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Edited on Mon Dec-21-09 12:17 PM by Kurt_and_Hunter
The reasons I would vote Yes:
1) There is no chance of fixing or improving anything. There will be no reconciliation manuever... no magical conference. If there were any fighting chance that killing the bill would lead to a better bill I would pursue the chance but with an utter failure of WH leadership the idea of sudden discovery of resolve, imagination, integrity, etc. seems delusional. Any deviation of process from our speedy race through the iceberg field would require Presidential leadership. This president is incapable of leadership and also not so inclined... he doesn't want to do it and if he did want to do it he still couldn't do it.
2) Failure of this bill would end the Obama presidency on the spot. This guy is not a very good politician. (If that raised your eye-brows then you need a new hobby. Obama's political brilliance will go down in history alongside Saddam's WMD... a media conventional wisdom fantasy in an echo chamber of amnesiac certainty. Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere with a clever primary strategy and a message for the moment and became President. Thus he was a great politician... except he was about the worst politician we've ever seen. Winning primaries doesn't make a person a great politician in the sense of being able to lead a nation, a party or a legislature while in office. Different challenges, different criteria.)
There is no second-act for Barack Obama so we must stretch out the first act as long as we can. See... here's the funny position we are in. Even if one argues that this bill is a step-backward that is actually worse than doing nothing we still have to ask "Okay, but how much worse?"
Even if the bill is bad we have to ask whether it is worse than effectively ending the Obama presidency.
Obama's shtick is superiority and Americans enjoy that only when backed by results. If he goes down Americans will line up around the block to throw dirt on him.
3) The long-term effects might be malign but there probably won't be a long-term. Republicans will take over the legislature, nominally or effectively via de facto pug-conservadem coalition. It will be better for us if the pugs have to dismantle this bill because that will have a positive political effect. The American people will probably hate us for this bill, but will later hate the pugs for trying to take this bill apart.
And, if nothing else, if pugs take over they will have to expend political capital dismantling this bill that would be otherwise spent dismantling something else.
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