The GOP Mission To Re-Elect Obama

Feb 12th, 2012

First, there was the Ryan Medicare debacle. Then came the GOP-driven debt ceiling disaster. Now, we have the "conservative" movement waging open war on contraception, a strategy which the vast majority of Americans aren't buying no matter how they frame it. In between these iconoclastic moments, we've had no meaningful legislation drafted in the House, demonization of the working poor, defense of corporations as people and an adherence to a social and economic orthodoxy so rigid that even a majority of registered Republicans oppose it point by point.

Perhaps, Team Obama should be thanking these guys.

Jonathan Chait writes:

"...President Obama has rehabilitated his own political standing in large part by highlighting the opposition of congressional Republicans. The Republican strategy has been to block and delay Obama’s agenda at every turn, and Obama has absorbed most of the backlash from a public that tends to hold the president singularly responsible for all political outcomes. Obama’s campaign of publicly highlighting Republican opposition has simultaneously helped to absolve him of at least part of the blame and made him look more like a strong leader.

I was skeptical last October that Obama’s initiative would help his approval ratings, but it looks like I was wrong. Obama’s poll numbers have climbed over the last several months, with his net job-approval rating, which had bottomed out at minus ten percentage points, approaching parity. The improving economy surely has helped. But it’s notable that the economy hasn’t helped Congress, which has seen its approval actually fall over the same span. It has all helped Obama’s strategy of making voters judge him against a concrete alternative, one that happens to be pervasively unpopular.

Republicans are beginning to grasp their own inadvertent complicity in Obama’s comeback. Some, of course, believe that their failure lies in having compromised too much. But political realism is advancing. Representative Tom Cole bluntly asserts that his party simply needs to disappear from the national debate: “The big thing for us is to not be part of the conversation instead of trying to inject ourselves into it.” It’s sound advice. If Republicans weren’t charging around threatening to overturn decades of American social policy and possibly plunge the world into economic crisis if Obama refuses to accede to their goals, Obama would have a harder time defining himself in opposition to them.

The payroll tax fight offers the first test of whether or not the new breeze of tactical realism will prevail, or be overwhelmed by countercurrents of militant obstruction."