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.
Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Sunday, March 03, 2013
Unprecedented!
Yet another edition of What BooMan Said:
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