President Obama’s legacy is on the line as he faces a GOP Congress in his last two years, and top Republicans are urging him to secure it by working with them even if it means giving in on a few of his cherished positions.
“To do that he’s going to have to spend some time working with Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress and adopting views that he doesn’t agree with,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which covers many of the president’s top initiatives, including Obamacare and education.
A big complaint, even from Democrats, is that the White House doesn’t coordinate well with Congress, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are telling Obama he needs to change his approach 180 degrees.
Alexander said the president told him that he is eager to work on key issues with the GOP, including drug development and education. But it’s the follow through Alexander’s waiting for.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Alexander suggested the president give his Cabinet more leeway. “He’s had some Cabinet members who do a good job of staying in touch with Congress, but their good work seems to disappear someplace into the White House sometimes,” he said. “If the White House would give his Cabinet members more latitude in dealing with Congress on important issues, they could help the president achieve some results and give him a legacy that will have some bipartisanship to it. His legacy right now is highly partisan.”
In the end, said Alexander, it is up to Obama. “It will take a different attitude than we’ve seen in the last six years,” he said. “That’s the way you get lasting results, get bipartisan agreement. The rest of Congress and rest of the country says, ‘Well, when they all agree with it, maybe I’ll accept it, too,’ I think we have a chance to do that.”
CHENEY CALLS KERRY ‘LOW CLASS,’ EDWARDS ‘SCUMBAG’
The memory of the 2004 presidential re-election campaign remain long and vivid for former Vice President Dick Cheney, who recalled that he was unimpressed and even disgusted with challengers John Kerry and running mate John Edwards.
Reflecting on Kerry’s bid, he called it a “no-class operation,” especially for targeting Cheney’s lesbian daughter, and slapped Edwards as a “scumbag” for fathering a child out of wedlock, a scandal the former veep suggested he knew about before the rest of the world.
“I knew what was going on in the campaign that everybody found out later,” said Cheney, who remains influential in conservative and foreign policy circles.
His comments, and those of many others involved in the 2004 race, are being unveiled in a new oral history project from Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History. Its first online effort focused on the race in which Kerry was expected to beat President George W. Bush and Cheney, but fell short.
Should former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush win the Republican nomination, Cheney’s review of the 2000 campaign provides an avenue to hit Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Part of our strategy was to tie [Al] Gore to [Bill] Clinton as closely as we could because at that point Bill Clinton was carrying a few negatives — you could put it in those terms — after his time in office,” Cheney said.
His wife even helped coin one of the campaign’s mottos to attack Gore — lifted from a 1992 Gore speech, “it’s time for them to go.”
GINGRICH SLEEPS WITH THE FISHES
Well-known as a fan of zoos and museums, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has taken his hobby to a new level: A Valentine’s Day campout out in New York’s American Museum of Natural History.
While he tweeted out a photo of him and wife Callista that day, Gingrich is just now dishing the details of once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Turns out it was a gift from his wife, who also included two L.L. Bean sleeping bags they slept in under the museum’s 94-foot-long blue whale.
“How could anyone resist?” said Gingrich of the overnight offered by the museum three times a year. “Next to my Valentine,” he said, “it doesn’t get much better.”
QUOTE
“Mayor — that’s a real job, man!”
Vice President Joe Biden during a stop in Columbia, S.C., home of the first southern presidential primary in 2016. Biden plans to decide on running this spring.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
