The Republican members of the House are the f*cking base, motherf*cker

[phantom power]

Perhaps the most important moment of the president's press conference today was his introduction of the term, "permission structure" to Our National Dialogue, and specifically in the context of trying to get Republican members of Congress to remember that they were not elected to be drive-time AM radio talk-show hosts.

"Ultimately they themselves are going to have to say we'll do the right thing...There are members in the Senate right now and I suspect members in the House as well who understand that deep down, but they're worried about their politics. It's tough. Their base thinks that compromise would mean somehow a betrayal. They're worried about primaries and I understand all that. And we're going to try to do everything we can to create a permission structure to do what's best for the country."

I always give the president points for optimism for saying things like this but, five years into his time as president, and almost three years since the country elected the nuttiest national legislature since the one that took Freedonia to war, he can't honestly still believe that there is some salient difference in the opposition between "politics" and anything else -- that the only thing standing between himself and what he wants to do for the country ("the right thing&quot is some magic formula that will immunize enough Republican members of the House against primary challenges so that they will come across on immigration, or on guns, or (God help us) on a Grand Bargain on the economy. (I'm rooting for the self-destructive crazies on that one.) I don't believe that this president continues to bang his head against this particular wall because he shares some conservative policy goals, but I do believe that he has repeatedly made the mistake of pursuing a mirage of bipartisanship in some form because he believes the political opposition to be made up mainly of reasonable men who are merely the victims of an unreasonable "base" Unfortunately, this is not true now. It has not been true at least since 2010. The Republican congressional delegation -- particularly the members of the House -- are completely creatures of the base. They are former state legislators and state senators who got elected to those offices espousing ideas that likely were further out there than the ones they're spouting now. In large part, they were raised within the base's political structures, both inside and outside of government. They are the product of a closed information society, with its own history and its own science and its own truth. To borrow a line from Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail, the Republican members of the House are the fking base, motherfker. They're not asking for permission to do the right thing, and they're certainly not waiting for this president to provide it. They're not posing. They are not doing what they're told. They're doing what they believe.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Running_The_Bases?src=rss

[tularetom]

1. I knew that was Charles Pierce before I clicked on the link

And as usual he has hit the nail on the head.

There is no way in hell this President or any other president, is going to convince these fools to do the right thing because as far as they are concerned, the right thing is no taxes on anybody ever and no government budget at all.

[0rganism]

2. I doubt "he believes the political opposition to be made up mainly of reasonable men"

but he has to shape his comments to fit a certain narrative frame by the mass media lest they pillory him endlessly and paint him as a divisive hardliner, more than they already do. President Obama is not an idiot. He knows what the author knows, and a probably whole lot more. It's a popular hobby on the left to go after the president as stupidly beholden to a message of compromise and third-way milquetoastery.

Look, suppose Obama comes out and says what most of us here already know, that the GOP is an intransigent, bought-and-paid-for, cesspool of hypocritical stooges for established wealth and power. That they cannot compromise with him as a matter of principle. That their primary purpose, openly expressed, is to endlessly obstruct the president's agenda and attempt to repeal whatever slivers of it pass through their obstructionist mesh. That he will never be able to bargain with them, as they score points with their supporters, rich and poor alike, on the basis of how much they stand in his way. That people who get elected on a platform of demolishing the nation's infrastructure cannot ever be trusted to reinforce it. What do you think happens then?

The mass media, which has a buttload of effort invested in casting congress as a well-intentioned but dysfunctional body of incompetent bargainers will be obligated to go after Obama as a bitter ideologue -- that or rewrite their own elaborate narrative about the government to reflect reality. Which do you think is easier? Which do you think appeals to big media's owners? They'd like nothing better than to dust off the "angry black man" story they've had waiting in the wings for five long years.

President Obama is not an ignorant idiot. I'm confident he knows the GOP is as evil and shortsighted as they are stubborn. But he also knows he has to appear to work with them or risk going too far afield in his own maneuvers, into positions which will become politically untenable. If, after his 2nd term, Democrats are unable to win seats in congress or the presidency, it won't benefit anyone except the GOP owning class.

I suggest we dispense with this notion that the president is too dense to understand the situation and proceed from the premise that it's much more complicated and nastier than those of us who haven't tried to hold a national position of leadership could possibly know.

[Marr]

3. Some apologist here recently called me a "conspiracy theorist" for

saying the White House and the rest of the DC establishment has been building political cover for passing SS cuts for at least a couple of years now. The very idea was, this person insisted, crazy.

Well, I ask you-- what is "permission structure" if not "political cover"? It means you're maneuvering legislation into positions from which a politician can vote "aye" without worrying about the consequences.

[zeeland]

4. Obama has said his favorite president is Lincoln.

One of the qualities he so admired was Lincolns ability to
work successfully with political adversaries in order to achieve
a common goal. Had he not been able to utilize the best qualities
of political foes, the Civil War may have ended differently.

Sometimes I think Obama is determined to emulate Lincoln
with repukes that are ignorant and unreasonable to a degree
he fails to accept. Some of the comments he has made lately
like not wanting to upset repukes regarding the legislation
affecting air travel, makes you drop your jaw and wonder what
the hell he is thinking. I won't go so far as to call it delusional,
but really WTF?