Brownback inadvertently helps prove Obama’s point

June 26, 2008

You’d think McCain campaign surrogates would know better.

Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas learned a lesson today that other John McCain surrogates might be wise to learn: Before you say Barack Obama never worked across the aisle, make sure he never worked with, for example, you.

On a McCain campaign conference call with reporters this morning, Brownback — who was briefly one of McCain’s rivals for the Republican nomination — said Obama was all talk and no action when it came to working across the aisle.

“John McCain’s a maverick. He’s fought for a bipartisan fashion,” Brownback said. “I think that the biggest thing I’ve seen from Barack Obama is a willingness, aggressiveness, to talk bipartisan and yet to vote the hard left — most liberal member of the United States Senate.”

That’s pretty much the standard talking point in GOP circles these days — Obama sounds like he’ll bring people , and he talks about working with Republicans, but it’s just a facade.

The problem, in this case, is that Obama and Brownback teamed up on multiple occasions. If anyone should know that Obama’s willingness to reach across the aisle is more than just “talk,” it’s Brownback.

So Obama’s rapid-response team quickly fired off an e-mail listing the projects on which he worked with Brownback. They include a Brownback bill that authorized sanctions against people who were involved with the genocide in Darfur, a version of which became law in 2006. They also teamed up on an Obama bill that required the administration to provide humanitarian relief and other aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Brownback also co-sponsored Obama’s bill to impose sanctions against Iran. And the two were involved — though not the principal players — in the 2006 immigration overhaul effort that McCain worked on with Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

“Their work stands as an important reminder that even in this era of increased partisan rancor, Democrats and Republicans can work together to tackle the critical challenges that all Americans agree must be met,” the Obama campaign e-mail said.

Did Brownback not realize how easy it would be to check this sort of thing?

it’s that internet thing… tubes and all

  • The big problem Republicans keep having is that they live in a world of illusion. It’s all about appearances and posturing, and the best previous Dems could do was to fight against those appearances by spinning out their own; which at best gave things a “he said, she said” quality to everything. But we’ve finally got a Democrat who deals in reality, which quickly cuts through all the Republican bullshit which never was real.

    I’m sure when Brownback was preparing to say what he said, he wasn’t thinking of reality at all. He was issued a talking point and didn’t really give it much thought beyond it’s ability to hurt Obama. McCain keeps making the same mistake when he keeps changing positions every day, based upon how he needs them to be on that day; ignoring any sort of consistency. Same with Romney when he attacked Obama for not going to Iraq more, even though he hadn’t either.

    Again, these people aren’t making reality-based attacks and don’t even think about reality when they make them. They’re just trying to spin appearances and can’t understand why everything keeps backfiring. But it’s simple: Obama’s not playing their games. He’s not trying to outspin them. He’s identifying it as bullshit and using reality to back his claims. They really have no hope, as smoke and mirrors is all they ever really had.

  • The repubs remind me of the character Benjy in “The Sound and the Fury”:

    Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
    And then is heard no more: it is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.

  • Reality only applies if the MSM actually reports on it and calls McCain and his surrogates on their outright fabrications. Thus far the record has been pretty weak in that regard.

  • Hell no, Brownback’s an idiot. He has no memory past 6000 yrs ago.

    Stop with all this bipartisan bullshit. Republicans worked across the isle to get republicans posing as dems to agree with them. How can you be reasonable with villains?

    The entire republican leadership voted lock step for our current disaster. It’s like saying we must let the terrorist cast a vote so we can be bipartisan. We want to end this republican obstructionist disaster and we can’t do it by allowing republicans to continue to try to implement it under the guise of being bipartisan. It’s bullshit. We also want the Bush enabling dems who acted under the guise of bipartisanship who aided this disaster gone as well. If we don’t it will just be more of the same crap. The repubs were all bipartisan when they controlled congress…they wouldn’t even ask what dems thought or give them a room to meet in. Bipartisan my ass. Working across the aisle means repubs coming across and history shows they seldom ever do.

  • Doctor Biobrain says: “…But we’ve finally got a Democrat who deals in reality, which quickly cuts through all the Republican bullshit which never was real…”

    I wish he would get to doing it. Besides his anti-whisper campaign I’m not seeing much evidence of this lately. Maybe because it is so often happening and hard to keep up with. After all it’s all the repukes have but I’m waiting to hear his campaign call Brownback a liar.

