The Morning Plum: Obama’s ambitious second term agenda intensifies GOP’s dilemma

Posted by Greg Sargent

In his State of the Union speech yesterday, President Obama laid out an ambitious vision for where he wants to take the country. He offered a way out of our economic doldrums — investment in the country’s future as an alternative to more crippling austerity. He proposed taking action to fix the broken immigration system, address the climate change that threatens our future, reform voting irregularities, staunch the ongoing gun slaughter of tends of thousands of Americans each year, and help millions struggling to enter the middle class, via a minimum wage hike, universal pre-school, and other proposals.

Many of these ideas have broad support. Obama’s speech represented an effort to solve an array of problems that the American people appear to want solved...Republicans face a choice. Either they can accept the realities of public opinion and become a functional opposition party, by working with Obama and Democrats to get some of what they want while allowing Obama to claim some victories of his own, as unbearable a prospect as that might seem. This is what Newt Gingrich eventually did in the 1990s. Or they can continue to reflexively obstruct everything, with an eye towards — well, it’s not clear what this would accomplish, except kicking the can down the road in hopes of taking back the Senate in 2014, making it even easier to tie up Obama’s agenda in advance of another grab at the White House in 2016.

Given the current state of the GOP brand — and the shifting demographic realities that suggest the Democratic coalition is ascendant, while the Republican one is shrinking — is this really a long term gamble Republicans are prepared to take? The proposals Obama laid out yesterday are likely to continue cementing the degree to which core growing constituencies — Latinos; young voters; college educated whites, especially women; and even to some extent non-college white women — identify with the Democratic Party. Reflexive GOP opposition to all these things could exacerbate the party’s estrangement from these groups.

Yesterday’s rebuttal by Marco Rubio was not encouraging. He rehashed many of the same old anti-government bromides that were soundly defeated in the 2012 election. As Steve Benen notes, the speech suggested that that Republicans are absolutely convinced that “there are no substantive lessons to be learned from their 2012 defeats.” Rubio’s primary statement outlining the GOP vision for government’s role in people’s lives amounted to this: “It plays a crucial part in keeping us safe, enforcing rules, and providing some security against the risks of modern life.” This isn’t an affirmative vision. It’s a grudging concession.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/02/13/the-morning-plum-obamas-ambitious-second-term-agenda-intensifies-gops-dilemma/