“We’re going to continue to go down the same path this year,” House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said before the retreat opened. “We’re going to look for common ground, but we’re not going to roll over on our principles.”
. . .
Boehner said that Obama’s speech Wednesday night showed that the president didn’t learn any lessons from Sen.-elect Scott Brown’s upset victory in the Massachusetts special election last week or from the earlier Republican gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia, and that Obama instead had decided “to just double-down on his job-killing agenda.”
Of course, it's not all bad from the elephants' point of view:
Still, Republican leaders said they liked some elements of Obama's bipartisanship overture, particularly the president’s positive remarks about offshore drilling and nuclear power.
“I don't think I've heard the president be more forceful when it comes to the expansion of nuclear energy in the United States,” Boehner said. “So we'll see …how that will manifest itself in legislation.”
Of course, it's no surprise that the Republicans liked that part of the speech- for all practical purposes, they wrote it. Obama is effectively offering them everything they've ever demanded on energy, hoping (apparently) for some reciprocation when it comes to cap-and-trade or some other form of climate-control legislation.
As today makes obvious, that's not going to happen. At all. Republicans will gladly accept all the peace offerings the Democrats offer, and then claim that they're "shut out of the process" and that the Democrats "need to compromise more if they want bipartisanship."
The stone wall is not coming down for Barack Obama. How many times will he hit his head on it before he realizes and accepts it?
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