“Tea Kettles” Will Cook Obama

The Act of Political Compromise Is Often Required but Rarely Seen

On the first day after the midterm elections begins the familiar fight for the next presidential election. After the enormous downfall, which the American voters bestowed upon their president and the democratic majority in Congress, Obama will have to continue doing his job for the last two years of his term. In the coming two years, the now-weakened president must produce results. Results that, in light of the new majority holders in Congress, will be much harder to achieve — and if even possible, it will only be through compromise with political opponents.

What Obama encounters: John Boehner, the next majority leader in the House of Representatives and most powerful Republican in the land, who wants to keep his job. He can’t really do that, if he sets himself against every proposal of Obama, which sooner or later will earn the displeasure of every American, who expect long-awaited solutions to the embattled country’s economic crisis.

Balancing Act

The cooperation between the president and the split Congress — a Republican House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate — requires a balancing act. Not impossible, as proven by Ronald Regan and Bill Clinton before Barack Obama. Of course, it was different for his predecessors. Obama stands before difficult conditions: He has to lead the U.S. through the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s. And he has to do it with the ultra-conservative tea party, which is an established political force after the defeat of several congressional candidates. Constructive suggestions, compromise and fine political craft work aren’t expected of them. Luckily, the most radical “Tea Kettles” weren’t elected to congress. Self-proclaimed “Missionary for God” Sharron Angle and well-known candidates like Joe Miller, the annoying journalist led away in handcuffs, were found by most Americans to be unreasonable.

Rather, it moves the majority of U.S. voters into the political center, especially after these past few years of democratic exuberance, which has pushed the traditional conservative America even further right.

It is from here, and not from extremists, who would prefer to shrink the state to skeletal size, that the majority of Americans expect solutions, jobs and economic recovery. But overall they seek that long lost confidence in the land of the unbound possibilities, that everything is possible once again.