Making Enemies
Jane calls it “working with President Obama to shape our nation’s future”>, but I’ll call it what it really is.
Obama and his team thought they were going to just ram the supplemental through congress with little or no resistance. Instead, they had to fight to the very last minute, with the President himself personally whipping reluctant Congresscritters:
By Monday the 8th, we had 12, but we lost 6 (as we knew we would) when the Lieberman photos came out of the bill. By June 12, we had 22. On June 13, we got hold of an internal Hill list that had the commitments that members had made to each other which gave us 32 — as you can see, 6 of the 10 defections came from from that list, so they were turning their backs on their colleagues to vote “yea.”
By June 15, we had 36 of the 39 votes we needed. In the end we took 32, picking up 7 that people worked really tenaciously for days on delivering. Rahm and the entire White House staff would have been *ecstatic* at those 7 votes. …
We all knew we were going to “lose” eventually, but “winning” was never the goal.
Just remember:
They had to hold it open 10 extra minutes and after the Dems hit 218 and there were five GOP votes that scurried in under the wire.
We made the President of the United States himself whip to get the votes.
We tried to make the Dems fight like this when Bush was in office to stop funding the war, but they wouldn’t–so we did it ourselves.
I’m very proud to have worked with every single one of you. This was going to be a rout. They had to work for it.
And even then, it barely passed. So let me tell you what this really is.
We are gonna fight to make these people, who have no values, principles, conscience, or honesty do what they said they’d do. We are going to fight every step of the way. And i for one am not scared of a fucking ballet dancer from Ohio with a potty mouth and bad teeth.
It’s like Steve Gilliard said a long time ago: WE FIGHT BACK.
