Obama’s legacy: Stalemate

By LeRoy Goldman
Special to The Observer

Charlotte Observer, Charlotte, NC 

Posted: Wednesday, Oct. 01, 2014

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/10/01/5213708/obamas-legacy-stalemate.html#storylink=cpy

Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama brought down the house at the 2004 Democratic National Convention with his electrifying speech. That speech assured his election to the Senate, but more importantly it gave birth to his quest for the presidency.

Without doubt the lines from the speech that engendered the greatest applause were, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

Those words were the foundation of his presidential campaign in 2008 that promised “Hope and Change.” Obama had read the mood of the nation correctly, and the electorate responded by providing him with a mandate to govern and a Congress with Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.

But today, half way through the president’s second term, his soaring words from 2004 ring hollow.

Today America is more polarized than it was a decade ago.

Today the stalemate in Washington that has emasculated the national government is easily understood by the existence of a no-man’s land that separates Red States from Blue States, whites from minorities, conservatives from liberals, and men from women.

The paralysis is so severe and so longstanding that we are now at the point where both sides accept its existence as the new normal.

Instead of finding ways to grapple with the major problems facing the nation, the president and the Congress remain locked in a zero-sum game in which each side believes that the only way to win is for the other to lose.

What’s worse is the fact that this problem will continue long after President Obama leaves office.

To understand why, we need to go back to the scene of the crime – the president’s first two years in office when he had Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Democrats controlled the House 257-178 and the Senate 60-40.

On Feb. 19, 2009 CNBC reporter, Rick Santelli, broadcasting from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, called for the creation of a “Chicago Tea Party.” It was the spark that lit the fuse of the tea party whose supporters were already outraged at the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that President George W. Bush signed into law the previous October and the Stimulus bill that President Obama had signed less than a month after taking office in January of 2009.

But what really fueled and sustained the growth of the tea party was their full-throated, intransigent opposition to President Obama’s plan to alter more than one-sixth of the national economy by proposing health care reform – Obamacare.

In June of 2009 the president laid out his strategy for sweeping health care reform. From then, until he signed Obamacare into law nine months later, the president attempted to explain his program to the American people dozens of times. He failed each time. They never understood it.

In addition, the president chose to turn the job of writing the legislation over to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and a few key committee chairmen on Capitol Hill, partisan Democrats. And all of this took center stage with Wall Street in turmoil, the mortgage market frozen, economy in free-fall, unemployment skyrocketing, stock market plummeting, and the recession deepening.

Obama’s unwise, unnecessary, and unforced error gave the tea party just what it needed – power.

On Election Day 2010 they took control of the House and they were hugely successful in state legislative and gubernatorial races all over the nation, just in time for the 10-year census and the congressional redistricting that follows the census.

The GOP added 720 state legislative seats in 2010, increasing its total to 3,941 Republican state legislators – more than at any time since 1928!

And since then those Republicans have so gerrymandered the House that there is no chance the Democrats can reclaim it until 2022 at the earliest. North Carolina is a perfect example.

Prior to 2010, its delegation had seven Democrats and six Republicans. Today it has nine Republicans and four Democrats. After this November’s election, it likely will have 10 Republicans and three Democrats.

Unwittingly, President Obama combined his naivete, arrogance, and inexperience in a way that neutered his presidency and brought to power radical Republicans who have repeatedly demonstrated their incapacity to govern. They have blood in their mouths, vengeance in their hearts, and insufficient electrical activity between their ears.

Thank you, Mr. President!

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