I have now seen dozens of diaries and comments on this site that are hammering Obama for saying he wants to meet with Republicans and see if there is room to compromise. Rachel Maddow was on Obama's case today making the same point. The notion is that Obama is dumb or delusional and that he really thinks significant compromise is possible. Rachel, whom I usually love, was snickering and sneering with a sense of superiority, as if only she, and not Obama himself, understood McConnell's atrocious speech. Many diarists here are sneering in a similar way.
But Obama is not dumb and he is not delusional.
Obama knows that there is little chance for compromise and a high likelihood of gridlock. He knows Boehner and McDonnell will not allow any significant legislation to pass that is even mildly progressive in nature -- even legislation far more watered down than health care reform or financial reform.
He knows all of this.
But he also knows that he cannot say what the "Obama is delusional" crowd wants him to say -- even though what that crowd wants him to say is true.
Let's get real. Obama could not have come out yesterday, the day after a major election defeat, and said:
John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are cynics. They only want to use their power to weaken my reelection chances and they know that if we work together to pass any meaningful legislation, that will strengthen my chances even if it helps the country. My God, Mr. McConnell admitted it! I won't talk to them. I won't meet with them. They don't want compromise and they can't handle compromise.
So I will let them take the initiative on legislation, and if they pass legislation contrary to the platform I ran on in 2008 and get it through with the assistance of a handful of Democrats in the Senate, I will simply veto it and point out to the voters in 2012 how bad their ideas were. Because if their top goal is to defeat me, my top goal is to defeat them and obtain Democratic majorities in both houses in 2012."
Had he done that, he would, to be sure, have proved to Rachel Maddow and many of the commenters here that he is as "smart" as they are. And a bunch of people here would have had a moment of catharsis.
But he would have destroyed the one path available to him to regain lost ground and rebuild the Democratic majority that was just lost.
That path is for him to remain true to who he is, let the public know that he has not shut the door on compromises to get the economy moving forward and create jobs, and force the Republicans to out themselves as to who they are: a party with no plan whatsoever to achieve even its own stated goals of deficit reduction and job creation.
The electorate who voted for the Repubs Tuesday includes not only a lot of Tea Partiers who don't want Republicans to try to compromise with Obama, but also a lot of independents who do want them to try to compromise. Obama knows that Boehner and McConnell are essentially forced to pander to the former constituency, and that to the extent they are tempted to even try to appease the latter constituency the Tea Partiers will go apeshit.
This is a long-winded way of saying that Obama needs to allow the Republicans the space to show even more clearly and to a broader swath of the electorate how crazy they are. Those who frequent this site already know how crazy they are and don't need more proof. But others apparently do.
If Obama says now what the "Obama is delusional" crowd wants him to say, it will muddy his ability to make that same point later when it matters far more -- after even more evidence is in and it is closer to the 2012 election and nothing has been done by the "new" Congress to address middle class people's real problems, or even the deficit.
One final point: We can all turn back the clock to January of 2009 and opine that, at that moment, Obama should have claimed a massive mandate for the Democratic platform and a massive repudiation of the Republicans and their ideology, and that he would go forward with his agenda without any Republican support if need be. That's a tenable position, and I would leave it to another diary to explore whether, though tenable, it is really correct. The point now is that even if that would have been brilliant back in 2009, we are now where we are now, for better or for worse.
And Obama's only remaining strategy is to be the last reasonable guy in the proverbial room when it comes to 2012. Come to think of it, that is how he won the general election in 2008. We all forget he was behind in the polls after the Repub's Labor-Day weekend convention and stayed behind or statistically tied until McCain panicked and started lurching around on the economy.
So everyone chill out and stop acting as if Obama fails to grasp that the Republicans are unwilling to compromise. He gets it. He just knows there is no percentage right now in saying that he gets it.