Chris Matthews Q&A: The right wants the president’s cojones!

[DonViejo]

Chris Matthews shares what the president told him after the first debate, and his secret Hillary Clinton “impulse”

BY JOAN WALSH

:::snip:::

I talked to Matthews about the book over breakfast early Monday, as the government edged closer to a shutdown. (The book’s official release date was Tuesday, the day the government shut down, an amazing coincidence for a book subtitled “When Politics Worked.”) The “Hardball” host ordered Corn Flakes with banana slices – “my father’s breakfast” – and talked about Reagan’s appeal to working-class Irish Catholics, “the Irish curse,” why Obama can’t buckle and what Hillary Clinton needs to do to win in a Lyndon Johnson-size landslide in 2016.

So Rush Limbaugh has already railed against the book, agreeing with a listener who was angry that you’re visiting the Reagan Library and said, “To me it’s like Satan writing a book about the pope and having a signing at the Vatican.”

Well, yeah, but I sent him a copy of the book. I said look at the book, it’s good for Reagan, it makes him look good. Why would he not like it?

He thinks you’re using Reagan to make today’s Republicans look extremist and bad. You’re exaggerating the extent to which he and the speaker got along …

And you know it happened. It happened. When they knew they had to move on, and get something done, they did. A good parallel today, to this fighting over the continuing resolution, is the Social Security deal. Reagan knew he had to get it off his back, he’d never liked Social Security, he’d said “make it voluntary,” that was the bugaboo of his career. He wanted it behind him. Tip, on the other hand, knew it really was reaching its fiscal deadline. Tip wanted to keep it working for people. So they found a way to compromise: If you made over $20,000 a year, you might have Social Security taxed, they found a way of sort of means testing, and Reagan got the cost of living adjustment delayed for three months. It was a progressive-leaning solution but it benefited Reagan politically, because it got the issue off his back.

:::snip:::

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/01/chris_matthews_qa_they_want_his_cojones/

[Doctor_J]

1. They've been gone since the Bush Tax Cut extension

[DonViejo]

2. How interesting that you would choose for your

27,447th comment at DU to laugh at the President and let us know you're in agreement with the GOP goal of castrating him.

My response to your comment? Simple:

[Doctor_J]

3. Um....yeah

you're in agreement with the GOP goal of castrating him.

Well there's one giant leap for mankind. I swear the BOG gets wackier every day.

I weep because they already DID take a lot of his mojo. And no one at DU is laughing about the last 5 years, most especially those who believed the campaign 2008 rhetoric.

the president contributed to today's situation by caving in to the republicans before. When the Bush Tax Cuts were extended, Boner and McTurtle were served notice that Obama would when the chips were down side with the 1%. We are now living with that legacy. Hopefully he will stand firm this time, and start fighting them with the same enthusiasm he fights for school privatization and MMJ prosecutions. It's not too late to rescue his presidency, but he's about 1 cave-in from being a lame duck.