The GOP can't fool the voters-- we KNOW that they are the ones who are not willing to compromise!

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Morning Plum: In using executive authority, Obama is on solid political ground
By Greg Sargent, January 28, 2014

The big news: Obama will announce in tonight’s speech that he will use executive authority to boost the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors. So he’s serious about going around Congress to move his agenda and spur the recovery. It’s fair to ask what took Obama so long to realize he had little other recourse, but either way, we’re now heading for a major battle over use of that authority.

Republicans are already denouncing the planned executive actions, arguing it will make compromise between the two parties harder. But again, Republicans have openly confirmed they deliberately denied support for Obama’s agenda explicitly to make it harder for him to claim he’d bridged differences between the parties. Seriously, Mitch McConnell has publicly admitted this.

Few pundits have been willing to reckon directly with the fundamentals of GOP obstructionism. A real reckoning would acknowledge that implacable GOP opposition to the Obama agenda, which began when the country was facing a dire, open-ended economic emergency, has for years been rooted in a combination of deliberate strategic choices and structural factors that have created a deeply unbalanced, unconventional situation. Commentators refuse to deal seriously with all of this — even though it is the actual cause of the very paralysis and dysfunction they regularly claim consternation about — and it will probably be absent from discussions of whether Obama’s planned executive actions are defensible.

But there’s evidence the public is aware of the basic outlines of the situation. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the battle over executive authority is occurring in a political context that reflects already existing views of Obama and the GOP.

Obama’s approval is low, and the GOP response seems like a bet that this will make independents more receptive to the argument that he’s the one hostile to compromise. But voters take a dimmer view of the GOP’s willingness to compromise.

The new NBC/WSJ poll, for instance, finds that a majority of Americans, 51 percent, believe Republicans will be “too inflexible” with Obama, while only 25 percent say they have the balance right (one wonders about the faculties of the 17 percent who say Republicans have been “too quick to give in” to the president). By contrast, only 39 percent say Obama has been too inflexible with Republicans.

Yesterday’s Pew poll found that by a huge margin of 52-27, Americans say Dems are more willing than Republicans to work with the opposition. While the GOP holds a narrow lead on the economy, it also found lopsided Dem advantages on which party is viewed as extreme and which party is more concerned with ordinary people — suggesting, again, awareness of the basic imbalance.

Beyond all this, let’s remember that the minimum wage hike is popular – and Congressional Republicans aren’t. And people don’t care about process — they care about results.

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