Obama's Big Mistake

Obama’s Big Mistake

The View from the Middle

Back in 2009, Barack Obama was ushered into the White House with a 79-vote majority in the House of Representatives and a filibuster proof majority of 60 votes in the Senate when you include the two so called Independents who caucused with the Democrats.  He read this as a mandate by the people to embrace his far left ideology when it might have been more of a rejection by the people of the performance of a two term sitting President.  Sound familiar?  I don’t believe that George W. Bush deserves all the blame for the financial collapse of 2008, but he has to bear part of it.

Obama was confident.  I would say cocky.  He assumed that the world had fundamentally changed and that he would always enjoy the advantages he inherited.  So, he told Republicans to “drop dead” in three different ways during the first two years in office.  First, he humiliated John McCain, Eric Canter and John Boehner by telling them in a very public fashion that “elections have consequences, and I won”.  This would hardly be described as being magnanimous in victory.

During the mid-term campaigning in 2010, he gave speeches ridiculing Republicans.  He created an analogy that compared the US economy to a car in a ditch.  He suggested that he and the Democrats had dragged this car back onto the road with no help from Republicans.  You can argue the accuracy of the analogy, but the insult that followed was unnecessary.  In terms of moving forward, he said Republicans could, “come along for the ride, but they gotta sit in the back seat.”  As you can imagine, Black Republican leaders were particularly offended. 

Finally, not chronologically but in terms of the intensity of the rejection, President Obama passed his signature legislation, Obamacare, without a single Republican vote in either house of Congress.  In a bill that was close to 3,000 pages long, he couldn’t include one conservative compromise idea, like tort reform or selling insurance across state lines, to cobble together a few Republican votes?  This would have at least given some appearance of bipartisanship?

This hardline rejection of roughly half of America led to what Obama described as a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms.  But he didn’t learn any lessons.  He proceeded to use Stalag Commandant Harry Reid to suppress any possibility of conservative ideas seeing the light of day in the Senate.  Republicans were allowed no bills to be debated and no amendments to Democrat bills.  Even as the ship was sinking, he would not seek consensus, which could have bailed him out.

Then, when he lost the Senate in the 2014 midterms, rather than reach across the aisle, he boasted that he “had a pen and a phone”.  He now planned to run the country as a monarchy through executive orders.  He has no compromise in his blood and this final attempt to dismiss the will of the people has cost him and his party the White House.

Now, he is about to learn a hard lesson.  In politics, if you run the country in a savagely partisan fashion and without any consensus, everything you put into place can be undone with the same stroke of a pen you used.  I get no joy out of writing these words, but I write them in the hope that Donald Trump won’t make this same mistake.

Mr. Trump inherits a similar situation to Mr. Obama’s.  While he doesn’t have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, he will find a more pliable minority opposition since 25 of the 33 Senate seats up for reelection in 2018 will be from the Democrat Caucus.  My hope is that Mr. Trump will reach out to the other side and find solutions that garner bipartisan support and will work for the American people.  Let me give you a few examples of some fertile compromise positions.

On immigration, the vast majority of Americans are in favor of better border security.  Mr. Trump should deliver on his campaign promise to secure our southern border, whatever that looks like.  Most Americans, if not all, are in favor of sending illegal alien felons back to where they came from.  Do it!  For the remaining, law-abiding Hispanic citizens (other than the fact that they are here illegally) we must offer them a path to legalization (not citizenship).  I wouldn’t even be so foolish as to suggest that they pay back taxes.  What a mess that would be.  They should pay a small fine, get legalized and then we can all put this nagging problem behind us.  Even a $100 fine would bring in a billion dollars, which we can put towards border security.

On Obamacare, there are some popular elements in the FCA.  I agree that the total law is a disaster waiting to happen, but as one of my old bosses used to say, “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”

Term limits is another area where President Elect Trump can find broad consensus, if not with members of Congress, with the American people.  75% of Americans are in favor of term limits and a President Trump could use his bully pulpit to bully congressmen and women to support a constitutional amendment to impose limits on themselves.

There are other areas where there is bipartisan support.  My hope is that a new President Trump would not make the same mistake that President Obama did, and reach out to the other side of the aisle to bring Americans together and to move America forward.  Early signs are good, but we have a long way to go and many wounds to heal.