Return to Sanity: He’s a Raging Partisan

Sunday, February 22, 2015

He’s a Raging Partisan | The Weekly Standard

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President Obama’s claim to have disapproved of gay marriage until he changed his mind in 2012 has been exposed as a lie. It was a small, politically expedient lie, but it got a lot of attention last week. Meanwhile a bigger lie hovers over the Obama presidency like an avenging angel, unseen and unheard.

The bigger lie wasn’t a fleeting comment. It was the crux of Obama’s presidential campaign. He didn’t say he was more liberal and more experienced than his opponents. But he did say he knew how to cleanse Washington of political and ideological polarization, raging partisanship, the frequency of personal attacks, and general dysfunction. This made him unique—and very, very appealing.

He repeated the theme in campaign speeches. And in his Inaugural Address in January 2009, he said: “We have come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the petty recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics . . . the time has come to set aside childish things.”

As he left the inaugural ceremony, former House speaker Newt Gingrich told his wife, Calista, “If he’ll govern the way he just spoke, he’ll be Eisenhower. . . . He’ll split the Republican party. He’ll dominate the country.”

But Obama hasn’t governed like Ike, a unifying national leader. Almost instantly, he became a highly partisan president. He had promised to consult Republicans in Congress and listen to their ideas. Yet he’s done that rarely and then usually in a false show of bipartisanship. He insinuates Republicans have nothing worthwhile to tell him.

He has passed up two opportunities to join the country in moving to the political center, the first after the Republican landslide in the 2010 midterm elections, the second after the GOP captured both houses of Congress in November’s midterm vote.