Word: careful
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...major legislation, even more than during the Clinton years. GOP leader Mitch McConnell led a filibuster of a deficit-reduction commission that he himself had demanded. The Obama White House spent months trying to lure the Finance Committee's ranking Republican, Chuck Grassley, into supporting a deal on health care reform and gave his staff a major role in crafting the bill. But GOP officials back home began threatening to run a primary challenger against the Iowa Senator. By late summer, Grassley wasn't just inching away from reform; he was implying that Obamacare would euthanize Grandma...
...Republicans have used this rising disgust with government not just to cripple health care reform but also to derail other Obama initiatives. In a memo to clients on how to defeat new regulation of Wall Street, Republican pollster Frank Luntz urged them to attack "lobbyist loopholes" - items that were put into the financial-reform bill, as in the health care bill, largely to attract enough Democratic votes to break the GOP filibuster. Needing 60 votes has made the debate over every bill on Obama's agenda longer and uglier, which is exactly how the Republicans want...
Last month, when the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed Americans' views on health care reform, it found that most people still back the individual components of Obama's effort. But enthusiasm for the bill itself - the contents of which remain hazy in the public mind - has faded, just as in 1993. And according to a new poll by CNN/ORC, public approval of Congress stands at its lowest level since - you guessed it - the Gingrich era. Once again, the Republicans have told Americans that they can't trust government with their health care, and once again, their own actions have helped convince...
Imagine if another powerful third-party voice were to emerge today, demanding that both parties take real steps to solve problems like global warming and health care - as opposed to the Tea Partyers, who insist that government just get out of the way. Republicans would still disagree profoundly with the Obama Administration's favored remedies, but they would feel greater pressure to amend rather than kill them. Perots would create a countervailing pressure against those partisan zealots who are constantly threatening to punish Republicans for giving the White House an inch. (See pictures of how Presidents age in office...
...elected by pledging to bring the country together. And every time he fails, the pressure on our two-party system builds. When government acts to solve problems, even if the solutions aren't perfect, it breaks the vicious circle of political failure and mistrust. When it comes to health care, for example, virtually every expansion of government's role - Medicare, Medicaid, the veterans' health care system, the Children's Health Insurance Program, even George W. Bush's prescription-drug plan - has proved popular. But when problems fester year after year and public trust in government falls lower and lower, strange...