E.J. Dionne: Obama needs to Decisively beat the Right

[WI_DEM]

Elections are supposed to decide things. The voters render a verdict on what direction they want the country to take and set the framework within which both parties work.

President Obama's time in office, however, has given rise to a new approach. Republicans decided to do all they could to make the president unsuccessful. Their not-so-subliminal message has been: We will make the country ungovernable unless you hand us every bit of legislative, executive and judicial power so we can do what we want.

Judging by the current polls, this approach hasn't worked. Mitt Romney is suffering not only from his own mistakes but also because a fundamentally moderate country has come to realize that today's GOP is far more extreme than Republicans were in the past. Romney's makers-not-takers 47 percent remarks made clear that the current GOP worldview is more Ayn Rand than Adam Smith, more Rush Limbaugh than Bill Buckley, more Rick Perry than Abe Lincoln...

Somewhat more possible, given the current polls, is unified Democratic government. If Obama winds up with something like 53 percent of the popular vote or more, the Democrats have a real chance of winning both House and Senate majorities...

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/09/24/can_this_election_settle_anything_115541.html

[rfranklin]

1. I said in 2008 that the Republicans had to be obliterated and...

there was a lot of kumbayah talk about "working together" and "finding middle ground." Now we can see that the Republicans in utter defeat just regrouped, rebranded as the Teabaggers, and schemed to obstruct Obama in every way possible. So much for "reaching across the aisle."

[Lefty Thinker]

2. Democrats in control need to

state their position, listen to the minority (Republican) position, adopt something (preferably an improvement) to rebuild trust in the political system. They need to learn to wait until the negotiations are underway before compromising.