Thursday Open Thread [11.15.12]

John Heilemann : “This is a president unusually focused in the present on what his legacy will be in the future. With Obama’s reelection, one foundational element of that legacy has been secured: the Affordable Care Act, which, had he been defeated, would not only likely have been repealed but retrospectively reduced to one of the causes of his loss. Now, with a second term ahead of him, among Obama’s paramount goals, say his advisers, is to add another glittering trophy to his mantle: at least one more domestic-policy reform tantamount in importance to near-universal health care.”

“The shiniest such prize would be the achievement of a grand bargain on entitlements and tax reform: a bipartisan agreement that would put the nation’s fiscal house in order for years, and maybe decades, to come. The extent to which Obama pines for this was illustrated by his ardent pursuit of such a megadeal in 2011, which ultimately fell apart when House Speaker John Boehner proved unable to move the tea-party faction in his caucus to accept new revenues.”

And I think this republication in full, and I will give credit where credit is due. Erick Erickson of Red State denounces the base of his own party.

Barack Obama won the election.

He did not win by stealing the election. Voter irregularities always happen. It is one reason we support voter ID rules. But even in the worse scenario of reports out there, there were not enough tales of voter irregularities to matter nationwide. This is another benefit and built in safeguard of the electoral college.

Barack Obama won. He won by turning out the most people in a well run campaign. In other words, he won fair and square.

We here at RedState are American citizens. We have no plans to secede from the union. If you do, good luck with that, but this is not the place for you.

We have a place for you here if you wish to continue the fight against Republicans in Washington like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell who’d be happy to sell us down the river to keep their power, no matter how devoid of principle or sound policy. You have a place here if you’d like to keep fighting the Democrats who are intent on further stifling economic growth, pushing forward with Obamacare, bankrupting the nation, and siding with teachers unions against kids who deserve better.

Too many people have spent the past four years obsessed with birth certificates. Now they are obsessed with voter fraud conspiracies, talk of secession, and supposed election changing news stories if only we had known.

So let’s add dabblers in this latest nuttiness to birthers as a category of people we do not welcome at RedState. Our aim is to beat the Democrats, not beat a retreat to a Confederacy that Generals Grant and Sherman rent asunder well over a hundred years ago.

Even here at RedState, while we may not much care for him, President Obama is still our President and we are still quite happily citizens of the United States. If we must drain this fever swamp that’s taken hold of a few people on the right over this past week before we can drain the swamp in Washington, so be it.

All others need not apply.

Sincerely,
Erick Erickson
Editor-in-Chief, RedState.com

“I think that there was a period of time when the Romney campaign was falling apart, people were not optimistic, nobody thought there was a chance of victory and I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said.” – Dick Morris, in an interview on Fox News, explaining why he predicted a landslide for Mitt Romney in the presidential election. So basically he admitted he lied to support the Romney campaign, as the truth was too damaging. Or in other words, he is a propagandist.

Jeff Greenfield has some words of caution to us Democrats:

“You’re looking at a political party that has lost the popular vote in five of the past six elections; whose one winning presidential candidate achieved the White House thanks to a fluke; and whose prospects for the future seem doomed by demography and geography. No, it’s not today’s Republican Party you’re looking at–it’s the Democratic Party after the 1988 elections. And the past (nearly) quarter-century is an object lesson in the peril of long-term assumptions about the nature and direction of our political path.”