Question Time

President Barack Hussein Obama is a brilliant politician. I have thought that most of the time I have been aware of him, though over the past few months my conviction has wavered. I am now returned to confidence in that opinion. The reason: his "question time" with the House Republican caucus.

I haven't watched every minute of his give-and-take with the GOP yet, but I've seen a lot of it. And he's being pretty tough on them. He very explicitly is saying things like, look, I just plain have adopted policies y'all have advocated, and you weren't satisfied. Things like, y'all shouldn't expect to get all of your ideas signed into law when you're a 60-40 minority in both Houses. Things like, you aren't engaging in the debate seriously. Things like, no, I am not going to agree to an "across the board" tax cut if that means tax cuts for the rich.

Now, none of these are new things for him to say. Most of them were in the SotU. Every Democratic talking-point for the past three months have included some of these or more. I don't really think he's going to suddenly convince 50 House Republicans (or, more importantly, any Senate Republicans) to support his policies after this one meeting. But I think it's a master stroke, for several reasons. First, I think when the Republicans have to listen to this week after week for months on end, and when he just keeps on out-debating them (which appears to be the general reaction so far), he might end up convincing some of them. It's certainly his best chance, and from what I've heard so far he's not trying to convince them by surrendering further ground but rather by simply arguing with them, in person. I also think he might make them look bad; these things are televised, after all, people can watch and they can see, continuously, that Obama's opponents have much worse ideas (and, for that matter, logic) than he does. And it gives him some amount of cover, I think. It makes it a lot easier to say he's including Republicans. It makes it easier for him to chide them for not playing the game, if they don't. (And I think he likes chiding them for not playing the game.)

From what I hear he also wants to take questions from the Democratic caucus, and I hope he does the same thing with the Senate caucuses, too. Question time is arguably the best feature of the British system, specifically (aside from the whole majority-rule idea, which we in this country evidently haven't caught onto yet...), and this looks like an unprecedented, I believe, attempt to implement something similar here.