Another Republican criticizes Obama

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Why can't those guys just sit down, shut up, smile, and look bipartisan

 

http://nypost.com/2015/11/15/did-obama-actually-follow-in-lincolns-footsteps/

[B-Man]

No surprise to those with three digit IQ's, but here we get a quote directly from a Obama Cabinet member.

 

 

 

FTA:

 

Bipartisanship was Obama’s campaign theme. “We are not a collection of red states and blue states,” he said after the Iowa caucuses in 2008. “We are the United States of America.”

 

LaHood was ready to sign on. “I’m a respected Republican,” he says he told Obama when the president-elect interviewed him for a Cabinet post. “If you’re looking for someone bipartisan, no one can fit the bill better than I can.”

 

Fast-forward to 2015. “I do not believe the White House ever committed fully to a genuine bipartisan approach to policymaking, despite the president’s words to the contrary,” he wrote.

 

The New York Times’ Peter Baker asked LaHood about it. He pointed to the 2009 stimulus bill, a $787 billion monstrosity ostensibly meant to jumpstart the economy but which Democrats actually used to go on a wish-list spending spree.

 

Democrats swore the bill would center on massive investment in roads, bridges and the like. Music to LaHood’s ears. But in the end, that was false advertising.

 

Obama promised the stimulus would be “the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower built an interstate highway system in the 1950s.” Yet, as The Economist noted, “Just $64 billion, or 8 percent of the total, went to roads, public transport, rail, bridges, aviation and wastewater systems.” High-speed rail was a fantasy; “shovel-ready” projects were anything but.

 

Yet that wasn’t the worst part for LaHood. Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress (Nancy Pelosi in the House, Harry Reid in the Senate) decided early on they neither needed nor wanted Republican participation in major legislation. They could pass the bill without the GOP. And so they did.

 

But not before Obama demonstrated galling chutzpah: LaHood was asked to call his former Republican colleagues in Congress and convince them to vote for the bill.

 

They were incredulous: Why vote for a bill they’d been shut out of? LaHood eventually gave up. Obama’s first major piece of legislation was “the beginning of the end of bipartisanship,” LaHood told the Times.

 

But it also shows that, in hiring his so-called “team of rivals,” Obama wanted them not for their dissenting opinions (the president listened mostly to Valerie Jarrett, sometimes to David Axelrod, never to people outside his paranoid inner circle) but to co-opt them. He wanted their names on his policies

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Edited November 16, 2015 by B-Man