By Dave Lindorff

Hand it to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH). The conservative senator from
the Granite State turned down an appointment to the position of
President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Commerce citing “irreconcilable
differences.”

Citing the latest Senate vote on Obama’s economic stimulus package,
for which Gregg voted “no,” Gregg said, “ We are functioning from a
different set of views on many critical items of policy."

Truth to tell, that can be said about the entire Republican Party,
in both House and Senate, which voted almost unanimously against
Obama’s signature domestic effort to date to try and kick-start the
economy. The House vote on the measure was completely along party lines
with no defections, while in the Senate, only three liberal Republican
senators voted for that chamber’s version of the $800-billion bill—but
only after those three Republicans had managed to sabotage it, probably
fatally, by forcing Obama and Senate Democrats to agree to making a
third of the bill be in the form of meaningless and useless tax cuts,
instead of programs to ease the plight of laid-off workers and people
losing their homes.

The fact is, Obama and his supposedly brilliant political
strategists have adopted a bone-headed approach of trying to seem
“post-partisan” which has led them directly into a Republican trap on
many key policy fronts. The economy is just one such area, where
Republicans let Obama water down his stimulus program in an effort to
woo them, and then simply voted against the package in the end. The war
in Afghanistan is another example, where Obama has been so busy buying
into the right’s agenda of continued war that he is about to commit the
nation to years more of expanded war in that war-torn region. Even
Obama’s cabinet picks have been terrible, made with an eye to appearing
“centrist” and even Republican-friendly, with many key holdovers, like
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, or appointments like Treasury Secretary
Tim Geithner, Bush’s pick for head of the New York Federal Reserve
Bank, not to mention his attempt to put a Republican in as Commerce
Secretary.

That last botched appointment was particularly pathetic. It had
offered Obama the chance to pick up a key Democratic vote in the
Senate, since if Gregg had taken the job and left his Senate seat, the
Democratic governor of New Hampshire could, and surely would have
appointed a Democratic replacement. But Obama, again wanting to show
his post-partisanship, cut a deal with Gregg in which the governor
agreed to appoint a Republican replacement.

Having seen how needing to get two Republican votes in order to
avoid filibusters in the Senate on key legislation can destroy the
legislation, Obama now needs to rectify this mistake.

It’s clear that, even if Obama doesn’t sink himself as he has been
doing, that the Republicans are out to sabotage his presidency. That
being the case, Obama should change course immediately and develop a
new strategy based upon confronting and attacking the Republicans in
Congress forcibly. One way to do that would be to name a few liberal
(not Gregg-style) Republican Senators from states with Republican
governors to posts in the cabinet. Example: Maine Senator Olympia
Snowe, who has served on the Senate finance committee and on a
subcommittee on small business, would make an excellent commerce
secretary (much better than Gregg, who at one point had called for the
abolition of the department), and if appointed, could be replaced by
Maine’s Democratic Governor John Baldacci with a Democratic senator.
Obama could also put Gates out to pasture and name the other Maine
Senator, Susan Collins, as Defense Secretary. Collins has served on
both the Senate Homeland Security and Armed Services committees, and it
would be a great idea to have a woman running the Defense Department.
Again, Maine’s Democratic governor could replace Collins with a
Democratic Senator, giving Obama 60 votes, eliminating his need to
cater to that treacherous turncoat, Connecticut Senator Joseph
Lieberman, who backed McCain last fall, and who renounced his
Democratic Party membership after being denied the party’s nomination
back in 2006. (This calculus assumes an eventual win by Democrat Al
Franken in the still-unresolved Minnesota Senate race.)

Even short of enhancing the Democratic margin in the Senate, Obama
could change the political climate in the Upper House by making it
clear that Republicans who obstruct his agenda will be barred from
having any legislation passed for the next four years. Their bills will
not get hearing, and if somehow passed, will be vetoed. He and his
Democratic Party allies in the Senate, should, in other words, start
treating Republicans in the Senate the way they were treated by
Republicans during Bush’s presidency: as irrelevant.

Even with 57 or 58 seats, Democrats have a much stronger position
in Congress today than they had when they took over the House and
Senate in 2006. They also have a much stronger position than
Republicans had between 2002 and 2006, too. But they, and Obama, are
still acting as though they are the opposition party, not the ruling
party.

If Obama wants to be a successful president, and if he hopes to be
re-elected in 2012, he will need to simply run over Republican
opposition in Congress and start pushing through the agenda that he was
elected to promote.

Bi-partisanship, post-partisanship, or whatever caving in to forces
of the thoroughly discredited right is called, is a doomed strategy. It
only encourages the Republicans, like wolves pursuing a wounded elk, to
move in for the kill.

Right now, the public is still blaming Bush, Cheney and the
Republicans for the messes in Iraq, Afghanistan and the US economy. But
it won’t be long before all those crises will have Obama’s and the
Democrats’ name on them, which is precisely the goal of the Republican
policy of obstruction and sabotage.

Obama doesn’t have much time to start taking charge of this
situation. A good place to start would be by calling on his Justice
Department to appoint a special prosecutor or two or three to start
aggressively investigating the crimes of the Bush/Cheney
administration, including any collusion with Republican members of
Congress .Democrats in Congress, too, could get much more aggressive
about their investigations in to the abuses of the last two
presidential terms. That would sure signal to Republicans in Congress
that he is serious, and not to be pushed around.

_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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digg_title = "Why Can Sen. Judd Gregg See What Obama Can’t?";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n\r\n Hand it to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH). The conservative senator from the Granite State turned down an appointment to the position of President Barrack Obama’s Secretary of Commerce citing “irreconcilable differences.”\r\n\r\n Citing the latest Senate vote on Obama’s economic stimulus package, for which Gregg voted “no,” Gregg said, “ We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy.\" \r\n\r";
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