DEAR EDITOR:
President Obama won re-election on a platform of higher taxes on the wealthy, socialized medicine plans and willingness to compromise. Republicans pounded Obama on his health care and tax policies and lost. Some high profile tea party people lost their seats; others barely held on to theirs. Obama won the popular vote by well more than 2 million and closer to 3 million votes.
Now is the time for Republicans to step up and start working with the president and pass his jobs bill. The fiscal cliff will come and go and taxes will go up on the rich, but only in a way so that Republicans can save face with their true leader, Grover Norquist. By letting the Bush tax cuts expire and then reinstating them only for people making less than $250,000 a year, January will be very interesting.
Any Republican who thinks the Republican way is still their mandate is dead wrong. By the time the next midterm elections come in two years, and if the Republicans have continued to be obstructionist and not willing to compromise, then it will be time for the president and the Democratic Party to go on the offensive and take them to the political woodshed.
Obamacare was just a start of health care reform. Progressives and a majority of the people in this country want single-payer, government-run health care. Progressives want funding for schools, roads and bridges, as do an overwhelming majority of the people. Progressives want the tax laws made so at the very least, the rich pay the same percentage as do the working class as do an overwhelming majority of the people. The right to choose for women is the law of the land, and it is what the vast majority of the people want to keep.
Any Republican who thinks that their election means more than the president is fooling himself. The president is the only person who had the whole country decide on him for his job, and congressmen and congresswomen only have a small amount of people voting for them and their job, mostly in districts created to protect their seats. That can change when or if Republicans become obstructionist again by the people calling them out on it.
It will take the Democrats to sound that alarm in each district where an obstruction exists. A few have gone with this election and that's a good start. We the people still need to finish the job should Republicans or any Democrats start acting like 2-year-olds again with the country's debt ceiling and continue to filibuster presidential appointments and hold up his legislation in an uncompromising way.
Leif Damstoft
Warren