Back on January 19, 2012, Barack Obama sang one line of Lets Stay Together at the Apollo. A few days later,House Democrats had a message for President Obama: Let’s stay together — adopting the song as a theme song that the LATimes called it the new anthem for the Democratic Party. Now, almost year later, in the face of the recently concluded Debt-Ceiling Crisis, the Democrats have come together in unity, realizing the goal of the LetsStayTogether movement that Barack Obama himself started with a soul love song. Jonathan Chait: Most of the analysis has focused on the mind-boggling stupidity of Republicans in Congress, who blundered into a debacle that failed in exactly the way they were warned it would. But it also represents a huge Democratic success. Of the Republican Party’s mistakes, the most rational was its assumption that Democrats would ultimately bend. This was not merely their own recycled certainty but widespread, world-weary conventional wisdom. Democrats would have to pay a ransom. Part of what undergirded Democratic unity went beyond a (correct) calculation that it would be dangerous to pay any ransom at all. Democrats seemed to share a genuine moral revulsion at the tactics and audacity of a party that had lost a presidential election by 5 million votes, lost another chance to win a favorable Senate map, and lost the national House vote demanding the winning party give them its way without compromise. Probably the single biggest Republican mistake was in failing to understand the way its behavior would create unity in the opposing party. Not until the very end, when the crisis was well under way, did any conservatives even acknowledge the Democratic view that the GOP had threatened basic governing norms. Ted Cruz and his minions may have undertaken a hopeless crusade, but they dragged along the Paul Ryan Republicans who all along seemed to think their extortion scheme was a simple business deal. Its collapse is one of the brightest days Washington has seen in a grim era.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 08:04:28 +0000
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