The Washington Post’s piece about the Congressional struggle to approve the rest of the $350B bank bailout bill has this revelatory nugget:
“The Republican base hates this. So a lot of people are saying why anger the base in the name of good policy when it’s going to happen anyway?” said Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), a senior member of the Senate Banking Committee.
This was, I suppose, good politics before the Great Recession: Obama’s going to veto the bill anyway, he won’t be overridden; the bailout will proceed. Republicans won an awful lot of elections with such games during the Reagan Era, playing off the clunky devotion to governance of the Dems. But it misses the public mood right now: stop playing games, things are just too serious.
The point is, why waste the effort if the bill is going to be approved, ultimately, in any case. Why delay all the other important work that Congress has to do? Yes, yes: to get re-elected. But that strategy doesn’t seem to be working too well for the G.O.P. in recent years, does it?