Richard Cohen Quotes
Something about the Clintons sets the GOP to howling at the moon.
Cohen, Richard. "The GOP's eternal Clinton obsession." The Washington Post, 1 Jun. 2015.
The President had negotiated the League of Nations as a part of the treaty negotiations ending World War I. However, he could not sell the idea to the Republican controlled Senate and the treaty was never ratified. This was the death of the League of Nations, a predecessor organization to the United Nations. America had gone into a period of extreme isolationism which in many way enabled WWII to get started. After WWII, the nation did not make the same mistake and the establishment of the United Nations was ratified handily. President Truman, however, was a much better salesman than President Wilson had been, and perhaps more important, the Republicans and Congress had never been involved in the League of Nations negotiations, whereas Truman had involved them heavily in a bipartisan effort.
The Republicans had been badly beaten in the 2012 Presidential Election. Many attributed the loss to the dissatisfaction of the electorate with the Republican ideas which had become more and more conservative in recent decades. Others, like Rubio, wanted to maintain the existing ideas which were very different from the Republican ideas earlier when they won more elections.
The historian was comparing Obama to other historical presidents who either had a majority of both Houses of Congress or had an opposition party that was generally quite cooperative and willing to compromise for the sake of running the country smoothly. At this point in time there was a Tea Party wing of the Republican that was particularly negative and obstructionist. They tended to threaten and intimidate the main stream Republicans who used the filibuster to block legislation the majority of Senators had voted for more times than all the other Congresses in American history. And that was only in Obamas first 6 years.
Richard Martin Cohen is an American writer best known for his syndicated column in The Washington Post, which he wrote from 1976 to 2019.
