The New Republic : Every action of the administration from here into 2012 needs to reinforce the point that we have it in our means to rescue the economy and to restore the promise of a middle-class country

.

Obama may be finding a way out of the Economic quagmire and nightmare, in great part created by his Republican Enemies. The last Republicans are not fit for Governance, only for Obstruction.

The New Republic -
The Fighting Bipartisan: Has Obama Found a Solution for Republican Obstructionism? -
September 9, 2011

By Mark Schmitt
Mark Schmitt is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and former editor of The American Prospect.


The Fighting Bipartisan: Has Obama Found a Solution for Republican Obstructionism?


Some excerpts :

Last night Obama found a way out, sort of. It’s not a fiery partisan confrontation; it’s a kind of fighting bipartisanship. He’s now putting forth a substantive agenda that is very likely to boost the economy, create jobs, and improve the basic fairness of the tax system in order to spread the benefits of economic growth more broadly. But he aggressively linked almost all of those things to ideas that Republicans had already supported, or that wealthy people such as Warren Buffet had embraced. He took ownership of some ideas that had traditionally been conservative, and embraced ideas that had had some Republican support.

None of that means that the American Jobs Bill that he insisted Congress pass will pass. Of course it won’t. And maybe it’s all too late; maybe at this point, only results matter. I noticed an odd idiosyncrasy today in the July Pew poll on Obama: Despite his 44% approval rating, his rating on the question, “Cares about people like me,” which many politicos consider the only question that really matters, is at 60%, higher than George W. Bush at his best. But the combination of the two suggests that people no longer care that he cares. They’re fed up with gestures, empathy, or good ideas that get blocked in the political process—all they want is results.

Obama’s new approach, though, sets up, in theory, a different hypothetical win-win than the one we’ve been operating under for almost three years. One possibility is that Republicans have some qualms about a wholly obstructionist agenda, Congress passes some or most of the American Jobs Act, the economy improves (likely with some help from the Federal Reserve, international circumstances, and good fortune), and actual conditions get Obama out of the box he’s in. Failing that, if the White House and Democrats can keep their focus on the American Jobs Act (and if the left can avoid getting distracted by Obama’s wise concessions to reality, such as long-term reductions in Medicare spending), then Republican obstruction takes a new form. It’s not just blocking Obama, or his agenda—it’s blocking economic recovery, systematically, including ideas that Republicans have embraced in the past and will embrace again.

Pulling that off, however, requires a discipline that goes beyond one speech. It means that every action of the administration from here into 2012 needs to reinforce the point that we have it in our means to rescue the economy and to restore the promise of a middle-class country. This speech alone won’t do the work. But if it’s a roadmap to the next period of the Obama presidency, it might represent a dramatic change, not just in the president’s electoral prospects, but in the range of policy solutions that are available now and in the future.

...........