Barack Obama is perhaps also the least effective Senator. This exchange between Chris Wallace and David Axelrod on yesterday’s Fox News Sunday is hilarious:
Fox News’ Chris Wallace: Now, David, McCain and Palin do have records of going up against their own parties. When has Barack Obama ever gone up against the Democratic Party in the U.S. Senate?
Obama Senior Strategist David Axelrod: … One of the first things that Senator Obama did when he came to the U.S. Senate was push for the most far-reaching ethics reforms that we’ve seen since Watergate. That didn’t please people on either side of the aisle, and he has done that consistently in his career. He’s reached across party lines to find consensus and he’s taken on his own party on issues like, like ethics reform.
You know, what was interesting about these attacks about bipartisanship and so on is that people like Dick Lugar, the very respected Republican senator from Indiana, spoke out and said, These are just partisan attacks. I’ve worked with Barack Obama.’ They worked together on arms control. Senator Coburn in Oklahoma worked together with him on budget issues, like putting the budget on Google so we can see how our money is being spent, putting caps on the contracts around Katrina rebuilding. Senator Obama has a strong recor d of working across party lines to produce progress for people.
Wallace: But David, because you guys always talk about ethics legislation and the nuclear non-proliferation deal with Dick Lugar, I went back and looked — both of those measures passed by unanimous consent. They were so accepted by the Senate that there was not even a vote. In fact, ethics legislation was one of the campaign promises. These were not — if I may, if I may. These were not areas where Barack Obama went up against the leadership of his own party nearly in the way that John McCain did on campaign finance reform, on limiting interrogation of terror detainees, on immigration reform. He did not go up against his own party on either of those issues.
It takes a lot of nerve–more specifically a lot of confidence that the mainstream media have your back–to cite as your number one example of something that “didn’t please people on either side of the aisle” a measure that passed unanimously on a voice vote! Once again, that’s typical Obama. Granted, he’s been in the Senate only a short time, but even so it is remarkable that he doesn’t have more legislative accomplishments to his name.
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