They just want their ticket back to power. But they don't necessarily seem to want to pay for it by working harder. They appear as if they'd prefer to see Obama fail -- the Rush Limbaugh style of leadership.
The path of least resistance is to complain and several vocal republicans have been doing a bang up job of that. The republicans who are actually negotiating on the stimulus are appreciated because they care enough to do the dirty work of working with the party in power.
The ones immaturely waving bills in the air deserve to be sidelined.
As usual, Bob Herbert is spot on:
He has certainly handled himself much better than some of the clowns carrying leadership banners for the G.O.P. Michael Steele, the new Republican Party chairman, could barely contain his glee over the fact that no Republicans voted for the stimulus package in the House. “The goose egg that you laid on the president’s desk was just beautiful,” he said.
“This bill stinks,” said Lindsey Graham of South Carolina during the Senate debate on the package.
Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, made it clear that his party was committed to the low road when he talked about picking up pointers from the Taliban.
I’m not joking. “Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban,” said Mr. Sessions, in an interview with Hotline, which is part of NationalJournal.com.
The simple truth is that most Republican politicians would like Mr. Obama to fail because that is their ticket to a quick return to power. I think the president is a more formidable opponent than they realize.
Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle. While Lindsey Graham was behaving like a 6-year-old on the Senate floor and Pete Sessions was studying passages in his Taliban handbook, Mr. Obama and his aides were assessing what’s achievable in terms of stimulus legislation and how best to get there.
