White House Has No Timetable on Waiting for Republican Cooperation
At Tuesday’s White House briefing, I asked Robert Gibbs to square Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s remarks to National Journal’s Major Garrett that “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president” with the President’s hope that Republicans will work with him after the midterms.
Gibbs’ answer, while reasonable, didn’t address a central issue: will the President switch from carrot to stick at some point, and when? I took another run at this at Wednesday’s off-camera press gaggle.
Transcript:
MR. GIBBS: Tommy, do you have one follow-up from yesterday? And then I’ll —
Tommy Christopher: Yes, I hate to follow that, but I wanted to ask you about Leader McConnell’s comments. I understand the necessity or the desire to allow the Republicans a window of time in which to realize that they have to roll up their sleeves and work together. I think what I wanted to ask you yesterday is how long a window is that going to be? And what’s the plan, what’s the strategy, if that window expires and they’re still not working —
MR. GIBBS: Well, look, Tommy, I don’t know how long that window is. I don’t know —
Tommy Christopher: Shorter than it was the last two years?
MR. GIBBS: Look, I will reiterate what I said yesterday and what I’ve said even before Senator McConnell made what I thought was his unfortunate comment, and that is, regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election, the American people are going to want Congress and the White House and the two political parties to be able to sit down in the same room, talk coherently about the issues that face the American people, and work constructively to solve them.
Look, if anybody takes a different message from this election, I think they will find themselves on the wrong end of voters two years from now, as well as when they take actions that are different than working together on these issues. I know it’s the President’s hope — you heard him enunciate in that interview — that we can work together to solve our problems; that we can work together to put our economy on an even stronger footing; and that we can work together to improve our educational system and to improve our foreign policy. All of those things the President wanted to do in running for President and hopes to do even — hoped to do here and certainly hopes to do after the election.
Gibbs is right about the message of this election, but only partially. There’s also a message in that enthusiasm gap that everyone’s talking about. All those voters who are staying home aren’t doing so because they’ve loved waiting two years for Republicans to work with the President.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
