On Sunday’s “State of the Union” on CNN, President Barack Obama’s chief campaign adviser David Axelrod surveyed the political landscape and the opposition his campaign is facing to get Obama reelected.
According to Axelrod, the Republican Party is opposing everything the president “wants to do” for the sake of politics.
“The nature of Washington is not monolithic opposition to everything the chief executive wants to do as a political strategy, and that is what happened here,” Axelrod said. “It was disappointing. I believe when the president wins reelection in the fall, there will be a new opportunity to get this done. Hopefully we can get something done beforehand. But to say because you have an implacable group of Republicans in the Congress who simply aren’t going to let that move — that the president hasn’t kept his promise, is a little disingenuous.”
Axelrod said the Republicans’ strategy was essentially a “reign of terror.”
“I think a lot of Republicans in Congress want to cooperate, know better, but they’re in the thralls of this reign of terror from the far right that has dragged the party to the right,” he continued. “In your own polling and other polling, you see the Republican Party has really moved out of the mainstream. In your poll, the president is winning among moderates by 41 points. And there is a reason for that — because Gov. Romney and the party has gone way off to the right. I think that these folks are going to recognize when they lose the election that that was the wrong path to take and now is the time for a season of cooperation. We’re not going to agree on everything because that’s why we have two political parties. But we shouldn’t reflexively disagree on everything just for the sake of politics.”