A Quote by John Podhoretz
Obama lost his ability to push his agenda through Congress when he received what he himself called a 'shellacking' in the November 2010 elections. That shellacking was primarily the result of massive policy overreach when he had a Democratic Congress in his pocket.
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And then there's this guy, Barack Obama, who lost - I could take up a whole afternoon talking about his failures, but - he lost his first race for Congress, and now he gets to call himself my husband.
Republicans in Congress are getting concerned that President Obama will try to use the final year of his term to push through too many controversial laws. Obama would've responded but he was busy drafting his new 'mandatory Mexican gay weed' bill.
If Paul Ryan is re-elected, if he's sent back to Congress, he will push for the biggest amnesty in this country's history; and immediately after his re-election, he will push Obama's jailbreak crime agenda.
[Barack] Obama won two elections but certainly the first one not because people wanted that agenda of his. He never told them what his agenda was. Not as it played out. Obama was something other.
It's far from clear in general that Donald Trump is a guy who really thinks about the details of policy and is going to do the kind of heavy lifting you have to do as president to get those policies through in Congress. I think the hope is that Paul Ryan and his crew will push policies through Congress and Trump will just sign them. That's not really how policy works.
Obama acknowledges his overreach openly every time he argues that he intends to do the job of an obstinate Republican congress.
Normally what happens in a new presidency is the president has a big agenda, and Congress is full of people with human weaknesses. And so the president indulges the human weaknesses of members of Congress in order to pass his agenda. This time it's the other way around. Donald Trump does not have much of an agenda. Congress burns with this intense Republican agenda and so does Congress that has to put up with the human weaknesses of the president in order to get a signature on the things it desperately wants to pass.
'Elections have consequences,' President Obama said, setting his new policy agenda just three days after taking office in 2009. Three elections later, the president's party has lost 70 House seats and 14 Senate seats. The job of Republicans now is to govern with the confidence that elections do have consequences, promptly passing the conservative reform the voters have demanded.
It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.
Losing the PR battles, particularly about healthcare, translated into losing his Democratic majorities in Congress, beginning with a Republican landslide in the midterm election of 2010.
Our president delivered his State of the Union message to Congress. That is one of the things his contract calls for -- to tell congress the condition of the country. This message, as I say, is to Congress. The rest of the people know the condition of the country, for they live in it, but Congress has no idea what is going on in America, so the president has to tell 'em.
In Barack Obama's second term, with his legislative agenda dead in a Republican-controlled Congress, the president turned to executive unilateralism on an innovative scale.
Obama has now lost his trustworthiness. He has lost any hope of majority support from the American people for his agenda. Obamacare has wiped that out. It really has.
The Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have taken the biggest lurch to the left in policy in American history. There've been no - no Congress, no administration that has run this far to the left in such a small period of time. And there is a reaction to that.
I actually believe that one of the lessons of 1993 and 1994, as well as 2009 and 2010, is that when a Democratic president has the opportunity - with a Democratic Congress - that you shouldn't wait to push significant legislation, whether it's health care, immigration reform, other measures.
In 2010, I ran for Congress in a Democratic primary against someone who had been there for 18 years. 'The Daily News' endorsed me. I was in 'The New York Times' above the fold. CNBC called this one of the hottest races in the country. On election day, votes for me never went past 19%. I lost.
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