Obama To Critics: I Won
Behold the new era of bi-partisanship.
President Obama listened to Republican gripes about his stimulus package during a meeting with congressional leaders Friday morning - but he also left no doubt about who’s in charge of these negotiations. “I won,” Obama noted matter-of-factly, according to sources familiar with the conversation.
The exchange arose as top House and Senate Republicans expressed concern to the president about the amount of spending in the package. They also raised red flags about a refundable tax credit that returns money to those who don’t pay income taxes, the sources said.
I certainly don’t begrudge Obama his attitude. He did win, and so did a lot of his Democrat colleagues, and so they’ve got a wide open field in which to advance their agenda.
But Obama is the guy who is calling for unity and bipartisanship, and he’s going to have to learn that if you want to work with the other side you can’t just dismiss their grievances with blunt statements like “I won.”
Unless Obama thinks that bipartisanship means all the other people come over to your side and work on advancing your agenda. Which he probably does.
Personally, I’d just as soon see liberals and conservatives working together as little as possible. When the two ideological sides in Washington start working together that usually means the taxpayer is getting screwed even worse than usual. And besides, the point of conservatism is to limit government. Compromises with liberals tend to only slow the growth of government.
I’d just as soon let the liberals be in charge of trying to grow the government and not give them any help at all.
