Guardian UK: Obama's reason cannot calm the Groucho Marxist right

[marmar]

Obama's reason cannot calm the Groucho Marxist right
The BP disaster is just the latest crisis that has seen this consensus-seeking president rebuffed by the worst of partisan politics

Martin Kettle
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 June 2010 20.29 BST


America's talking heads of left and right agreed that Barack Obama failed to come up with the right words in his Oval Office address this week on the BP oil spill disaster. But his bigger problem, they went on, is that he has not done the right deeds. "For starters," said one commentator, "the underwater gusher is either contained or it is not. And right now it is not."

Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. And this is collective madness. By what measure of reason can any president of whatever party be held politically responsible for a catastrophic failure of hi-tech engineering? Obama has partly got himself to blame, of course. The more he identifies himself with solving the oil spill problem, the more he looks like he owns it too.

Yet by what logic is a president from a party with at least some record of environmental and corporate regulatory awareness now being besieged for failures on the ocean floor? This is particularly egregious on the conservative right, addicted to drilling for oil, as well as committed to the absolute minimum of environmental or corporate regulation by a federal government whose activities it regards in many respects as illegitimate and unconstitutional.

Welcome, however, to American politics less than two years after the supposedly transformational once-in-a-generation election of President Obama. Welcome to an American politics in which opinion polls now show the Republicans have a chance of recapturing Congress in November's midterm elections and maybe even an outside chance of levelling the Senate. If that were to happen, then America, far from reaching its post-cold-war point of domestic political balance in 2008 after the culture wars of the previous 20 years, would be plunged back into them. In that event the change which Obama promised would have proved to be not so believable after all. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/17/obama-partisan-politics-bp-disaster

[babylonsister]

1. Thanks, recommend. What logic indeed. nt

[DJ13]

2. less than two years after the supposedly transformational once-in-a-generation election

Thats the whole problem.

The left believed it WAS transformational, and the right was afraid of the transformation, but Obama played it safe by trying to be in the middle as soon as he was sworn in......which angered the left and gave the right an opening to stay relevant and attack.

[Scuba]

6. +1

[snot]

3. Why insult Groucho.

[struggle4progress]

4. "Whatever it is, I'm against it!" -- Groucho (as Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff in Horse Feathers)

[Hugin]

7. My thoughts, precisely.

Probably, because IRL Groucho was a Progressive.

"Although Irving Berlin quipped, "If Marx had been Groucho instead of Karl, the world would be in less of a snarl," Groucho's political views were left-wing. Marx & Lennon: The Parallel Sayings was published in 2005; the book records similar sayings between Groucho Marx and John Lennon.

Groucho Marx

[Mac1949]

5. I've always appreciated the Guardian...

even though I don't always agree with them.  I wish we had
papers like it here in the U. S.