Sunday, November 09, 2014

On Chucktoddery

Chuck Todd's Obama book says more about the author than it does about the president : Columbia Journalism Review
...Then there are the numerous instances of GOP implacability. Todd reminds us that when Obama praised Republican Marco Rubio’s tax-credit proposal, Rubio had to go on talk radio the next day to appease Republican foot soldiers riled up by the president’s seal of approval; that Obama once invited GOP-ers to a White House screening of Spielberg’s Lincoln, and no one showed up; that even after furious courting by the president, not a single Republican voted for a healthcare reform bill modeled after a Republican governor’s plan.
But far too often, Todd falls back on lazy, a-pox-on-both-houses thinking. He lambasts the GOP for its obduracy but upbraids Obama for not trying harder to win Republicans over anyway—this despite Todd’s own observation that Republicans had “perfected” the strategy of total obstruction, and that Republicans had come to see opposing Obama as a simple matter of “self-interest...”

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