I must say I’ve been quite proud of my president as of late. It appears that Obama has certainly come into his own as he enters his second year of service. Last week, President Obama tore into the Republican opposition on Capitol Hill, blaming the GOP for what he called politically motivated opposition on virtually every issue.
Obama promised to “call [Republicans] out when [Democrats] extend a hand and get a fist in return.” Senate Republicans, he said, have tried to employ the filibuster more over the past year
than in all of the 1950s and 1960s combined. The GOP’s strategy has been “20 years of obstruction packed into one,” he said.
The president’s tough rhetoric was part of a more aggressive — and frequently populist — White House strategy in the wake of the Democrats’ recent upset loss in the Massachusetts Senate race. The Democratic answer to the Massachusetts Senate race should not be “to do nothing” in Congress, he said.
Nervous constituents want to see legislative progress, he asserted. “We should do more, and we should do so without delay,” he said.
Obama urged Senate Democrats to stop listening to what he called politically oriented cable television shows on networks such as Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, and instead get out of the Washington “echo chamber.”
Most people “don’t care about majorities and minorities and process,” he said. They just want to know if their elected representatives are “delivering for me.”
