That's kinda the point Joe

From Joe Scarborough's weekly column in Politico:

"White House watchers believe the president will not touch Social Security until he is safely ensconced in his second term."

This is seemingly passing comment in the column is unfortunately the problem for as long as politics has existed in the human community. When unpopular decisions need to be made, political leaders don't make them because it reduces their chances of getting re-elected. It's not necessarily a sign of cowardice. That political leader believes he or she is doing the right thing for his or her town, city, state, and country and can only continue doing so while in office and not out of it.

That's part of the reason presidents don't attempt any real reform until their second term, such as Reagan's 1986 Tax Hike. Obama addressing Social Security now would be akin to George H.W. Bush breaking his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. Presidents make controversial decisions in their second term because they don't have a re-election to worry about. As a two-term president, your place in history will be determined by how much you accomplish, not just if you're a two-termer. Unfortunately the fickle voting public will never re-elect you to a second term if you do something unpopular in your first term no matter how beneficial it is to the greater good.

Why is that a problem? Because the loss is usually due to the unpopular decision and, more often than not, the challenger will have run on a platform to get rid of whatever good yet unpopular thing the incumbent did, setting the whole country back.

So isn't the issue equally divided between the politicians in charge as well as the naivete of the voting public?

Bipartisanship? Easier said than done. Easier dismissed than done too.

Joe Scarborough had a column in Politico earlier this week about bipartisanship. The column itself contained much recycled verbiage from the final chapter of his most recent book. In fact, I even cited this incident in my review of the book on Amazon.com. It still is a lesson in how a determined person with a curious mind can overcome the most opinionated of obstacles.

Which brings us to something that happened on Wednesday in Chicago. After a contentious Senate race that was determined by less than 2% of the votes, the Republican Senator-elect Mark Kirk and the Democratic runner-up Alexi Giannoulias decided to meet up for drinks. I'm sure this will soon be followed by the "Merlot Summit" between President Obama and the presumptive Speaker-to-be John Boehner.

The only issue is politicians have to work together and do so much less begrudgingly than people think. They are in it to get re-elected and if pandering to hate-mongering is the way to do it, so be it. However, that is not in their nature. The conventional wisdom is it's not in human nature either. But I'm starting to question that conventional wisdom when, after e-mailing the Scarborough column to a close friend of polar opposite political leanings, I received the following reply:

"Read it, don't agree with it. When a side wins it won't be wise to let their 'enemies' off the hook."

This reply came from someone I know pretty well and someone I know well enough to know that this individual did not feel the same way after the 2006 and 2008 election results. Where have our politics gone when common sense advice is dismissed by common sense people solely because it requires them to suspend their own political opinions long enough to listen to someone else's point-of-view?

President {insert name here} wants to destroy the Constitution!

Interesting op-ed by Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’S “Morning Joe” in Politico last Monday. This is remarkably, and sadly, a very accurate passage:

“For eight grim years, Democrats worked to delegitimize Bush. Opinion leaders on the left relentlessly bashed the 43rd president on national TV and online, accusing him of being a fascist and war criminal who worked in tandem with Vice President Dick Cheney to destroy the Constitution.

Eight years before Bush entered the White House, Republicans (like myself) glared at Bill Clinton as he was being sworn in as president, immediately declaring him unfit for office. Soon after he was sworn in, extremists began claiming that the 42nd president was a Marxist and fascist who sought to destroy the Constitution.

The ugliness that followed set a dangerous precedent that fed into the shrillness of the Bush era. And as the Age of Bush mercifully came to a close, a cacophony of enraged right-wing voices welcomed Obama to the White House by accusing him of being a Marxist, a fascist, a Nazi and a racist who hated America and was — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — trying to destroy the Constitution.”