I'd like to ask all of the people who thought trying to reach out to Republicans in a bipartisan manner would be a good idea -- Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama in particular -- how'd that work out for you?
Could the effort at bipartisanship over the last two years have been a bigger disaster? The Democrats allowed the Republicans to make their case for two straight years while Democrats laid down their arms. And it turns out the voters didn't know why they should vote for the Democrats. Surprise, surprise.
The Republicans on the other hand went with complete and utter partisanship -- and it worked! If the Obama White House trusts one more idiot in Washington who says they should try reaching consensus with the Republicans, then they deserve the ass kicking they'll get next time around, too.
We had a Republican strategist on our show tonight and with incredibly honesty he admitted that the idea of "bipartisanship" is something that only benefits Republicans because they never really engage in it and they get the Democrats to do what they want (you can watch it here at the 6:39-7:48 mark). How stupid do you have to be to keep falling into that trap?
I guess as stupid as Mark Penn, who of course predictably calls for Obama to do just that -- again -- for the next two years. But Penn isn't stupid (the Democrats aren't stupid either, they're just supposed to be the patsies that lose to the Republicans in this big corporate game that's being played on us). Penn loves the corporatist, pro-Wall Street, Republican policies and is just using the results of this election to push for them as he did when he was running Hillary Clinton's campaign. How did that work out for him? Oh yeah.
Rush Limbaugh pushed the Republicans to fight and not give an inch to the Democrats. That strategy unfortunately worked. However much you might love the idea of bipartisanship, it has proven to be a terrible political strategy. Exactly as we said in the beginning of the Obama administration, the Republicans had no desire to work with the president on anything. We said the only thing they would want to do is to tear him down. We were right.
That's the Washington reality. If President Obama doesn't adjust to that fact and start fighting back, the next two years are going to be brutal.