Snookered and Shellacked
by digby
Greg Sargent discusses an interesting tidbit from Richard Wolfe’s new book about the first year of the Obama administration:
In an interview with Wolffe, the President seemed to acknowledge that in pursuing bipartisan support for health reform, he and Democrats got snookered by a previously-thought-out GOP strategy to delay the process for as long as possible in order to politically damage him and the Democratic Party. Here’s the President on page 75:
“You have to give the Republicans credit, just from a pure political perspective, that they used every instrument available to them in the Senate to prolong the process in such a way that helped drive down support nationally, that gave everybody a sense that somehow Washington was broken,” he told me. “At a time when everybody was worrying about jobs, for us to have to spend six to nine months on this piece of legislation obviously was not helpful.”
In other words, Obama is saying, Republicans were only gaming the process all along.
Well, who could have predicted such a thing? It’s not like they were signaling their intentions or anything.
“If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”
In fact, they did seem to be aware of it. They just thought they had a secret nuclear weapon:
“They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was, you’ve got me.’
That didn’t work out so well …
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