Obama: “My Way or . . . My Way”

The Washington Post’s Charles Lane has focused on a single exchange during President Obama’s meeting with senate Democrats February 3. Lane writes that Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark), arguing that the Democrats’ ambitious legislative agenda was sowing job-destroying “uncertainty” in the business community, asked the president, “Are we willing as Democrats to push back on our own party?”

Obama’s revealing reply,

If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression -- we don’t tinker with health care, let the insurance companies do what they want, we don’t put in place any insurance reforms, we don’t mess with the banks, let them keep on doing what they’re doing now because we don’t want to stir up Wall Street -- the result is going to be the same. I don’t know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us into this fix in the first place. If our response [is] “we don’t want to stir things up here, we’re just going to do the same thing that was being done before,” then I don’t know what differentiates us from the other guys. And I don’t know why people would say, boy, we really want to make sure that those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us.

OK. In other words, we’re Democrats, we don’t care about polls, we don’t care what happened in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, we just keep doing what we did all last year, and the people will (eventually) love us for it. Folks have two choices, and only two choices: Bush or Obama, and they chose Obama.