The dominant Boston Globe is conservative? That's rich. You carried the state in November, 2008, by 26 points. Republicans haven't won there since saddle shoes -- and this time they didn't distort anything. The big swing in Massachusetts was by independents.
You mean it wasn't "right-wing teabaggers" -- as New York Senator Chuck Shumer called them?
No sir. It was just your normal everyday voters angry about (a) an augmented government role in a proposed health care system from which those poised to pass it exempted themselves, and (b) increased federal regulation that failed to improve the lives of voters hurt by the worst economy in 70 years, voters forced to cut back as you grew the federal government inexorably bigger. For such voters, in Massachusetts for heaven's sake, just like the everyday rest of us, a federal takeover of health care after a huge federal grab at the economy was a tremendous over-reach -- an ideological bridge too far.
But I am not an ideologue.
MR. PRESIDENT, you just don't seem to get it. An ideology is a shackling, blinkering line of thought that controls how one views the world. In your case, your rigid leftism restricts the intellectual freedom that would allow you to approach events and developments in an independent, centrist -- even conservative -- way. Because you are so reflexively partisan, you are incapable of practicing the bipartisanship you preach.
For you, bipartisanship works only when independents, centrists, Republicans, and conservatives sign on to your proposals -- go along with your points of view. Your definition of bipartisanship boils down to "my way or the highway."
MAYBE you missed the news stories. I have embraced "pay-as-you-go." In my 2011 budget, I have proposed freezing discretionary spending. If Congress won't do it, I will appoint a bipartisan commission on deficit reduction. None of that can be even remotely construed as ideological or reflexively partisan.
Yes it can. (1) In an hour begging for reduced spending, your 2011 budget calls for $85 billion more in federal spending than the 2010 budget. Indeed (2), your 2011 budget would freeze just $447 billion, only 12 percent of the budget -- and would freeze that spending at your forced-up, "stimulus" levels enacted a year ago. Finally (3), "pay as you go" and your suggested bipartisan commission are just screens for already-proposed higher taxes that would bring in $1 trillion in additional revenues -- from practically every American -- by 2015.
As it is, you are on track to match during your first 20 months in office the $3.3 trillion in additional debt that the previous administration added during eight years.
As I said on one of the Sunday talk shows last month, we need "to try to reset the tone."
Yes sir, we do. And given the Massachusetts primal scream, if you're capable of doing so then you're the one who must come back across the ideological bridge. And of course, you're the one closest to the tone switch. It's right there in the Oval Office -- on your desk.