Jonathan Cohn (TNR): Mitt Romney has released a statement on the proposed debt ceiling deal. And, shocker, he opposes it…
….Substantively, his statement’s relationship to reality is tenuous at best. (It was Obama who pushed this debate until the very last minute?) But put that aside and look at the big picture.
… Obama has taken a lot of criticism for his management of the debt ceiling debate, most recently from yours truly. But Romney’s statement is a reminder of just how difficult a situation he faces, given the extremism and immaturity of Republican Party leaders these days.
As Greg Sargent writes this morning: If the basic premise of this critique holds that Obama should have stood up to a party that was prepared to allow the economy to implode in order to get its way, then why are we assuming that Republicans wouldn’t have done that anyway, no matter what the President did? If Obama had barnstormed the country for weeks, hammering the GOP with the demand for a clean debt ceiling hike and threatening the Constitutional option if the GOP didn’t buckle, would Republicans really have changed their behavior? …
Could Obama have adopted a far more aggressive posture while negotiations were going on? Absolutely. But the simple fact of entering into talks inevitably reinforced the sense that Obama and Dems were not prepared to allow default – no matter what – reinforcing a set of dynamics that were stacked against them. Was that avoidable?
These are good questions.
The Obama Diary 
Mitt is not winning the GOP primary – there is no excitement for his campaign, and given what we just saw with the debt ceiling hostage taking, the GOP is controlled by the tea party, and the tea party is all about emotion and Bachmann or Perry will be the one to scratch their itch.
The Dems in Congress blew the debt ceiling vote when they punted on it in 2010 because they wanted the GOP to have to own raising it as well. Reid thought there would be a clean bill as always, so have the GOP House majority have to vote for it. We all know what happened. Same with the Bush Tax cuts expiring – President Obama said to deal with them before the election, but the Senate didn’t want to touch it because there was tough votes. Maybe it saves Reid, Murray and Bennett I guess.
Well, the GOP has a serious dilemma in that case. With a person like Bachman on their ticket, the Democratic base will be super fired-up, as “disappointed” as they may be with President OBama, they will turn out in droves to prevent Bachman from being president.
On the other hand some of the Democratic “disappointeds” may be less fired-up with a Romney type candidate, but the GOP base will be even more apathetic. Futhermore, President Obama continues to have a core group of supporters who are fired up for him no matter what. President Obama also has a huge international support base that none of these Republican candidates could ever hope to have. And believe it or not, his international support DOES and WILL influence his domestic support.
So that’s why the Republicans have to resort to using gimmicks all year long like debt ceiling vote, CR vote, and other contrived political crises that they hope will ding President Obama’s standing – hopefully to make it easier for the best of their pathetic bunch of clowns to run.
Look at this jerk:
“Cannot believe @Rep_Giffords chose this vote to make her comeback.”
I understand why many people don’t like the deal but why criticize Gabby Giffords?
Can you believe people think this Adam Green (of PCCC) is a good strategist? The guy who thinks TODAY is the day to attack Giffords?
Guys like Adam Greed disliked Giffords – always have. Giffords was a member of the Blue Dog Caucus and from a very purple district. Folks on Daily Koch are calling her a puppet and even Bill Maher cracked about it.
Two days before she was shot, there was an anti-Giffords diary on Daily Koch in which the diarist headlined something like “Giffords is dead to me” because she voted for something the diarist didn’t like. Of course he was extremely remorseful for posting that diary after the event – but it just goes to show that the extreme left can be just as inflammatory and hyperbolic as the extreme right.
I really don’t know much about these people other than what I’ve read here but this is a real dirtbag comment.
I just got a email from “bold progressives” tonight. Full of Obama bashing. “unacceptable” was the title. I had the satisfaction of contacting them and requesting that my name be taken off their list as I thought they were undermining Democratic and progressive causes with their bullshit.
Thanks to the info that Chipssticks has posted here I was able to throw in a few facts and let them know the exact reasons for my concerns.
I have never been on these left wing sites, mostly because I don’t have access to a lot of stuff at work and no time when I get home. I’ve always been a Democrat. I’m just happy to have the President we’ve got. He does the best that can be done under the circumstances and that’s all I ask of anyone. I’m getting pissed off at people who try to wreck it for me because I really really like him. Love him. I just do.
He should be spending his time on hiring a lawyer to get him out of the mess he is in. I find it very ironic that someone who is working towards a degree in ethics has none.
Jerk is not a strong enough word. Classless and inappropriate.
Let me say it up front! If Adam Green is a Democrat I really don’t want to be in the same party. Instead of celebrating the courage of Gabby Giffords’ return to congress he chooses to focus on how she voted? Sorry, but these so called “bold progressives” have lost every ounce of humanity. I really don’t care how Gabby Giffords voted on raising the debt ceiling. Many people I respect, like Henry Waxman, voted against it. All I care about is that this courageous woman, who has gone through the kind of suffering that idiots, like Adam Green, who pretend to be progressives, have never experienced, showed up to vote. As Nancy Pelosi said, Gabby Giffords “personifies courage.” This is a day all of us, regardless of ideology, should have been celebrating. This was indeed a miraculous day for me because I honestly never expected that it would come. Gabby’s presence today demonstrated the triumph of human spirit that transcends politics and ideology. But these imbecile, so called leftists, with small souls, or may be no souls at all, had to turn it into yet another occasion to bash President Obama. And they have the audacity to call themselves progressives. In my humble opinion Adam Green would probably be more at home with the racist right wing tea baggers!
I would wager that Adam Greene does not consider himself a Democrat – at least not since Jan 20, 2009. Most of these extreme left-wing nuts are grappling with their own brand of ugly racism. That’s why they will spend far more bashing President Obama than any other politician or political group. But you They try to hide their racism in different ways and with great effort. But you can’t hide this ugliness of spirit and mind. It’s there no matter how much window dressing you put on it.
A. Green is a sick bastard.
mitt romney……… 🙄
Very appropriate response. He’s such a flip flopper that anything that comes out of his mouth is lies, lies, and more lies.
I’m sick and tired of these “Obama should said this or not done that but there was nothing he can do” analysis. It makes no sense. You can’t criticize someone over a task you say is impossible.
They are sounding like broken records and people are beginning to tune them out. Their useless analysis is quickly turning into background noise. The way the public responded to PBO when he urged them to contact congress drove the MSM and punditry stirring mad (Andrea Mitchell I’m looking at you). They are becoming increasingly outraged and their Obama Derangement Syndrome is becoming less and less manageable. It’s a matter of time before one of them utters the N- word, and I would bet that we will see or hear something like that before Nov 2012.
Well shit, I didn’t know chameleons could talk.