Obama, In Morning Joe Interview, Predicts War Inside Republican Party If He Is Reelected

[Jim Lane]

17. I hope Obama is deliberately lying for reasons of political expedience.

I hope he doesn't really believe this:

"There are a whole range of issues I think where we can actually bring the country together with a non-ideological agenda," Obama said in a pre-taped interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

The important things are all intensely ideological. Will we have progressive taxation? Will we protect Social Security, Medicare, and a whole array of means-tested programs? Will government rein in corporate polluters and Wall Street crooks? Will we stop wasting huge sums on our bloated military?

The "non-ideological agenda" is how early in the year we switch over to Daylight Saving Time.

Obama's a smart guy. I'm sure he's noticed that the "bring the country together" program that he began in 2009, which eschewed partisanship, has spectacularly failed. The better way to bring the country together is for him to emphasize the ideological agenda, to expose the Republicans as the lunatic right, and to bring the country together in electing a Democratic House and a more strongly Democratic Senate in 2014. (Unfortunately, I think it's too late for him or anyone to flip the House this year. If he'd followed this more confrontational approach beginning, at the latest, a few months after his inauguration, when it became undeniable that the Republicans were engaged in pure obstructionism, there's a good chance that the catastrophe of 2010 wouldn't have happened. That's water over the dam, but let's at least learn from the mistake.)