Monday, March 9, 2015

Speaker Boehner Doesn't Have a Strategy

I have to admit that I read this article Jonathan Chait wrote about his interview with Dan Pfeiffer hoping to get some insight on the inner workings of the Obama administration. But instead - for me - the big take-away was about Speaker Boehner.
The administration has now decided that in many cases, even adversarial bargaining fails because the Republican leadership is not capable of planning tactically. “You have to be careful not to presume a lot of strategy for this group,” Pfeiffer said. “I’ve always believed that the fundamental, driving strategic ethos of the Republican House leadership has been, What do we do to get through the next caucus or conference without getting yelled at? We should never assume they have a long game. We used to spend a lot of time thinking that maybe Boehner is saying this to get himself some more room. And it’s like, no, that’s not actually the case. Usually he’s just saying it because he just said it or it’s the easiest thing to solve his immediate problem.”
Well..that settles that. Boehner is actually the idiot he seems to be.

When it comes to what President Obama learned from this, BooMan is over-thinking it all. The few times the President is forced to deal with the Republican House (i.e., on budget issues), he now knows that he has to wait until AFTER Boehner fails at pandering to the lunatic caucus in order to attempt negotiations.

1 comment:

  1. Eve'nin, Nancy
    SO glad you put this up including brotha Boo's latest. CLEARly he reads you, but Boo, and any number of others, just don't get how PBO thinks. And, it scary to realize that there are guys abounding in positions that impact on us all who just don't have the critical thinking abilities to effectively deal with the complicated matters that are happening in the world. 'Course, while we shake our heads in disbelief, it's also not as if we didn't see this during PBO's first mid-term. We didn't vote. Twice. This is the end result. And, then we hear: "Obama didn't do this or Obama didn't do that". It really pisses me off.

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