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Sunday, March 03, 2013

Unprecedented!

Yet another edition of What BooMan Said:
Articles in the Washington Post and Roll Call report on the president's focus on winning back control of the House of Representatives. Both articles treat this as a highly risky strategy… They act like this is some kind of unprecedented thing, the president wanting his party to control Congress… Another thing I see in print a lot is the idea that second-term presidents only have a brief period to do anything before they become lame-ducks. Again, the sample size is so small that this is meaningless. Insofar as we can talk about LBJ as a two-term president, his second term was ruined by Vietnam. Nixon's by Watergate. Reagan's by Iran-Contra. Clinton's by Linda Tripp. Bush Jr.'s by the war in Iraq. If you want to predict that Obama will make a similar blunder, you're welcome to play Nostradamus, but it doesn't look likely right now. What's unprecedented is the situation… where a minority party simply insists on its agenda with no compromises or concessions. In this situation, it's either civil war or the midterms start early.

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