With Victory, Republicans Would Face Uncertainty
In The New York Times article With Victory, Republicans Would Face Uncertainty, John Harwood goes over some of the obvious problems facing the government after the election.
He concludes with the following:
What’s clear, after Republican defeats in 2006 and 2008 and Democrats’ travails this year, is that both parties remain at risk so long as Americans suffer from high unemployment and weak economic growth. As the political world begins looking ahead to the 2012 elections, that means the widest opening for an independent candidacy since Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign.
“I think it’s possible,” Jeb Bush said. Meantime, he added, just as Mr. Obama has hit “the reset button” on foreign policy endeavors, “We should maybe try to reset the political climate in Washington.”
If Obama’s problem is that he has not been able to get the 60% cooperation of the Senate, how is an independent President going to do better?
If the problem is the Senate, then the solution is not to change the President or the President’s party. The solution, one would think, would be to change the Senate.
Of course nothing that the American electorate might choose to do would surprise me any more. They might in fact change the characteristics of the Presidents they elect in the future without paying any attention to the real problem which seems to lie in the Senate.
The old Sesame Street routine seems to have more and more relevance these days. Who knew it was meant as a parody of the American electorate as a whole? The routine went something like this:
Customer: I’ll have orange juice and eggs for breakfast.
Waiter: We don’t have orange juice.
C: Then I’ll have cereal and orange juice.
W: We don’t have orange juice.
C: Then I’ll have pancakes and orange juice.
W: We don’t have orange juice.
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