President Obama laid it out for repugicans. If the repugican cabal doesn’t move to the center, they will never win the presidency again.
Transcript from President Obama’s interview with Marketplace:
Ryssdal: Another culture question — the culture of
this town. Your mantra this year has been “pen and phone,” right? “I am
going to do whatever it takes with executive order to govern,”
basically. And you have done that on immigration, you have done it on
the minimum wage for new federal contract workers — all kinds of things.
The question, though, is — and I understand your frustration with the repugican majority in the House of Representatives — is that where we
are now? That it’s one guy with a pen in this town, who is running the
American economy?
President Obama: Well, unfortunately, we have a
Congress that’s broken down. And I know that a lot of times people who
are watching what’s happening in Washington sort of feel like, “You
know, a plague on both their houses. Democrats, repugicans, they’re all
the same. None of them care about us.” But the truth is that we have a
very specific problem. We have a House of Representatives that is so
ideologically driven at this point that they are not able to carry out
basic functions of government. So we saw this during the government
shutdown. The idea that we would shut down the government based on a
notion that we’ve got to drastically cut the basic safety net — despite
the fact that the deficit has come down by more than half during my
presidency — is not based on common sense, it’s not based on any sound
economic theories. It’s based on the ideological predispositions of a
handful of folks who are currently calling the shots in the House of
Representatives. The same is true, we just recently saw, with
immigration reform; we have bipartisan support for immigration reform.
We know that the economy would grow faster, that we would end up seeing
$1.4 trillion in additional growth in the United States if in fact we
passed immigration reform. We know that there are companies across the
country, particularly in the high-tech sector, that are begging to have
highly skilled immigrants — who we’ve trained, we’ve paid for and are
now going back to their home countries to start businesses — stay here
in the United States. Despite all that, we still couldn’t get the House
of Representatives to act, primarily because of politics, primarily
because they’re captive of a small ideological band inside their caucus.
And so, I don’t think this is a permanent state of affairs; I think
over time the repugican cabal will move back to the center, mainly
because if they don’t, they’ll never win the presidency again.
Obama was right. The repugicans have no choice, but to
move back to the center. The repugicans haven’t even begun that process. In
fact, they have responded for calls to move to the center by moving
harder to the right. This isn’t rocket science. Since the Great
Recession, the country has been moving more to the left. The repugican cabal has
responded to this shift by resisting all change and purging their cabal
of anyone who isn’t a lunatic fringe ideologue.
The repugican cabal continues to try to fool voters
into supporting their agenda. They like to disguise their extremist
agenda with moderate sounding people and language, but voters aren’t
buying. Eventually, repugicans are going to get sick of losing
presidential elections, and decide to move to the middle. After they
move back to the middle, Congress will start functioning and things will
get done.
The president laid out the reason why it doesn’t
matter who repugicans nominate in 2016. As long as they insist on
running to the far right in a center-left country, Democrats will remain
in the White House.
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