    (interesting name for someone so against immigration and global warming and so for bombing brown people…Brownback)

  • Senator Blowback—he’s like the idiot soldier who never learns to aim the nozzle of a flamethrower AWAY FROM HIS OWN FACE.

    I’ve just got to ask—are the networks keeping track of the GOPer fools and their drivellous commentaries? There’s about 5 years worth of late-night comedy material out there right now—and we’re not even at the conventions yet!

  • Nice job with the “Republicans are like terrorists” hypebole, there, joey. I’m sure people take you reeeeeal seriously. Yep.

  • joey, did you bother to read the article up above? Check out the very end. Obama’s campaign *did* shoot back about this.

    Sheesh.

  • ’ve just got to ask—are the networks keeping track of the GOPer fools and their drivellous commentaries? -Steve

    Does the Pope shit in the woods?

    No.

  • Michael W.

    The “Sound and Fury” quote is actually from Macbeth, Act V. Faulkner used part of it as the title to his book.

    But in any case, it fits here.

  • After all it’s all the repukes have but I’m waiting to hear his campaign call Brownback a liar.

    One part of politics is to be able to call someone a liar without actually calling them a liar. Sure, Obama could call Brownback and the other Republicans liars, but all it would do would be to get the media in a tizzy about how shrill Obama is and how he’s betraying his nice guy rhetoric to make angry attacks against politicians they know and trust more than Obama. So it’d be completely counter-productive. The focus would be on Obama, not on what he said. And Obama would then find himself on the defensive, having to explain what he meant by that and proving that Brownback was lying, using evidence the pundits would never accept. That’s just how it works.

    But as it is, anyone willing to listen to Obama will know automatically that this makes Brownback a lying jerk. Some things don’t need to be said. Most folks hate Republicans, so it’s not necessary to give them conclusions. Obama just needs to set the facts straight and the proper conclusions will be reached. The problem for Kerry and Gore wasn’t that they didn’t call Bush a liar. It was because they kept trying to spin appearances, rather than talk directly to he people and deal only in truths. Obama has corrected that.

  • seems to me the more appropriate literary analogy is the sheep in Owell’s Anmal Farm: “Four legs good, two legs bad!” They’re saying what they desperately want to be true, to an audience that also desperately wants it to be true, and if enough people decide it’s true, then damn it, it must be true.

    If the population were solely broken up into equal thirds – dem, gop & indie – then 33.3 percent of the population, at any time, is inclined to believe the bull shit spoon fed to ’em by the GOP. All they gotta do is convince less than 20 percent of the remainder, & you got a majority believing bullshit that the left has to try to patiently explain is bullshit. And thanks to the complicitness of some members of the media & the complacency of much of the rest, the bullshitters are able to shout louder. Doesn’t give the truth much of a shot.

    When Brownback utters such an out and out lie, GOPers are inclined to believe it, BECAUSE THEY WANT TO, and we have to hope the people who aren’t total gullible dolts get the followup about it being a lie. How many will get THAT memo? And of those who don’t, how many will believe the lie? And how many will have their vote influenced by that lie?

    This is how the GOP will operate between now and November, trying to siphon off a few votes with each lie, and hope they’ll add up. But also hoping they won’t get caught by people that believed Lie A when they get to Lie Q: “but, if Brownback lied about Obama’s willingness to work with Republicans, then maybe that whole madrassa thin ain’t true, neither…right?

    Hell of a way to steal an election, but it’s not like they’ve been the epitome of honest & forthright gov’t in the recent past…right?

  • Did Brownback not realize how easy it would be to check this sort of thing? — CB

    He probably didn’t even know/remember that he had worked with Obama on those bills; it would have been his staff taking care of the nuts and bolts, with him just taking credit and voting as his masters at the White House told him to.

    Upper West, @11,
    Thanks; I recognised the quote as being from Shakespeare (though couldn’t have said which play, much less which act), but the references to “Benjy” and “Sound and Fury” had me stumped (I thought it might have been some TV program). Sigh… I obviously didn’t pay as much attention as I ought to have had to the American Lit, when I was at the U. OTOH… It was (now) my husband who was teaching the course, so I was “otherwise occupied” mentally 🙂

  • Like and share Doctor Biobrain’s analysis. Think they’re thoughful and deeper than average.
    Kind of couch doctor?
    Regards

  • Dale, @13,

    You’d owe me, for a keyboard, if I hadn’t equipped the last one I bought, with one of those “keyboard condoms” (TAIO used to make me short-circuit keyboards on a regular basis)

  • Politicians today are hypocrites with short-term memory loss of convenience.

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