Obama Joint Session slapdown
TweetToday President Obama “announced” that he would address a Joint Session of Congress next Wednesday, September 7th. He did this without first consulting with congressional leaders. Turns out, there was a major debate of Republican presidential candidates scheduled for the same night. Given Obama’s track record, everyone assumed that this was another piece of naked political gamesmanship on his part; the judgment was that it was a plan to overshadow the Republican debate and dominate the political conversation. But Speaker of the House John Boehner did not roll over, and within hours the White House capitulated, agreeing to have the Joint Session on the following day instead. (Chad Pergram explains here why, ultimately, the president had very little choice.)
Although the presumption of political gamesmanship on Obama’s part is a fair one and emanates directly from how he has conducted himself as president, I honestly wonder whether in this case it wasn’t just obliviousness on the part of him and his staff. Why try to block this Republican debate in particular, when there will be many more? What would be the real value of creating a kind of “face-off” between the sitting president and a dozen or so contenders for the office?
The general presumption about his motivation for scheduling the address on Wednesday underlines this point: Barack Obama, who was elected in significant part because some people viewed him as a “post-partisan” incarnation of reasonableness and equanimity, has actually been the most aggressively partisan president the U.S. has had in many decades. He has never missed a chance to demonize Republicans, usually by name, in preference to making a strictly positive case for his own policies. In this he makes a dramatic contrast with the previous holder of the same office, who many (including Yours Truly) believe erred in the opposite direction, allowing innumerable calumnies to go unanswered.
|
|
To the extent it is presumed that virtually everything President Obama does is a political ploy, it naturally weakens the value of all of his various speeches and joint-session-addresses. And that is the price a naked partisan ultimately pays for being nakedly partisan.
…
Addendum 9/2/20111: See Hot Air for this interesting precedent regarding presidents dictating terms to the House: Remember when Tip O’Neill rejected Reagan’s request to address the House?
