One of the reasons I’ve pulled back on my support of certain aspects associated with Team Obama (keep in mind that when you get involved, you essentially end up supporting many national, state and local campaigns and causes) is the general frustration I have not about how the presidential firewall was so incredibly well protected in 2012, but rather how poor the strategy was ‘down ticket’. There simply was not enough time and attention paid to state assemblies and the impact that this had on gerrymandering, to include House seats post-2010. So what we now face is very well outlined this morning by David Frum:
“Republicans who want to fight smarter are called squishes; Republicans who wish to fight less are called RINOs—and both have been hunted pretty near to extinction…The short answer is a breakdown in the party’s ability to govern itself. It can’t think strategically. Even when pressed to do something overwhelmingly likely to end in disaster, as this shutdown looks likely to do for Republicans, the party has no way to stop itself. It stumbles into fights it cannot win, gets mad, and then in its anger lurches into yet another fight that ends in yet another loss.”
I mean, we’ll see. But the idea that the President might capitulate on something that was clearly fought over and won in 2012 is for me like being in an altered universe. You cave on this, and you take us into the distorted reality rabbit hole a la Alice in Wonderland.
