Obstruction All That is Left to GOP

As Michael Tomasky (h/t Anrew Sullivan) points out in The Daily Beast, obstruction is the main role left to a diminshed Republican Party.

Bear in mind here the words of Mike Lofgren, the former GOP congressional staffer who left his party in disgust in 2011. At the time, he wrote a big Goodbye to All That piece (from which I quoted), where he said the following: “A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.”

As long as we can gum up the works, make it look like Washington can’t do anything, deny Obama any sort of breakthrough victory, then we can head into ’16 in a strong position. We can say the country needs new leadership, the Democrats weren’t able to govern. It’s the same old story, like how George W. Bush ran by blaming Bill Clinton for failing to unite the country, after the Republicans had spent eight years making sure that Clinton couldn’t possibly unite the country.

This is a key way in which the Republican party puts its perceived political interests ahead of the good of the country.  It is a cynical attempt to con the electorate into putting them back in power.  Guess what? It isn't working.  As Greg Sargent notes about a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll

Strikingly, the poll finds that 64 percent say the GOP is “emphasizing a partisan approach in a way that does not unify the country,” versus only 22 percent who say the party is “emphasizing unifying the country.” For Obama those numbers are the other way around — 43-48.

You can fool some of the people some of the time.......