Best advice to Dems: get down to business
President Obama has endless advice for successor Donald Trump on how he should govern, but 44 could draw on his own bitter experience to give some pointers to his own party.
Isn’t it about time Obama pulled Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer aside to explain to him that it’s time to end the pointless sleep-over protests for Obamacare, that petulant partisan politics won’t lead to a productive Congress? Democrats won’t win more seats next year or achieve any agenda items if they become the Party of No, as Schumer has promised.
Last week Schumer said, “The only way we’re going to work with him is if he moves completely in our direction and abandons his Republican colleagues. Ninety, 95 percent of the time, we’ll be holding his feet to the fire and holding him accountable. But we’re Democrats. We’re not going to just oppose things to oppose them.”
Are we honestly supposed to believe that the party which just tried to derail the Electoral College vote, which has been smearing Trump’s Cabinet appointees as bigots, that keeps insisting — never mind all the negatives piled up around Hillary Clinton — it was the Russians who swung the election by hacking some nasty Democratic emails ... are we supposed to believe that party won’t oppose anything just to be confrontational?
What the Democrats don’t seem to realize is that Trump is a deal-maker. His entire career — and his recent meetings with liberals like Al Gore — make it clear he doesn’t care which party anyone is in if they are ready to do business.
You would hope Obama would have done some soul-searching in the last few weeks, and might see his icy relationship with Republicans over the last eight years got him nowhere — literally, as the GOP is now poised to dump his legacy of executive orders. That he might acknowledge it was a mistake to spend so little time on Capitol Hill, that a legacy has to be built on both sides of the aisle if you want it to endure.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if his final speech as president in Chicago today encouraged both parties to get along and find common ground?
Most Americans agree Obamacare needs a fix. If Democrats truly believe any part of the health care law they passed unilaterally has value, they could work with the GOP on a solution — rather than holding latenight pajama parties, and hoping the GOP fails so they can use it as a political talking point.