Will the real Obama administration please raise its hand? Steve Benen flags this passage from a Politico story today about the possibility of Dems losing their 60-seat supermajority if Scott Brown wins the Massachusetts Senate race:
The narrower majority will force more White House engagement with Republicans, which could actually help restore a bit of the post-partisan image that was a fundamental ingredient of his appeal to voters.
“Now everything that gets done in the Senate will have the imprimatur of bipartisanship,” another administration official said. “The benefits of that will accrue to the president and the Democratic Senate. It adds to the pressure on Republicans to participate in the process in a meaningful way, which so far they have refused to do.”
Steve is dumbfounded: “The only rational expectation is that the scorched-earth strategy of the last year will get worse — they’ll be less interested in ‘participating in the process in a meaningful way’ when they smell blood in the water and have the votes to filibuster literally everything.” I agree. But in fairness, the Politico piece is headlined “Obama plans combative turn,” and it contains these quotes right up at the top of the piece:
“This is not a moment that causes the president or anybody who works for him to express any doubt,” a senior administration official said. “It more reinforces the conviction to fight hard.”
….“The response will not be to do incremental things and try to salvage a few seats in the fall,” a presidential adviser said. “The best political route also happens to be the boldest rhetorical route, which is to go out and fight and let the chips fall where they may. We can say, ‘At least we fought for these things, and the Republicans said no.’”
You can find someone to say just about anything if you make enough phone calls. But I doubt that many people in the White House think that Republicans are suddenly going to become more cooperative if Scott Brown wins tonight. Obama may genuinely be dedicated to giving bipartisanship a chance, but he’s not an idiot. And whatever else you think of them, neither are guys like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel. In fact, who knows? If a loss in Massachusetts is what it takes to finally wake Obama up and show some fight, maybe it will turn out to be a blessing in disguise.
