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There were two words that cost the Democratic party the House in the 2010 election, and oddly enough they were uttered far before the election season started for anybody but the most politically obsessed. Which is how it often goes, really. If, in late 2008, you had asked somebody whether fundraising was going to be a hindrance for the Republicans in 2010, or whether the promised shutdown of Gitmo would be the same for the Democrats, you probably would have gotten a 'Yes' answer to the first and a 'Maybe' for the second; but as it turns out neither was a significant factor in the midterm elections.
But back to the Two Words... which you may have guessed to be "I won." They were uttered in January of 2009, and directed at Republican legislators who were still naively clinging to the notion that "bipartisanship" to a Democrat meant anything except "Do as I say and I won't call you names." The new President, of course, was happy to set them straight, as it were: and the thought processes going through various heads must have been... fascinating.
President Obama: Oh, we've all been waiting for this, haven't we? I've got a heavy majority in the House, an almost filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (and I know that Harry's talking to Arlen), and my numbers are sky-high. I'm going to steamroller these SOBs so hard that their grandkids will be picking cement chips out of their skin. Let Nancy and Harry slap something together on the stimulus, have them pick off half a dozen Senators and a couple-score Congressmen, and that'll set the tone for the next two years. And the best part is, they don't dare go up against me, because, hey, I won. I am awesome.
Every Republican in the room: [expletive deleted] you, n00b...
(Most Republican Members of Congress, continued): ...I just survived two election cycles that were Darwinian in the way that they pruned out the slow, the weak, the vulnerable, or the just plain unlucky. You don't scare me, and if you could touch me, you would have done it already. Boehner's right: you don't know how this game is played, and you're not even trying to learn the rules.)
(Republican Senators, continued): ...you've done nothing useful in the Senate for four years; even when you weren't running for President you were a grandstanding little weasel who liked to glom onto any interesting and/or media-friendly opportunity that happened on by. The Democrats carried you because you look good on camera, and now that you're in the Oval Office you're just going to let the foxes determine poultry policy, huh? No wonder McConnell was giggling the other day.
Every Republican in the room: You know something, buddy? You ain't so tough, after all.
The above is perhaps just the slightest bit facetious, but I think that the point is sound. If the President had run as a hard-left partisan, and been elected, then an attitude of "I won" would have been... workable... for him. But he didn't; Obama ran on what was frankly a Messianic platform where everybody in the sidereal universe would unify under the banner of the Lightworker and build a new Jerusalem. Which is very sweet, but here on Planet Earth such an attitude is incompatible with ruling as a partisan, which is what Obama's been doing for the last two years. And so the President did the one thing that he shouldn't have done: convinced the GOP that they might as well get mad.
His most fanatical supporters hate hearing this; then again, they're a bunch that largely defines 'reaching across the aisle' as 'we're not going to put all of you on trial for war crimes.' In other words: they'll be upset anyway, so who cares?
