What's with all this talk about bipartisanship? Like a child guilty of a prank, Obama is promising that he will do all he can to be more bipartisan from now on. There is endless analysis of whether he is really trying to be bipartisan and why and why not. All this bipartisanship drama makes me think the world has suddenly gone insane.
We have had eight years with a President who was an unbending, uncompromising religious fanatic. Everybody knew his convictions because he had no fear of expressing them every chance he got. Nobody expected any bipartisanship from him simply because it was like expecting to draw blood from a stone. And everybody seemed to accept it. So my question is: why is it perfectly acceptable for a Republican president to be fanatical and intransigent in promoting the interests of people who voted for him but for a Democratic president it suddenly isn't? Do the bloggers, the journalists, the pundits, the politicians who keep harping on Obama's lack of bipartisanship even realize how completely hypocritical they sound?
1 comment:
Excellent points, Clarissa. I think the current blabber about bipartisanship was at least partly generated by Obama's promise to end it if he was elected. Everyone should have understood that it wasn't going to happen and really can't happen. There are just too many issues that aren't amenable to the significant compromising that bipartisanship requires.
It would be much more realistic to expect politicians to behave in a more civil and respectful manner toward each other. There's nothing wrong with being on different sides of issues--in fact that's the essence of politics. But it's reasonable to expect politicians to behave like adults and show some respect to each other.
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