Will GOP Work With the President Next Term?

     I've heard a good deal of speculation on this question, including many liberals like Chris Hayes-recently had a big segment on it on the weekend.

     To an extent, this question gets me impatient. It's almost like speculating about Hillary in 2016: can we just win this election and speculate about what happens later, later? The President himself, to be sure has suggested that the GOP will work with him more if he wins. After all, they won't have to worry about beating him anymore.

    This morning Bill Clinton said the same basic thing on Morning Joe. The GOPers have insisted they will obstruct and oppose this President as relentlessly as ever in the second term-which is looking more likely by the day.

    I wouldn't put that past them, knowing how perversely rigid they are. I certainly wouldn't presume that they will. However, there is some reason to think-whatever they may believe now, when they are still hoping against hope-they may change at least some.

    A big part of it, to be sure, is what happens to Congress. The Dems are looking much stronger to keep the Senate-Nate Silver has them close to an 80% chance-in a month it's risen to that level from just 39%.

   That surge is a testament to the President's considerable coattails-and Romney's "coattails in reverse"-thanks to Romney and Akin, Scott Brown now is in a real danger of losing.

    Silver has also suggested that if this bad trend for Republicans continues, the Dems could even threaten to take over the House.  According to at least on rigorous poll analysis, the Dems have a real good chance at winning the House, though there's a lot of disagreement, and this is not the mainstream view, at least not yet.

    http://election.princeton.edu/2012/09/21/monkeying-around-with-fundamentals-based-models/

    Obviously if the Dems take over the House, the matter of GOP obstruction is less of a concern-though not wholly so. Actually the GOP has had it's best years as teh minority party-1992 and 2008.
Going back to the New Deal they were in the minority so much, that perhaps being the very disloyal opposition is when they are at their best.

    While the Dems on paper had a super-majority in 2009, the reality was considerably different-the GOP teamed up with the Blue Dog Dems and made every vote very dicey.

     Assuming even that the GOP holds onto the House-perhaps with lower numbers-I do think it's at least possible they work more with the President, or at least are less aggressively obstructionist.

     Actually even now they have been less this year on some things-far from everything to be sure, like what they just did to the veterans this week.

     But they did get an interim budget passed-they clearly aren't fixing for anymore brinkmanship right now. Most importantly, it's like the saying goes: elections have consequences. If the GOP loses this election they may have to do something that they seemingly never do-engage in some soul searching.

     It seems to me that this election is really about a philosophy on the size of  government-one the GOP seems to be losing at every turn. The Romney campaign is the most brazenly Right wing ticket we've seen since the New Deal. No Republican party standard bearer ever explicitly ran on ending the New Deal before-Medicare and SS.

    No doubt, many conservatives are already trying to spin this as Romney is losing-and poisoning the well for  the Congressional GOP candidates-by not being a true conservative.

    However, at least some individual GOP congressmen may worry after the election more about themselves being a "one term proposition" than about President Obama-who they can't beat now anyway. Here are comments by Lindsay Graham that might seem to validate this:

    "Before U.S. senators fled the Capitol for the campaign trail early Saturday, members of each party made an unusual prediction: If this year's election changes nothing in the alignment of national elected offices, it will be a game-changer."

     "Their takes on whether that would be good varied, but they agreed it would be better for Democrats."

     "On the Republican side, outspoken South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said that by every economic standard, Mitt Romney should be headed for a win over President Barack Obama, with coattails for down-ticket offices."

      "But in acknowledging a trend in the polls against the GOP standard-bearer, Graham said it would show that America's demographics have so changed -- in Democrats' favor -- that a president's stewardship of the economy no longer is a deciding factor."

      "If we lose this election, performance as president doesn't matter like it used to," Graham said in a discussion with The Huffington Post and several other reporters outside the Senate chamber last week.

      "There's a reason no president has ever been reelected with an economy like this," Graham said. "It would tell me that it's more of a demographic race for president than it is a performance-based race. And that may be where we're at as a nation, and maybe where we are as a party, and we just don't know it."

      "Graham, who said earlier that the country wasn't "generating enough angry, white guys" to keep the GOP in business, was referring to the growing trend of Republicans depending on white voters to win elections."

     http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/25/election-2012-game-change_n_1903327.html

     In other words Graham seems to be admitting that if the President wins and the Dems do well, that in some sense conservative ideology itself will have been repudiated by public. Graham is admitting that they are running as Republicans-not RINOs which is what the conservative diehards will always claim:

     "It's a startling admission from a Southern white politician, but one he stood by. "If he's able to do this, President Obama's rewritten history," Graham said. "If we lose as Republicans, we're going to have to ask ourselves, who are we going to be? If we don't beat this guy, who are we going to be?"

      Yes, the GOP is partisan, but implicit in this partisanship, is the assumption that it's a political winner. If it starts becoming clear it isn't, what then? Maybe at least some individual GOP Congressmen-even if the party as a whole won't budge-will start to worry about their own re-elections.