Wile E. McConnell

Something else is afoot. This is just too weird, even for the minority leader.

Mitch McConnell is maneuvering through a rollout of open diplomacy: his notorious "one-term" remark and now the chortled quip, "If [Democrats] think it’s bad now, wait 'til next year." Yet McConnell, a professional faker, must know what Julian Assange amateurishly doesn't: that open, which is to say public, diplomacy is only a tactic to obscure private means.

Idealists, tea partiers and children may read Woodrow Wilson, but McConnell is reading Sun Tzu.

President Obama grasped the import of the electorate's midterm message -- however naively, voters expect Washington to pull together, to move the ball, whatever metaphor you like -- and consequently, to my mind, he also began to play the obscurantist, open diplomacy game.

Let us join hands and meld minds and advance together to splendid horizons of principled compromise -- that's the presidential chant in public -- while he privately concedes that his best shot at reelection and even larger Democratic majorities in 2013 is serial GOP obstructionism in 2011-12, all of which will seem very much like 1948.

So contrary to what Obama says, he expects something else, which he intends to exploit at the proper time.

True, his activist base still doesn't "get it" -- they want him out on the stump, now, counterproductively hissing and snarling, since for them that would be abundantly rewarding -- and that's partly because Obama has not spelled it out for them in strategic crayon.

Though they're supposed to understand this stuff all on their own, it's apparent the president takes the Kantian approach to pedagogy -- the really dumb ones are beyond hope, so why bother? 

Still, I can't help but think that McConnell indeed "gets it." Obama is staging a yawning gap of a trap which only the blinkered, fight, fight, fight Ed Schultzes of American politics can't perceive. For that very reason, though, McConnell is bound to see his party's abyss, and somehow avert it.

How? That's why I wrote "somehow." I haven't a clue. And perhaps McConnell doesn't have one yet, either. For the moment all he and the semantically inventive John Boehner can do is swaddle their anarchistic base in caressing assurances of idiotic entrenchments and mindless malgovernance.

Comments

[Anne Johnson]

I consider myself part of Obama's base. I have found him difficult to read, but I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing. It also helps that the republicans are very out in the open about their only goal is making him a one-term president. They don't care about jobs, the economy, the 99'ers the wars, or any other pressing issue that our country faces. I just wonder if they realize what could happen if our economy only sees minimal improvement and the unemployment numbers aren't much lower than they are now. Who will the voters blame?

[Chris]

Well we know who Fox news and talk radio will blame, and that influences a lot of people.