Ann Althouse, while scoring the dueling press conferences last night (she figures Boehner won*), observed that compromise was a favorite theme in the President’s comments last night. In fact, President “I won” Obama was and is very upset that we’re not embracing compromise, because that’s what this country is all about**. So Ann muses:
I had to stop and think: Is America really about compromise? I thought of the Missouri Compromise. And the Three-Fifths Compromise. Maybe compromise is a dirty word for a good reason!
The more I look at that, the more enjoyably ruder that sentence gets. As always, context is key…
Moe Lane
*Let me address this, actually. If you’re a netrooter, you almost certainly thought that the President did better than Boehner did last night; and if you’re a VRWCer, you almost certainly thought that Boehner did better (we will now pause for the 5% or so contrarians from both sides to chime in with their contrarianism). And, yes, even if you thought that the representative for your side sounded better you don’t necessarily believe him.
But that’s not the issue: the issue is what the folks who aren’t us or the netroots thought. We’ll probably know that in a week or so.
**Which factoid should come as a bit of a shock to the Confederate, Old Imperial Japanese, Nazi, and Italian Fascist governments. Not that you can actually check with any of them, of course – but, hey, you can always get an old ex-Soviet apparatchik drunk and ask him what he thinks about America’s willingness to compromise.
Right now (facts be damned) we have a president talking compromise and a speaker talking, in essence, “No compromise!” The optics favor the president here — by a lot.