Taking their toys and going home | Michael Tomasky

I barely even remembered that there was a financial crisis commission with five Democrats, four Republicans and one independent that was/is supposed to report on the roots on the financial crisis next month. Obviously, this isn't a topic on which D's and R's are going to agree. Equally obviously, we know the Republicans like to block things. Even so, this report from HuffPo is a bit depressing:

The four Republicans appointed to the commission investigating the root causes of the financial crisis plan to bypass the bipartisan panel and release their own report Wednesday, according to people familiar with the commission's work...

During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases "Wall Street" and "shadow banking" and the words "interconnection" and "deregulation" from the panel's final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal.

See, Obama's "hostage" metaphor was exactly right. Al Franken used to make this point when he was a mere funny author, re the 2000 election. Al would say roughly: See, the implicit Republican position is to say to voters, you want civility and cooperation all that nice stuff, elect us, because the Democrats are weak and divided and enough of them will go along with us that you'll see some cooperation and civility, whereas if you elect the D's, we're strong and united sonuvabitches and you're not going to see any cooperation and civility. That is our solemn promise to you. And that is hostage holding.

This provides an un-clumsy enough segue into my column in today's formerly arboreal Guardian, which is basically about how, two years in to the Obama term, we see clearly that the high hopes many had in 2008 just aren't going to be met but rather than mope about it let's just recalibrate hopes and get on with business. But on the subject of the R's I include this thought:

...the Republicans have become more nakedly than ever the party of rich people and corporations, and those rich people and corporations are uniting with Republicans to do everything in their power to block even mildly ameliorative reform. By all appearances, these people believe the country is theirs to run, was somehow stolen from them in 2008, and they're just going to oppose everything until they get it back in 2012.

I lean toward this interpretation, but among what we might call the "professional liberal" class of advocates and pundits, it seems I'm in the minority. Hence the classic liberal circular firing squad that's been on display in Washington over the tax deal.

But I can't really blame the president for not being liberal enough. It's not a liberal country. I do, however, blame him for being in denial about the nature of his opposition. They want to destroy him. He still seems to think he can seduce them, as if they were no different from the couple of conservatives on the Harvard Law Review whose respect he won when he was its president.

I notice our dependable friend LHB is over there in the comment thread disagreeing with me already, and a few others, but most of Tomasky blog's regulars haven't weighed in yet, so I wanted to make sure you knew it existed.

US economyUS politicsMichael Tomasky
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