Friday, October 29, 2010

Obama offers a 60 Vote contradiction

President Obama voiced displeasure with the 60 vote Senate majority rule on Wednesday saying, "I would love not to have a 60 vote requirement."

The President suggested that procedural obstacles, like the aforementioned requirement, have made it difficult for him to advance his Progressive agenda.

The former Chicago pol added: "There are all kinds of things that happened during the course of these two years, in terms of process, that I would like to see changed."

Obama's words, however, appeared to contradict some of his past statements.

In an interview with CBS in 2004, Mr. Obama emphasized the importance of using a 60 vote Senate majority "to move an American agenda forward," rather than "a Democratic or Republican agenda." In a speech to the Center for American Progress in 2006, then-Senator Obama criticized the notion that: "We" can "identify our core base..., throw 'em red meat" and rely "on a 50 plus 1 victory."

"If we want to transform the country," he said, "that would require a sizable majority."

The President's contradictory statements, however, should come as no surprise, for indeed the rhetorician par excellence has been known to alter his statements according to the specific situation he is facing and the particular offensive/defensive strategy he is seeking at a given moment in time.



Update: I just discovered that "Naked Emperor News", from whom I culled the videos from '04 and '06, posted a similar video - to the one above - on Thursday, using new footage from '05 [as a juxtaposition], instead of the '04, '06 footage. As strange as this may seem, I was unaware of this.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This doesn't seem contradictory to me. He's saying you need a sixty vote majority to pass anything. He's also pointing out that Repubicans and Democrats need to work together to make anything happen. His frustration is that the Republicans' agenda is not to support any legislation put forward by the Obama administration. They don't care about government they only care about politics.