnell says, that is the Republican platform. The strategy is only political – regaining power. Once they have it, the strategy changes to retaining power.
I was thinking last night. As disappointed as I feel in these last two years, I don’t really think the Democrats made a mistake. I think the Left made the mistake. This is no time to measure success by looking at the traditional Liberal Issues and chastising Obama about his failures in bringing them home. This is not the time for federal government to lead those fights. That’s our job. This is a time to reestablish the viability of the Middle Class. If Obama made a mistake, it was in putting Healthcare in front of Financial Reform. Maybe the "Surge" in Afghanistan was a mistake [politically]. But not being more "Liberal" was not a mistake. I don’t know if avoiding a "Truth Commission" on the Invasion of Iraq was a mistake or not. I am too biased to trust my own judgment on that topic.
The single most important thing we want to achieve is to reestablish the Democratic Party as the party of the Middle Class.
Besides the Return of the Constipated Crowd’s policies and politics, it’s going to be pretty awful having to look at those two sour-pusses McConnell and Boehner day in and day out. McConnell looks like your chinless Aunt Minnie minus her knitting and dressed in male drag; and Boehner looks perpetually like he’s got stomach cramps and stayed too long in the tanning booth.
Ad hominem? Yes. Catty? You got it. True? You betcha.