I was glancing through Joke Line's Time editorial...it's quick and one-sided, but it offers an interesting perspective on some of Obama's policy directions after the SOTU.

First of all, I think it's plain to most everyone that the GOP has one and only one policy at the moment: intransigence. It's also their election strategy. Republicans in Congress have staked their political future on defeating Obama's policies pretty much regardless of what those policies are. Health reform, financial sector reform, federal budget reform & paygo, tax cuts...whatever Obama's for, they're against...even if they were previously for it. And it isn't just because Republican pet projects have been rolled up into omnibus spending bills they couldn't possibly support (though that's happened as well). No, even on stand-alone, no-strings-attached formerly Republican initiatives, the do-nothing delegation is against it as long as Obama's for it.

Today's GOP has become a party of pure, tactical cynicism, and obstruction is their only policy. Which unfortunately, with a 60-vote Senate, is pretty much the only political strategy with a better-than-even chance of success. We're living through a golden era of do-nothingism.

There's a very good chance this tactic will work, meaning the GOP could well pick up seats in the midterms whereby they'll be able to do nothing far more efficiently. There are a lot of disaffected liberals out there just waking up to the fact that Obama is what he's always claimed to be: a pragmatic centrist who wants government to work for the largest possible number of people, whether that involves the liberal agenda or not. And everyone else is exasperated by all the backbiting, and above all the appalling lack of results. And, once you discount the notion that their jobs require them to do anything useful to the American public in exchange for their paychecks, the GOP are sitting on a policy that almost can't lose.

But here's where Obama's political kung fu kicks in. He sees that the Republicans, by committing themselves lock stock & barrel to ideological trench warfare, have an enormous weakness: they can't vote *for* anything. This makes them highly predictable, and a highly predictable enemy is as good as dead. They've put their own necks in the noose. All Obama has to do is promote the less odious Republican policies: nuclear energy, offshore drilling, middle class tax cuts, budget reform, pay-as-you-go legislation...and now the suckers have to choose between voting for Obama or voting against their own policies & principles. Either way, Obama gets something he wants and they go into the November elections compromised. Ain't politics just a hell of a thing?

This flavor of politics used to be called triangulation, but there's a difference with Obama because he actually *does* want responsible nuclear power, offshore drilling, etc. So long as those initiatives are part of an overall green power investment in clean, safe energy independence that creates American jobs, they dovetail Obama's current policies perfectly. Meanwhile balanced budget fervor is just the thing to begin turning off the spigot of federal largesse once stimulus spending is no longer needed. And who knows, at the end of the day something might actually get accomplished in Washington.

Well played, Mr. President.
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"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

–Voltaire