Conservatives Defeat Modest Gun Regulation and the Blame Goes to . . . President Obama

Maureen Dowd is the Increasingly Irrelevant NY Times Columnist

Let’s see, you need 60 Senators, all of whom are independently elected to pass any legislation in the Senate.  So a minority of Senators, from a small minority of the population can block any legislation.  And this is what happened when the Senate tried to pass expanded background checks for gun purchases.

So whose fault is it that the legislation didn’t pass?  Well according to NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd, it is the President’s.

President Obama has watched the blood-dimmed tide drowning the ceremony of innocence, as Yeats wrote, and he has learned how to emotionally connect with Americans in searing moments, as he did from the White House late Friday night after the second bombing suspect was apprehended in Boston.

Unfortunately, he still has not learned how to govern.

How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.

It is not clear exactly how the President can make a Senator vote one way when the Senator does not want to vote that way.  And it is not clear why the blame for the defeat of the legislation does not lie with those who voted against it.  And it is really not clear why anyone who has the slightest knowledge of politics would not know that whatever passed in the Senate was doomed in the House. 

But maybe knowledge of government and politics is not required for those who write opinion pieces for newspapers.  It is certainly the case for the Wall Street Journal and becoming the case for the New York Times.