Last week, right here we wrote about how President Obama lost the vote on the gun bill.
here's part of what we said:
President Obama is really more interested in campaigning and demonizing Republicans than he is in reaching across the aisle to make a deal. Obama doesn't want a Democrat/Republican, bi-partisan unity vote.
If he did, he would have gone to the GOP with a solid 58 votes and that likely would have tipped the scales and brought two more Republicans in the fold and the scales would have been tipped.
But it wasn't worth it for him to keep his own party together and then just two more GOP votes. He was more interested in campaigning all over the country, using parents of the Sandy Hook massacre as props and denouncing gun owners and second amendment defenders. All that was more important to Obama and his team than quietly working out a deal.
He didn't want to do the hard work that needed to be done.
Instead -- as is often the case with Obama -- he wanted to grandstand; to campaign; to propagandize. He simply doesn't appear to be interested in leading and building consensus the way a president should.
"Unfortunately, he [Obama} still has not learned how to govern.Folks, you read it all here first.
"How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.
It’s unbelievable that . . . he could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.
"Even House Republicans who had no intention of voting for the gun bill marveled privately that the president could not muster 60 votes in a Senate that his party controls.
"President Obama thinks he can use emotion to bring pressure on Congress. But that’s not how adults with power respond to things. He chooses not to get down in the weeds and pretend he values the stroking and other little things that matter to lawmakers."
And you saved yourselves the aggravation (and the cost) of having to read the New York Times.
Of course, there is one vital difference between Dowd's approach and ours: She still insists (no matter what the problem) in pinning the final blame on Republicans and conservatives. We don't.
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