Blogs For Victory

Then Senator Arlen Specter is showing him how to do it:

Dear President Obama:

Congratulations on your inauguration. Throughout your campaign, you promised change and pledged to strive for bipartisanship in your administration, and you underscored this commitment to bipartisanship in your inaugural address.

I write to respectfully suggest that, as a sign of bipartisanship, you renominate some of President George W. Bush’s circuit court nominees who were not confirmed prior to the adjournment of the 110th Congress. To do so would echo the bipartisanship President Bush demonstrated when he renominated one of President Clinton’s judicial nominees, Judge Roger Gregory, to a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Several of President Bush’s circuit court nominees had bipartisan support and were not confirmed due to asserted time constraints. I believe these nominees in particular deserve your consideration. Mr. Peter Keisler, nominee to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, had bipartisan support and garnered praise from across the country, including the editorial boards of The L.A. Times and The Washington Post. In addition, Judge Paul Diamond, nominee to the Third Circuit, and Judge Glen Conrad, nominee to the Fourth Circuit, had bipartisan support, including the support of their Democratic home state Senators. All three nominees were rated “well qualified” by the nonpartisan American Bar Association and would be excellent candidates for renomination.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, and I look forward to working with you.

Sincerely,

Arlen Specter

Now, elections do have consequences – we lost, and now it will be President Obama nominating judges over the next four years and it is expected he will nominate judges in line with his liberal worldview. This is just one of the hard lessons of politics which should make us, in future years, redouble our efforts to win. If Obama refuses to follow Senator Specter’s advice he won’t have done something wrong – but he will have failed to do something good.

Don’t get me wrong here – with Obama’s impatience and the Democrats’ generalized pinheadedness, we on the GOP side are just waiting for revived power to fall into our laps like ripe fruit. Ultimately, the question is not whether we’ll recover power, but when. Will it be in the 2010/12 phase or the 2014/16 phase? The other question is whether we’ll be smart enough to run the course for a big win, rather than the regular win we can expect. But, unlike our Democrats, we do have a concern for the nation as a whole and thus we’d prefer not to see things go to heck in a handbasket, even though this would work to Obama’s credit and make our return to power a longer process. But we need something – we need, that is, to know that when we come to the table and pull Democrat fat out of the fire that we’re going to get something in return. A few judges, some tax cuts, a bit of spending restraint, and we’re off to the races…and, incidentally, the economy is saved and Democrats will get to take credit for it, just as Clinton did in the late 90’s.

Or Obama and his Democrats can take the Pelosi attitude – they won, they get to make the rules. Which is fine and dandy and in keeping with the hard reality of political power…but if we want a new spirit of cooperation, we’re going to need more than lip service to bipartisanship.