Obama: No isn’t the answer

There are legitimate debates to be had on issues like how to deal with long-term debt and healthcare. But those issues aren’t the focus right now, President Barack Obama noted in remarks at a private Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser in Potomac, Md., Monday night.

“The debate we’re having right now is about, what, Benghazi?  Obamacare?  And it becomes this endless loop.  It’s not serious.  It’s not speaking to the real concerns that people have,” the president said, after laying out how his administration has worked to get things moving in the right direction after the Great Recession that marked the end of the Bush years.

Whatever progress has been made has come without the participation of congressional Republicans, whose approach has been to say no, no, no and then no again to anything that might make a Democrat look anything resembling good.

“The problem we have is very simple.  We’ve got one party in Congress right now that has been captured by ideologues whose core premise is no, who fundamentally believe that the problem is government; who don’t believe that we as a community, as a country, have any serious role to play in giving people a hand up; whose budget reflects an interest in cutting back commitments to the most vulnerable and freeing the most powerful from any constraints; and whose principal focus at any given point in the day is trying to figure out how can they make people sufficiently cynical, sufficiently angry, sufficiently suspicious that they can win the next election,” Obama said.

Obama described the situation in the GOP as a party having been “captured,” meaning to say that he actually wants “an effective, serious, patriotic, capable, sober-minded Republican Party.”

“We’ve had that in the past. I come from the land of Lincoln,” Obama said. “Abraham Lincoln thought infrastructure was a pretty good idea.  That’s part of why we got a Intercontinental Railroad system. Teddy Roosevelt thought conservation was a pretty smart thing.  That’s why we got the national parks.  Dwight Eisenhower thought it made sense for us to invest in science and education.  And that’s part of the reason why we produced so many engineers and scientists in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

“I constantly try to remind people that what’s going on right now is not a debate between traditional Democratic and Republican values,” Obama said.