The new meme: It's Obama's fault, don't blame Republican obstruction.

[NuclearDem]

56. I'm not saying the Republicans aren't the problem.

But the problem from the administration is that when a proposal is made, there's not a whole lot of follow-through. Administration makes a proposal, the Republicans reject it, and then instead of fighting like hell for it, the administration just starts offering concessions.

That's how it was the health care debate. The administration floated the idea of single payer and the public option, but when there was even a shred of resistance to the idea, they went straight for the individual mandate. The problem is immediate gratification in politics; if you don't get what you want immediately, it's presumed to be a defeat. The one thing the Republicans do right is that they don't take that as the final word; even if they lose a political fight miserably, they at the very least fought tooth and nail for their policies. What that ends up doing is planting their ideas' seeds with the population at large, and ten to fifteen years down the line, they end up reaping the benefits when popular attitudes have shifted.

When you immediately backtrack from a position rather than fighting for it, the population at large essentially ends up forgetting about the idea in the first place. By the administration's logic, Occupy was an abject failure because we didn't immediately see a rise in taxes on the 1% or better treatment for workers, the gay rights movement in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s failed because the states didn't start legalizing equality until 2004, and the movement to end criminalization of marijuana failed because it's not yet fully legal in every state.

Even if you lose a fight, as long as you fought like hell for the idea, you're going to end up seeing it come to fruition later down the line, simply because you made a case for it and started convincing people it was the right idea. The administration has done that on some issues, but not nearly the majority of them.