Republicans’ McConnell Seeks to Say Yes to Obama on Something

[maseman]

March 11 (Bloomberg) -- Mitch McConnell, the most powerful Republican in the U.S. Senate, has so far had one word for President Barack Obama’s agenda: No.

Now, with his party being battered as rejectionist, the Kentucky lawmaker says he’s looking for something he can say yes to. The Senate minority leader, who has opposed every major Obama initiative since the president took office, says he sees the opportunity for agreement in areas such as foreign policy and overhauling Social Security.

“No one wants him to fail,” McConnell, 67, said in an interview. “But saying ‘no’ to bad policy is not saying ‘no’ to everything.”

[babylonsister]

1. Foreign policy? How big of him-not.

Maybe that's because the rethugs don't have a clue and weren't going to fight him on that to begin with?

http://washingtonindependent.com/32929/gop-lacks-leadership-on-foreign-policy

During his first 45 days in office, President Obama has made several sharp departures from the foreign policies of the Bush administration that were shaped in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Obama has announced a timetable for staggered withdrawal from Iraq. He has ordered 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and engaged in a wide-ranging review of U.S. war aims. And he has begun exploring direct negotiations with the Iranian government.

And the response from the conservative movement and the Republican Party — which turned or sought to turn every election after 9/11 into a referendum on foreign policy and national security — has largely been either silence or agreement.

To some degree, conservatives say, the still-nascent Obama administration’s foreign policy needs time to develop before a critique can emerge. And when the administration enacts policies that the Republican party finds agreeable, as with the troop increase in Afghanistan, it would make little sense to attack. But that leads to a broader problem that leading conservatives identify: in the wake of the Bush administration, the question of what exactly Republican foreign policy is remains unsettled. Several GOP decisionmakers say bluntly that they are unsure who the leading foreign-policy figures on the right are anymore.

For the Republican Party, which has so long prided itself on its perceived dominance over questions of America’s role abroad, to be without clear foreign-policy leaders is a striking development. Preeminent among the GOP old-guard foreign-policy establishment is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who structured his 2008 presidential campaign around the argument that Obama was dangerously ignorant of geopolitics. Yet McCain gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute on Feb. 25 that applauded Obama’s troop increase and urged a greater infusion of civilian resources, a direction that Obama administration officials have already indicated they’ll embrace when the new Afghanistan strategy is released next month. More surprisingly, after warning on the campaign trail that withdrawing from Iraq along a fixed timeline risked squandering the security gains made by the surge, McCain’s spokeswoman told The New York Times that the senator was “supportive of the plan.”

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[spanone]

2. i'll know President Obama is on the right track as long as mitch-boy votes against him

[rolltideroll]

4. Agree nt

[Cleita]

3. Doesn't he know he's becoming irrelevant?

I think he'd better start saying yes to programs that benefit his state before they fire him in the next election.

[maseman]

7. I can't stand him

He's already irrelevant.

[msongs]

5. how bout "Yes I am unhappy we have a black man as president"? nt

[alfredo]

6. I hope McConnell say yes when Obama asks him to kiss his ass.