By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--December 10, 2014
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“We’re going to have to set up for the new battle, which is going to begin on Jan. 6,” he said. His somewhat belligerent tone contrasts with that of Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the incoming majority leader, who has pledged to be more conciliatory and cooperative with Mr. Reid and his 46 Democrats. But Mr. Reid made clear that he does not trust Mr. McConnell to string together the kinds of grand compromises he has vowed to pursue. He also rejected the notion that Democrats’ defeat in the midterms would engender passivity. And he said that Republicans were simply too radical to put forward an agenda that voters would trust. “They want to eviscerate Clean Air, Clean Water, E.P.A.,” Mr. Reid said, referring to the landmark environmental laws that established new pollution standards and created the Environmental Protection Agency. “Is there enough they can do to help Wall Street? I don’t think so. Big banks? I don’t think so,” he said, adding, “That’s where the new battle is going to be.”
He acknowledged that he thought Democrats had been in pretty good shape until just a few days before the election. "Things went south quickly," he said. "But we always thought we had issues on our side." In hindsight, Mr. Reid said, it was easier to see how damaging the mismanaged rollout of the Affordable Care Act exchanges had been. "We never recovered from the rollout because the election became one that was directed toward the president. We couldn't overcome that," he said. Still, he added, "I should have seen it coming."It wasn't that Reid and Pelosi jammed an unworkable, unwanted, law down the voters' throats. It wasn't that, once the "rollout" happened, the law revealed itself to be the exact sort of massive boondoggle Republicans had been warning people about. It wasn't that the law was so poorly conceived and written that it's achieved the exact opposite of its "lower rates better coverage" goals. ...And it wasn't that ObamaCare has already proven its detractors right in almost every possible way, yet the President is still delaying the "really bad" parts of the law. Nope. It was the "rollout." That gosh-darned website went south and everything was downhill from there. Other things that had nothing to do with the Democrats' defeat?
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